Methods for specifying and shaping model behavior through instructions, demonstrations, constraints, reasoning scaffolds, and prompt composition.
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13 articles in this tag.
A user types three words into your assistant. The model returns a confident, well-formatted, entirely wrong answer to a question nobody asked. The user…
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The first sub-answer is wrong, and every later step inherits it with full confidence.
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Your few-shot set passes every happy-path test, then folds the moment a real input arrives with an extra clause, an unusual label, or a phrasing you did…
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"Self-improving agent" is three different mechanisms wearing one coat. Pull the coat off and you find a memory that accumulates, a skill file that gets…
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You tighten the system prompt. You add the word "always." You move the rule to the top. The model still ignores it, and you have no idea which part of the…
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The demo works. You paste a gnarly task into one prompt—extract the entities, reconcile them against the schema, flag the contradictions, write the…
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A prompt that passed review, shipped, and then quietly broke a downstream consumer is not a prompt problem. It is a specification problem wearing a prompt…
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The prompt worked on your laptop. In production, the same prompt returns a paragraph on Monday, a bulleted list on Tuesday, and a confident fabrication on…
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The model gets the answer wrong, and it is not because it did not know something. It dropped a constraint. It merged two cases that should have stayed…
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That failure breaks the "bad answer means bad instruction" reflex. Sometimes the instruction is fine, and the bottleneck sits somewhere else: the model…
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A prompt that grew from three lines to thirty is not a better prompt. It is a prompt nobody has tested.
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You ask the model to critique its own draft. It returns: "The response is clear and well-structured, but could be more specific." You ask it to revise. The…
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The demo works. The real inputs don't. Same prompt, same model, and suddenly the output is the wrong shape, the wrong label, or confidently on the wrong…
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