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.
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.studio88 articles
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.
Context Engineering Is the New Prompt Engineering: How to Load Your LLM's RAM Like an Operating System
Karpathy was right -- the highest-leverage skill in 2026 isn't writing better prompts, it's deciding what goes into the context window and what stays out
Agent Outcome Rubrics Are Just Prompts: How to Write Grading Criteria That Actually Fail Bad Output
Anthropic shipped the grading loop -- the rubric is now the hardest prompt you'll write