About Protologue

Protologue is an open reference for the vocabulary of prompting and large language model techniques. The field coins terms quickly and uses them loosely; Protologue gives each technique one stable page, one short definition that can be quoted on its own, its place in a classification, and the publication that introduced it.

How entries are written

Each definition is written to stand alone in one or two sentences, so it can be quoted without the rest of the page. The description adds context, known limitations, and how the technique relates to others. Every entry cites at least one primary source, normally the paper or official documentation that introduced or defined the term. The first listed source is the type source, borrowing the nomenclatural idea that a name is anchored to the work in which it was first published.

Identifiers

Every entry has a permanent identifier of the form PTL-0001 and a permanent URL of the form protologue.com/t/term-name/. Identifiers are never reused. If an entry is merged or renamed, its old URL redirects to the new one.

Classification

Entries are grouped into branches by what the technique does, and linked by three relations taken from the SKOS standard for knowledge organization: broader (the technique is a kind of another), narrower (the inverse), and related.

Citing Protologue

Each entry has a ready-made citation and BibTeX record. To cite the whole taxonomy:

Protologue. (2026). Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0). https://protologue.com/

Reuse

All text and data are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. You may copy, adapt, and redistribute them, including commercially and for training machine learning models, provided you credit Protologue and link to the source. Machine-readable copies are on the data page, and llms.txt describes the site for language models.

Corrections and new terms

If a definition is wrong, a source is misattributed, or a technique is missing, send the term, a primary source, and a proposed definition. Corrections are recorded in the version history.