AI engineering glossary · Prompt context engineering
What is instruction following?
Instruction following: The ability of a language model to carry out what a prompt asks, including constraints on length, format, language and content. Models trained on instructions do this far better than raw pretrained ones. Weak compliance shows up as ignored constraints or missing steps.
Instruction following: an example
Asked for 'exactly three bullets, each under 12 words', a model with strong instruction following returns three short bullets and nothing else.
Related terms
More Prompt context engineering terms
- Instruction hierarchy
- Instructor library
- JSON mode
- Least-to-most prompting
- Logit bias
- Logprobs
- Long-context prompting
- Lost in the middle
Where you learn it
Instruction following is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.