Don't over-prompt

A failure mode is the ever-growing prompt: every bug spawns another paragraph until the prompt is thousands of lines and the model can't prioritise. Resist. Prefer:

• moving task-specific instructions into loadable templates,
• moving deterministic formatting into code,
• and fixing systemic issues (better tools, better context) rather than papering over them with more prose.

A focused prompt that the model actually follows beats an exhaustive one it can't prioritise.