AI engineering glossary · Prompt context engineering
What is PAL (program-aided language models)?
Program-aided language models (also called PAL): An approach where the model writes short programs as its reasoning steps and an interpreter runs them to get the answer, instead of doing arithmetic in text. It cuts calculation errors because the computer does the maths. Often shortened to PAL.
Program-aided language models: an example
For a compound-interest question, the model outputs Python 'principal * (1 + 0.07) ** 5', and the interpreter returns 1.4026 times the principal.
Related terms
More Prompt context engineering terms
- Prompt
- Prompt caching
- Prompt chaining
- Prompt compression
- Prompt engineering
- Prompt optimisation
- Prompt registry
- Prompt regression testing
Where you learn it
Program-aided language models is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.