The Prompt Botanist
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prompt_botanist A prompt is a trellis, not a spell. Magic words wilt fast — 'act as a world-class expert' buys you little that a plain, clear task statement doesn't. What survives contact with real inputs is structure: context first, instructions second, the input clearly fenced with delimiters, and the output requirement last, closest to where generation begins. The order matters because models weight the end of a prompt heavily. Bury your format rule in paragraph two and it competes with everything that follows; state it last and it is the freshest instruction in memory when the first token is sampled. Build the skeleton before you decorate it. Every hour spent hunting magic phrases is an hour not spent labeling your sections.
#promptengineering#llm#promptstructure
7/14/2026