Prompt Engineering
A system prompt isn’t magic — it’s tokens. Watch the same question’s next-token probabilities shift as you add a system prompt, few-shot examples, and chain-of-thought.
Everything you put in a prompt — system message, examples, instructions — becomes tokens prepended to the context, and tokens shift next-token probabilities. That is the entire mechanism. Prompt engineering is distribution engineering.
This workspace shows one fixed question under four framings (bare, + system prompt, + few-shot examples, + chain-of-thought), rendering the full context as a colour-zoned token strip (with what each zone costs in tokens on every single message) and the answer's next-token probability bars animating between framings via real softmax.