AI engineering glossary · Prompt context engineering
What is prompt sensitivity?
Prompt sensitivity (also called Prompt brittleness): How much a model's output changes when the prompt is reworded in ways that should not matter, such as changing punctuation, order of examples or synonyms. High sensitivity makes results fragile, so serious teams test many phrasings before trusting a prompt.
Prompt sensitivity: an example
Changing 'Answer:' to 'Response:' in a prompt moves accuracy on a 200-question test from 71% to 64%.
Related terms
More Prompt context engineering terms
- Prompt template
- Prompt versioning
- Pydantic validation of LLM output
- Quote-first prompting
- ReAct prompting
- Reasoning effort
- Recency bias in prompts
- Refine summarisation
Where you learn it
Prompt sensitivity is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.