Prompt engineering: How to fix instructions that AI ignores
While running automation pipelines on my Mac mini, I hit a recurring wall: the AI simply wouldn't follow directions. Whether generating articles or summarizing text, I spent hours tweaking prompts to get the length, tone, and structure right. Through this trial and error, I realized that while AI is great at creation, it struggles with strict constraints. At first, I tried simple requests like "Summarize this within 300 characters. Use a strong tone." The results were consistently over the limit, often hitting 400 or 600 characters. To fix this, I tried aggressive commands like "Strictly adhere to 300 characters!" or "Do not exceed the limit by even one character." It didn't help much. I learned that for an AI, numbers aren't precise constraints; they are just a general "vibe." To solve this, I stopped trying to control length via the prompt and moved it to post-processing code. Regardless of the AI's output length, I simply t...