Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

The 2 types of prompt engineering

2 Jul 2025

Watch on YouTube

This is a YouTube video titled "The 2 types of prompt engineering" created in July 2025. The content is a monologue or talk explaining two distinct approaches to prompt engineering: conversational prompt engineering involving iterative improvements during interaction, and classical prompt engineering focused on perfecting a single prompt for large-scale use. There is only one speaker, and the discussion centers on AI prompt engineering concepts.

First of all, there's the conversational mode in which most people do prompt engineering. You're using Claude, you're using ChatGPT. You say, hey, you know, can you write me this email? Does kind of a poor job and you're like, oh no, like make it more formal or add a joke in there. And it adapts its output accordingly. I refer to that as conversational prompt engineering because you're getting it to improve its output over the course of a conversation. Notably, that is not where the classical concept of prompt engineering came from. It actually came a bit earlier from a more AI engineer perspective. You're like, I have this product I'm building, I have this one prompt that are super critical to this product. I'm running like millions of inputs through this prompt each day. I need this one prompt to be perfect. I just take this one prompt, improve it and then never change it. Those are the two modes.