Prompts & chat shape

A prompt is a function argument, not a spell

It's tempting to treat prompting like magic incantations. Drop that framing. A prompt is just the text you pass to the model — an argument to a function, the same way you pass message to a Python function. Better arguments give better results; there's nothing mystical about it.

Modern chat models don't take one flat blob of text, though. They take a list of messages, each with a role. Three roles matter.