Prompt Design for Production LLM Systems
A production prompt is not a clever sentence. It is one component in a system that includes model configuration, trusted instructions, untrusted input, tools, validators, retries, monitoring, and human review. The useful unit of design is therefore a testable contract: what the model may read; what it must produce; which tools it may request; which constraints are enforced outside the model; how failures are detected; and which evidence determines whether a change is safe to release. Prompt wording still matters, but wording alone cannot guarantee factuality, valid data, authorisation, or reliable execution. Those properties require controls around the model. ...