prompt-engineering

A prompt states a goal and gets out of the way. Everything else in it is load — spent on every run, taken from the attention the model would otherwise put on the work — so each line has to buy more than it costs. What follows decides three things: whether a line exists, where it sits, and how it is worded. ## Where a line came from Ask this before asking whether the line helps. A line can be true, relevant, and still worth cutting, so usefulness does not settle it. Provenance does, and you can answer it from memory: - **The user ruled it** — a decision, preference, or constraint they stated. Nothing derives it. Keep. - **The world holds it, out of the run's reach** — an unwritten convention, a failure you observed, a fact outside what the run will read. Keep, and prefer a pointer to the source over a copy that can go stale. - **It counteracts a default you have watched the model take** — keep, when the default is observed rather than feared. - **You worked it out from material the run will also read** — cut. A conclusion available in the corpus is one the run reaches itself, so writing it down buys nothing and spends load on every invocation. That last class is the one that feels most earned, because you did the work to reach it, and it is where over-specification comes from. Two tells: a line you could justify from the same sources the run gets, and a sentence arguing for the instruction above it — an instruction does not need advocacy, and the run is not persuaded by it...