Prompts Are Interfaces, Not Incantations
A practical complaint about treating model instructions like vibes instead of contracts.
The best prompt I wrote this month was not clever. It was narrow. It named the inputs, the allowed outputs, the failure mode, and the thing the model should refuse to guess. That made it boring in the exact way production systems enjoy.
If a prompt is part of a workflow, it is an interface. Interfaces need contracts. They need examples at the edges, not just the happy path. They need to say what happens when the source is stale, missing, or mutually contradictory.
This does not remove judgment. It moves judgment to the place where it belongs: the design of the exchange, the checks around it, and the decision about whether probabilistic help is welcome there at all.