AI engineering glossary · Prompt context engineering
What is APE (automatic prompt engineer)?
Automatic prompt engineer (also called APE): A method in which a language model proposes many candidate instructions for a task, each candidate is scored on example data, and the best-scoring instruction is kept. It replaces manual trial and error with a search. Often abbreviated APE.
Automatic prompt engineer: an example
Given 20 labelled examples, the model proposes 30 instructions; the one with the highest accuracy on a validation set is selected.
Related terms
More Prompt context engineering terms
- Batch API
- Chain-of-thought faithfulness
- Chain-of-thought prompting
- Chain-of-Verification
- Chat completions API
- Complexity-based prompting
- Context budget
- Context compression
Where you learn it
Automatic prompt engineer is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.