Reference
Prompt Engineering Glossary
Every term you need, with working example prompts and practical notes on when each technique earns its keep.
5 terms starting with "T"
Temperature
A sampling parameter (typically 0.0-2.0) that controls how deterministic vs. creative an LLM's output is. Lower = more predictable, higher = more varied.
DevelopmentToken
The atomic unit of input and output in an LLM. Not a word or a character -- a chunk produced by the model's tokenizer, roughly 3-4 characters of English.
AgenticTool Use
Giving a model the ability to call external functions (APIs, databases, code execution) during generation, with the model deciding when and how to invoke them.
DevelopmentTop-P (Nucleus Sampling)
An alternative to temperature: the model samples only from the smallest set of tokens whose cumulative probability exceeds P, ignoring everything below that threshold.
TechniquesTree of Thoughts (ToT)
A prompting strategy where the model explores multiple reasoning branches, evaluates each, and selects (or combines) the best -- versus linear chain-of-thought which commits to one path.