Ethan Brooks

Answered Streaming responses: how do you validate a schema you have not finished receiving?

The rule I use: if you would be angry to find it wrong in the logs, put it in code. Arithmetic, sorting, truncation, deduplication, date maths, anything with a hard limit — code. Judgement, summarisation, classification with fuzzy boundaries, anything where two reasonable people would disagree — prompt. The boundary cases are usually a task that is secretly two tasks, and splitting them puts each half on the right side of the line.

Answered How do you evaluate a prompt change without a labelled test set?

Format rules go in the system prompt, and it caches, which matters more as the prompt grows. The "closer to the end is followed better" effect is real but it is about recency across the whole assembled context, not about which field the text sits in. If you have a long user message, a one-line reminder at the end of it is cheap and closes most of the gap without duplicating 400 tokens.

Shared a bide Salary negotiation script with a clear walk-away point

Turns your job offer and market data into a target, an ask and a walk-away number, plus a call script and replies to the three most common pushbacks.