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COMPEL Glossary / prompt-template

Prompt template

A versioned, parameterized representation of a prompt — with placeholders for user input, retrieved context, and dynamic state — enabling reuse, testing, and audit.

What this means in practice

Prompt templates are the source-of-truth artifact that a prompt registry stores; production prompts should never be inline string literals.

Synonyms

parameterized prompt , prompt pattern template

See also

  • Prompt — The input text, structured message sequence, or multimodal payload provided to a language model at inference time.
  • System prompt — Operator-authored instructions that set behavior, persona, and boundaries for a model — distinguished from user prompts because the system prompt carries the operator's policy, while the user prompt carries end-user intent.
  • Prompt evaluation harness — The infrastructure that runs capability, regression, safety, and human-review evaluations on prompts — distinct from a general LLM evaluation harness by scope: prompt-evaluation tests the prompt while holding the model fixed, catching prompt-level drift (e.g., after a system-prompt edit) without attributing it to the model.

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