Why Prompts Fail in Production (and the 4 Failure Vectors)
A guide for developers highlights four key failure vectors that cause prompts to break in production environments, despite working correctly in development playgrounds. These vectors include shifts in input distribution, contamination of context in multi-turn conversations, unexpected model updates from providers, and adversarial or creative user inputs. The article emphasizes adopting an engineering mindset, treating prompts as software with defined contracts and failure modes, to build more robust LLM applications. AI
IMPACT Developers need to engineer prompts for production robustness, anticipating diverse user inputs and model behaviors.