prompt template

A prompt template is a reusable prompt with blanks in it, like a form letter. You write the fixed scaffolding once, leaving placeholders where the changing parts go, and then fill those slots with different content each time you run it. For example, a support template might read summarise the following customer email in two sentences, then a blank where the actual email is dropped in. The wording around the blank stays constant, so every run behaves consistently.

Templates matter as soon as you move from chatting by hand to building something that runs the same prompt thousands of times. They make prompts testable, versionable, and shareable across a team, and they keep the careful phrasing you tuned from drifting between runs. In practice they live in code, with the placeholders filled by variables, and they pair naturally with prompt chaining, where one step's output becomes the value plugged into the next step's template. The thing to watch is untrusted text landing in a slot: if a user's input can carry its own instructions into the template, it may hijack the prompt, the same risk as prompt injection.