Techniques
Persona Stacking: Layer Multiple Roles in One System Prompt for Expert-Level Output
Why 'You are a senior engineer who also reviews for security' beats single-role prompts
Brian Gagne
Author
Brian Gagne
CTO, Kief Studio
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.
75 articleskief.studio
Articles by Brian Gagne
TechniquesMeta-Prompting: Write Prompts That Generate Better Prompts Than You Can
Use frontier models to improve their own instructions with measurable improvement loops
Brian Gagne
TechniquesThe Negative Prompt Pattern: Tell the LLM What NOT to Do and Watch Quality Jump
Why exclusion constraints are more effective than inclusion instructions for complex tasks
Brian Gagne
TechniquesFew-Shot Prompting Is Dead Weight in 2026: When Zero-Shot With Constraints Outperforms Examples
The counterintuitive cases where removing examples improves output quality
Brian Gagne
AppliedHow Accountants Are Using AI to Draft Client Advisory Letters in Half the Time
The prompts that turn raw financials into client-ready advisory letters, and the judgment calls AI can't make for you
Brian Gagne
AgenticPrompts for Product Managers: From User Research Synthesis to PRD Generation
The PM prompt toolkit that turns two days of synthesis work into an afternoon
Brian Gagne
AppliedHealthcare Prompting Done Right: Clinical Decision Support Without Liability Landmines
Prompt guardrails for medical applications that regulators and clinicians can trust
Brian Gagne
AppliedLegal Document Review Prompting: Clause Extraction Without Hallucinated Citations
The grounding techniques that keep LLMs honest with legal text
Brian Gagne
TechniquesPrompting for Financial Analysis: Extract Insights From Earnings Calls and SEC Filings
Structured prompts that turn 100-page filings into actionable intelligence
Brian Gagne
DevelopmentTest Generation Prompts That Produce Tests Worth Keeping
Why most AI-generated tests are useless and the prompt structure that fixes it
Brian Gagne
TechniquesPrompting for Database Migrations: Generate Safe, Reversible Schema Changes
The constraint-heavy prompt template that prevents destructive migrations
Brian Gagne
DevelopmentThe System Prompt Architecture for Coding Agents: What Claude Code and Cursor Get Right
Reverse-engineering the prompt patterns behind production coding agents
Brian Gagne