Vibe CodingPrompt Engineering
The practice of structuring instructions to an AI model to reliably get the output you actually want.
Prompt engineering is the practice of writing instructions — wording, structure, examples, constraints — so a model produces the output you actually intend, reliably, rather than something that merely looks plausible.
What it looks like in coding contexts
For coding agents, this usually means being specific about scope (“only touch the auth module”), providing constraints that aren’t visible in the code (“this needs to support offline mode”), and stating the definition of done rather than just a vague goal.
A common misconception
Prompt engineering isn’t about finding a magic phrase. The bigger lever is almost always context — pointing the agent at the right files, explaining the “why” behind a task — over any particular wording trick. See Context Is the Whole Game.