Concepts & capability filters
prompting_technique
System prompt
A system prompt is a control message, separate from user turns, that sets a model's role, task, tone, and constraints for a conversation.
- Category
- prompting_technique
- Difficulty
- Not classified
- Aliases
- None tracked
- Last reviewed
- 2026-07-02
Key facts
- Providers weight it more heavily than user input, and it is typically not shown to end users — though that is a product choice, not a guarantee.
- It is your main lever for steering behavior without fine-tuning.