Promptware Engineering: Software Engineering for LLM Prompt Development

Abstract: LLMs are increasingly integrated into software applications, with prompts serving as the primary 'programming' interface to guide their behavior. As a result, a new software paradigm, promptware, has emerged, using natural language prompts to interact with LLMs and enabling complex tasks without traditional coding. Unlike traditional software, which relies on formal programming languages and deterministic runtime environments, promptware is based on ambiguous, unstructured, and context-dependent natural language and operates on LLMs as runtime environments, which are probabilistic and non-deterministic. These fundamental differences introduce unique challenges in prompt development. In practice, prompt development is largely ad hoc and experimental, relying on a time-consuming trial-and-error process - a challenge we term the 'promptware crisis.' To address this, we propose promptware engineering, a new methodology that adapts established software engineering principles to the process of prompt development. Building on decades of success in traditional software engineering, we envision a systematic framework that includes prompt requirements engineering, design, implementation, testing, debugging, and evolution. Unlike traditional software engineering, our framework is specifically tailored to the unique characteristics of prompt development. This paper outlines a comprehensive roadmap for promptware engineering, identifying key research directions and offering actionable insights to advance LLM-based software development.