AI engineering glossary · Prompt context engineering
What is maieutic prompting?
Maieutic prompting: A technique that asks a model to explain its answer, then to explain each explanation, building a tree of statements and dropping the ones that contradict each other. It aims to keep only mutually consistent reasoning.
Maieutic prompting: an example
The model says 'A' is true because X, then is asked 'if X were false...'; inconsistent branches are removed.
Related terms
More Prompt context engineering terms
- Majority label bias
- Map-reduce summarisation
- Markdown formatting in prompts
- Max tokens
- Message roles
- Meta-prompting
- Multi-turn conversation
- Needle in a haystack test
Where you learn it
Maieutic prompting is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.