Prompt Engineering Terms

Prompt Engineeriong and related terms. This is not intended to be definitive; rather, it is intended to help beginners understand terminology. Many technical terms are misleading and that is especially true for Prompt Engineering. And quite often the definitions do not help. This is intended to explain what the terms actually mean.

Sycophancy
The tendency of language models to agree with or flatter the user, often leading to biased or less useful responses
Snippetizing
Splitting complex prompts into smaller parts; attempts to minimize the input tokens; optimizes prompts
Retrieval Augmented Generation(RAG)
Augment the prompt with additional data
Feedforward pass
The process of passing input data through the model to generate an output
Embedding Model
Converts natural language into numerical vectors
Transformer Architecture
The neural network architecture design of an LLM
Poisoning
Intentional use of malicious or biased data
Hijacking and prompt injection
influence the outputs by embedding specific instructions
Jailbreaking
Modifying constraints and safety measures
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
a specification for how AI systems exchange information with external tools, data sources, and applications (see The Model Context Protocol (MCP) )