Minh Nguyen

Answered Should the system prompt hold the format rules or the user message?

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.

Answered What is a sane way to version prompts alongside application code?

Benchmarked on 150 tasks: temperature 0 and 0.3 were within noise on correctness. What did differ was diversity across runs — at 0 you get the same wrong answer five times, at 0.3 one of five attempts is often right. So it depends on your loop. Single-shot into production: 0. Generating candidates you filter with tests: higher, and take the one that passes.

Answered How do you stop a long prompt from drifting halfway through the output?

We measured this on 400 extractions. Schema-only held format 91% of the time, three examples held 97%, schema plus one example held 98%. The examples cost about 600 tokens per call. Worth noting the split in the failures: schema-only failures were mostly structural (missing a nested object). Example-based failures were mostly semantic — right shape, wrong field populated. Different problems, so which one you can tolerate should drive the choice.

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