Stop Trusting Free-Form Chain-of-Thought. Make Your Model Sign a Logical Certificate Instead
Meta's semi-formal reasoning template forces premises, traced paths, and a derived conclusion -- so you can see exactly where the model is bluffing.
Brian Gagne
CTO of Kief Studio. 20+ years technology consulting. Cisco Certified Ethical Hacker, UPenn AI for Business, Perplexity AI Business Fellow. Builds the tools Qurtoo teaches you to use.
https://kief.studio78 articles
Your Agent Reads the Transcript Twice: Stop Piping Tool Outputs Through Context and Filter Them in Code
The 'response bloat' tax quietly doubles your token bill. Here's the prompt pattern that keeps raw tool payloads out of the model's working memory.
Marc Andreessen Told His AI to 'Never Hallucinate.' Here's the Four-Line Scaffold That Actually Works
You can't command next-token prediction into honesty, but you can engineer the conditions where it stops guessing.
Stop Prompting Your Agent. Engineer the Loop That Prompts It
The four standing prompts behind Boris Cherny's "loop engineering" -- find-work, do-work, verify, remember -- with copy-paste scaffolds and the guardrails that keep them from running rogue.
Chain-of-Thought Assumes Left-to-Right. Mercury 2 Doesn't: How to Prompt a Diffusion LLM by Handing It a Skeleton, Not a Trail
Diffusion models like Inception's new Mercury 2 refine the whole answer in parallel, so scaffold the output shape instead of nudging a linear reasoning chain.
Your Agent Should Write Python, Not Emit JSON: Prompting for CodeAct Now That It Ships in Microsoft Agent Framework
BUILD 2026 made code-as-action a first-class pattern. Here's how to rewrite your tool-use prompts from "pick a tool" to "write code that calls the tools" and cut tokens 30-50%.
Delete Your Temperature Parameter: Why Self-Consistency Sampling Is Dead on Reasoning Models Like Gemini 3.5 Flash
Google's migration guide quietly killed the majority-vote trick you've leaned on for years. Here's what replaces it.
Stop Writing Supervisors, Write Handoffs: The Three-Sentence Prompt That Lets One Agent Surrender Control Without Losing the Thread
Microsoft's new Handoff orchestration pattern proves the routing decision isn't architecture, it's a prompt. Here's how to write it so your agents don't deadlock or drop context.
Strip the 'Wait' Tokens: Two Papers Prove Your Reasoning Model Is Wasting Half Its Budget Thinking Out Loud
The NoWait technique cuts chain-of-thought length 27-51% with zero accuracy loss -- here's how to apply it in Claude, GPT, and Gemini
Speculative Planning Prompts: How to Make Your Agents Pre-Plan During Tool Call Idle Time
The IdleSpec technique turns dead wait time into planning cycles that cut agent task completion by 40%
Adaptive Few-Shot Prompting: Use Semantic Retrieval to Pick Your Examples Instead of Hardcoding Them
New research shows dynamically selecting in-context examples by embedding similarity outperforms static few-shot by up to 7 BLEU -- here's how to build it
Gemini Spark Skills Are Just Trigger-Condition Prompts: How to Write Always-On Agent Instructions That Don't Go Rogue
The prompting discipline for persistent background agents is fundamentally different from chat -- here's the pattern that keeps autonomous actions safe and useful.