AI engineering glossary · Prompt context engineering
What is developer message?
Developer message: A message role offered by some model APIs for instructions written by the application developer, ranked above the end user's messages but working like a system prompt. It lets the builder set rules that a user cannot easily override, and it supports a clear order of trust among instructions.
Developer message: an example
A travel app sends a developer message: 'Always answer in the customer's language and never reveal internal pricing rules', then passes the user's chat below it.
Related terms
More Prompt context engineering terms
- Directional stimulus prompting
- DSPy
- Dynamic few-shot selection
- Few-shot chain-of-thought
- Few-shot prompting
- Frequency penalty
- Function calling
- GBNF grammar
Where you learn it
Developer message is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.