Talking to machines
Prompt engineering as an epistemic competence
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54103/2531-5994/31801Keywords:
Ingegneria dei prompt, Modello di ragionamento, Gioco di ruolo, LLM, Apprendimento contestuale, Alfabetizzazione critica nell'IA, IA agenticaAbstract
This paper proposes to regard prompt engineering not as a repertoire of techniques for improving the performance of generative language models, but as an epistemic competence that defines the communicative interaction between humans and artificial intelligence systems. Having identified its conditions of possibility in in-context learning and in the fictional personae generated by LLMs, it turns to a brief account of the classical prompting techniques, from few-shot to chain-of-thought. The advent of reasoning models and agentic architectures absorbs many of these formalized strategies into the models themselves; what is transformed, without disappearing, is the competence required to construct epistemically controlled interactions. Prompt engineering is thereby repositioned within a broader critical competence, in which asking pertinent questions, verifying sources and assessing the reliability of the output matters more than proficiency in codified protocols.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Fabio Ciotti (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Accepted 2026-07-16
Published 2026-08-06
