CRESS Principles for Context Engineering – R is for Refutable

When we interact with a language model, we’re communicating in natural language. And communicating in natural language is a lossy process. There’s what I intended it to mean, and then there’s the meaning the model interprets, and they’re often not the same thing. Many bad things have happened in the world because the receiver misinterpreted the intent of the sender. So it’s important to know with high confidence if we’ve grabbed the wrong end of the stick. In real-world communication, a simple technique to uncover misunderstandings is to test interpretations to see if they satisfy the original intent. Including a test in an instruction given to an LLM serves two useful purposes: It restricts pattern-matching to those that also match the test and not just the natural language instruction. Coding models are actually trained by pairing code samples with tests of some kind, and more recently test execution has been used as a reward function in reinforcement learning. LLMs are sort of…