The Problem is Prompt Debt

You can’t be model agnostic if you’re hand-tuning prompts Thanks to natural language interfaces, AI applications can be prototyped quickly. You write what you want in English, hand it to a frontier model, and a working prototype appears in an afternoon. This is extraordinarily powerful and for one-off tasks, optimal. But as a way to build reliable systems, the natural language prompt is a trap. The plain-English prompt that makes prototypes effortless turns out to be a poor way to specify how a system should behave, and the bill arrives slowly, disguised as ordinary progress, until the application can barely move. The problem is not any single prompt. It is that natural language was never meant to be a specification language for engineering, and treating it as one quietly caps what you can build. The Prompt Debt Trap The first symptom of prompt debt is slowing iteration. As users flag errors and spot edge cases, additional guidance is added to the instructions, nudging the model into…