Prompt engineering, plainly
Prompt engineering is structuring what you ask a model so its answer is more reliable - giving examples, breaking a task into steps, or stating constraints explicitly, rather than hoping a vague question works.
What RAG actually does
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) looks up relevant information from your own documents before generating an answer, so a model can respond using facts it was never trained on.
Why they matter together
A well-written prompt still fails if the model has no access to the right facts, and a good retrieval pipeline still fails with a vague prompt. Real applications need both.
Where to go from here
These are core topics in the Generative AI & LLM Development course - understanding them first makes the practical work land faster.
