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Crouching Engineer, Hidden Hacker
Hidden conflicts in your prompt context will probably generate undesirable outcomes
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The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The Boiling Frog
When we work in large, complex systems, it becomes difficult — if not impossible — to maintain a reliable mental model of how all of the pieces interconnect with and affect each other. It’s not often obvious why a part at one end of the machine begins behaving badly when the root cause could really be anything from the system input to the multiple other subsystems and network paths along the way.
Sometime we don’t even see the bad behavior, or we don’t recognize it, because it’s close enough to normal when the problem starts and it grows slowly enough for us to get used to its minor ratcheting as time goes by.
But then someone new joins the team, and asks: “Why is this happening?”
One Size Fits All
I recently started working with a new client, a large company building a very interesting AI-based solution that’s serving many big, important customers. Not only is it an enormous and…
