What is a prompt template

In the world of language models we can think of them as functions, and like functions they can accept input, that input is often in the form of text and that is what we call a prompt and some times we may want to prompt a language model with very similar input with just a subtle change. for example if we prompt a language model for the weather of a particular region or the food that is most famous in a city. This is where a prompt template can come in handy. Prompt templates are like predefined input with place holders for the the piece of data we want to update example

what is the most famous food in Then when we use this template the city we pass to this template becomes the value of the placeholder data. They are kind of like email templates

Using a prompt template may help with more consistent output from the language model since the template with standardize the input we can expect more uniform output. It can also help help with efficiency by not having to type out same set of prompts with subtle changes and help with more agentic workflows.