System prompt

How it is used

Written by developers, not end users, and usually hidden from them. Teams keep it in version control and test changes carefully, because a small edit can change behavior everywhere. It is contrasted with the user prompt or user message.

Example sentences

1. The system prompt tells the assistant to answer only questions about our products.

2. After we shortened the system prompt, responses became faster and cheaper.

Common collocations

• write a system prompt
• update the system prompt
• system prompt instructions
• leaked system prompt

Related terms

• promptThe text or other input given to a generative model to tell it what to do, such as a question, an instruction or a few examples followed by a task.
• prompt engineeringThe practice of designing, testing and improving prompts so that a model gives accurate, useful and consistent outputs for a task.
• guardrailA rule or check placed around a model to stop harmful, off-topic or unsafe inputs and outputs, for example a filter that blocks personal data in answers.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• system prompt · Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

More terms: Machine Learning and Data Processing

• artificial intelligence
• machine learning
• model
• dataset
• training data
• label
• train
• supervised learning
• neural network
• deep learning
• loss function
• overfitting