You Can't Prompt Your Way Out of a Hard Constraint
The article discusses the author's experience with building an AI content engine and the challenges faced with prompt engineering. After removing a verifier stage from the content pipeline, the author discovered that the model was ignoring critical formatting rules embedded in a large system prompt. The piece emphasizes the importance of enforcing rules in code rather than relying solely on prompts.
- ▪The author removed five nodes from their content pipeline to improve efficiency.
- ▪After the change, multiple outputs generated by the model were incorrect due to ignored formatting rules.
- ▪The article highlights the need to enforce rules in code rather than relying on prompts for compliance.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3837867) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Tobias Koehler Posted on May 29 • Originally published at connectengine.net You Can't Prompt Your Way Out of a Hard Constraint #buildinginpublic #claudecode #promptengineering #n8n Thursday morning I removed five nodes from my content pipeline. By lunch I understood something about building with language models that eleven failed edits had been trying to teach me all week: when a rule absolutely has to hold, you don't write the rule into the prompt. You enforce it in code.
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