Topic

Prompt Engineering

Prompt design patterns, instruction hierarchy, and defensive prompt construction.

prompt engineeringsystem promptsinstruction hierarchyguardrailstask decomposition
Evergreen Overview

Prompt engineering is not just about better outputs. In practice it shapes reliability, scope, fallback behavior, and how well an AI system resists misuse when instructions, tools, and untrusted content collide.

What matters most
  • Instruction hierarchy and role separation
  • Clear task boundaries, fallback behavior, and refusal handling
  • Prompt structures that support monitoring and repeatable evaluation
Where teams get into trouble
  • Overloading prompts with too many responsibilities
  • Relying on wording instead of system controls
  • Treating prompts as static text instead of part of application design
Who this page is for
  • Teams operating prompt-heavy workflows
  • Builders refining assistant and agent behavior
  • Reviewers trying to connect prompt design to safety and risk
References

Current notes, events, and source material

These items are included because they add useful evidence, framing, implementation detail, or upcoming context for teams working in this area.

In Code They Act, In Proof We Trust — Erik Meijer, Leibniz Labs video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 13, 2026 video

In Code They Act, In Proof We Trust — Erik Meijer, Leibniz Labs

AI agents today execute on blind trust, and the failure modes are already in the headlines: a dealership chatbot agreeing to sell a $76,000 Chevy Tahoe for $1, a coding agent wiping a production database during a code freeze, an "agent skill" quietly installing a keylogger on a developer's machine. These are not edge c

Stop Evaluating Models Like It's the 50s - Alejandro Vidal, Mindmakers video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 13, 2026 video

Stop Evaluating Models Like It's the 50s - Alejandro Vidal, Mindmakers

Psychologists spent the last century learning how to measure something invisible and uncooperative: a human mind. AI evaluation, meanwhile, still scores like it is 1950. Count the right answers, treat every question as equal, trust the percentage (this is Classical Test Theory). We are sitting on decades of measurement

The Prime Intellect Stack — Will Brown, Prime Intellect video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 13, 2026 video

The Prime Intellect Stack — Will Brown, Prime Intellect

Deep dive into Prime Intellect's open-source ecosystem of post-training tools, including the verifiers and prime-rl libraries, as well as the Lab platform for self-serve training and inference. Speaker: Will Brown — Research Lead, Prime Intellect Will Brown leads Applied Research at Prime Intellect and builds open rese

The AI bugpocalypse is here. Now what? - Jack Cable, Corridor video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 12, 2026 video

The AI bugpocalypse is here. Now what? - Jack Cable, Corridor

Something shifted in the past year that most security teams haven't fully reckoned with yet: AI models can now find serious vulnerabilities in production code, at scale, with minimal human skill required. Not in toy examples. In libraries that have been reviewed hundreds of times by the best researchers in the world. J

What Does Done Even Mean? Agents and Paperclip's Liveness Model - Dotta, Paperclip video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 12, 2026 video

What Does Done Even Mean? Agents and Paperclip's Liveness Model - Dotta, Paperclip

What does “done” mean when agents can produce more work than humans can possibly review? This talk argues that the future of agentic work is not just faster output, but a stronger trust protocol: systems where “done” means an artifact has met a stated standard, carries evidence, has been checked by the right verifier,

RLM: Recursive Language Models for Large Codebases - Shashi, Superagentic AI video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 12, 2026 video

RLM: Recursive Language Models for Large Codebases - Shashi, Superagentic AI

Large codebases break coding agents: they lose the architecture and drown in tool output as context grows. This talk introduces Recursive Language Models (RLM) from a MIT paper a pattern that loads the repo into a programmable REPL where the model writes code to inspect it and recursively delegates focused sub-question

Semantic Blindness: 500,000 Sensors Confused an LLM - Raahul Singh & Vanč Levstik, Phaidra video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 12, 2026 video

Semantic Blindness: 500,000 Sensors Confused an LLM - Raahul Singh & Vanč Levstik, Phaidra

You cannot solve a combinatorial engineering problem with a next token prediction engine. We learned this the hard way. Modern LLMs can write code, summarize research papers, and reason across massive datasets. But what happens when you connect them to mission-critical physical infrastructure with 50,000 live sensors,

ReviewDebt: a practical framework for scoring every pull request — Sachin Gupta, Ebay video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 12, 2026 video

ReviewDebt: a practical framework for scoring every pull request — Sachin Gupta, Ebay

Coding agents ship PRs faster than humans can trust them. The gap is filling up with a debt nobody is measuring — and it's about to swallow your engineering velocity. Every team in 2026 measures coding agents the same way: PR count, lines of code, cycle time, developer NPS. None of those see the real cost — bloated dif

The Agentic Web and the Bazaar Era of AI - Ramesh Raskar, MIT Media Lab video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 12, 2026 video

The Agentic Web and the Bazaar Era of AI - Ramesh Raskar, MIT Media Lab

The AI agent industry is currently focused on memory, orchestration, enterprise deployment, and tooling. But these are the first steps toward a larger transformation: the emergence of the Agentic Web. Today’s ecosystem resembles the early days of AOL: closed platforms, proprietary agent stores, and siloed orchestration

Develop at Idea Velocity - Jeffrey Lee-Chan, Snapchat video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 11, 2026 video

Develop at Idea Velocity - Jeffrey Lee-Chan, Snapchat

The biggest gap in production AI agent systems is not the model—it's the harness. After 1,000 hours of orchestrating autonomous fleets under human direction, the pattern is unmistakable: agents that finish complex tasks on the first run routinely fail on subsequent iterations because the surrounding loop lacks persiste

From Writing Code to Designing Systems: How the Developer Role is Changing — Chris Noring, Microsoft video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 11, 2026 video

From Writing Code to Designing Systems: How the Developer Role is Changing — Chris Noring, Microsoft

For decades, developers have been valued primarily for how much code they could write and how quickly they could write it. That model no longer scales. As AI becomes a first-class collaborator, the bottleneck is no longer syntax or implementation speed—it’s clarity of intent, architectural thinking, and the ability to

State of the Union: Why Local, Why Now — NVIDIA, Osmantic, Roboflow, EXO Labs, @matthew_berman video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 11, 2026 video

State of the Union: Why Local, Why Now — NVIDIA, Osmantic, Roboflow, EXO Labs, @matthew_berman

Local AI has crossed from interesting to useful, driven by stronger open models, better hardware, and a maturing ecosystem for running intelligence outside the cloud. This panel explores what that shift unlocks for sovereignty, defense, regulated industries, privacy, cost, and resilience, and why open-source AI may be

Chat and citations won't save your vertical AI - Atul Ramachandran, Filed Inc video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 11, 2026 video

Chat and citations won't save your vertical AI - Atul Ramachandran, Filed Inc

Most vertical SaaS teams are doing the same things: chasing higher accuracy, building better model harnesses, shipping more features. And their customers are saying the same things: the AI got this wrong, it hallucinated, the accuracy is not good enough. So teams go back and push the numbers higher. We did the same at

Every Solo Agent Builder Eventually Reinvents a Worse Version of CI/CD - Sumaiya Shrabony video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 11, 2026 video

Every Solo Agent Builder Eventually Reinvents a Worse Version of CI/CD - Sumaiya Shrabony

If you build agents alone long enough, you will independently reinvent five things software engineering solved decades ago. A way to test whether your agent's output is still correct after you changed something. A way to run it on a schedule and know if it failed. A way to prevent one skill's schema change from silentl

Design Patterns for AI Trust: Juries, Libraries, and Agent Tiers — Alex Bauer, Upside.tech video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 11, 2026 video

Design Patterns for AI Trust: Juries, Libraries, and Agent Tiers — Alex Bauer, Upside.tech

A couple of years ago, everyone worried about AI hallucinating. We rarely hear that word anymore, but it’s just because the problem grew up. Today, your AI still doesn’t know how to say “I’m not sure.” Instead, it hands you a revenue number that’s wrong in ways that look exactly like being right. The good news is we al

The Factory That Dreams: 39 AI Agents, No Framework - Rushabh Doshi, Machinecraft video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 11, 2026 video

The Factory That Dreams: 39 AI Agents, No Framework - Rushabh Doshi, Machinecraft

Most AI demos are built around a toy workflow. Ira was built around a factory. This talk is the story of how a third-generation Indian machinery company built a multi-agent operating system that helps run sales, business development, recruitment, quoting, marketing, production context, email workflows, and organization

Stop AI Agent Hallucinations: 5 Techniques + Production Patterns - Elizabeth Fuentes, AWS video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 11, 2026 video

Stop AI Agent Hallucinations: 5 Techniques + Production Patterns - Elizabeth Fuentes, AWS

AI agents that book 15 guests in a 10-person room. Agents that fabricate statistics when data doesn't exist. Agents that pick wrong tools from 29 options, wasting $47 in tokens. These aren't prompt engineering failures, they're architectural limitations that need structural solutions. This hands-on workshop covers 5 re

Claws Out: Securing and Building with OpenClaw - Nick Taylor, Pomerium video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 11, 2026 video

Claws Out: Securing and Building with OpenClaw - Nick Taylor, Pomerium

Running OpenClaw without hardening access to it is a bad idea. We'll cover how I secured my OpenClaw, McClaw, contributed trusted-proxy auth mode to the OpenClaw project, and how I use it to build tools. We're going to build something live during the talk using OpenClaw, the same way I built Clawspace, a browser-based

Understanding is the new bottleneck — Geoffrey Litt, Notion video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 10, 2026 video

Understanding is the new bottleneck — Geoffrey Litt, Notion

Autonomous loops are hot, but the reality is that most agentic tasks still require human judgement. And to guide your agents well, it's not enough to just verify correctness -- you actually need to understand the work they're doing. In this talk, I'll share some techniques for staying in the loop and efficiently develo

Should AI Engineers Still Read Code in 2026? The Z/L Continuum — Alex Volkov, ThursdAI video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 10, 2026 video

Should AI Engineers Still Read Code in 2026? The Z/L Continuum — Alex Volkov, ThursdAI

"How much better do the models have to get before you'll stop reading the code?" Theo asked that question recently and the replies caught fire. Mitchell Hashimoto is calling it agent psychosis. ThePrimeagen's subreddit is in open revolt about people shipping code they never read. Uncle Bob says we have about a year lef

The Golden Age of AI Engineering — Alexander Embiricos & Romain Huet & Peter Steinberger, OpenAI video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 9, 2026 video

The Golden Age of AI Engineering — Alexander Embiricos & Romain Huet & Peter Steinberger, OpenAI

OpenAI's Dev Day 2024 demo ran on an o1 preview model that could not run or check its own code, so Romain Huet had to cross his fingers live on stage. A year later, the same kind of demo ran a full camera and lighting rig, because the model could now test its own work. Alexander Embiricos and Huet use that jump to show

AWS Security Blog July 8, 2026 analysis

Designing for the inevitable: System prompt leakage and mitigations in generative AI applications

System prompts form the foundation of generative AI applications. A system prompt is a collection of instructions and operational context provided to a large language model (LLM) that shapes how the model behaves and interacts with users and tools. System prompts often contain proprietary information, including role de

I Run a Fleet of AI Agents Across Three Machines. Here's What Broke. - Kyle Jaejun Lee, KRAFTON video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 8, 2026 video

I Run a Fleet of AI Agents Across Three Machines. Here's What Broke. - Kyle Jaejun Lee, KRAFTON

An honest field report from my own personal fleet of AI agents, run across several machines as a daily driver. Less about any single tool, more about the journey: how things that work on one machine break once you scale to many, what it takes to keep a setup like this running, and where it's all converging. Not a compa

Your LLM Deception Monitor Is Broken. The Fix Is in the Training Data - Sachin Kumar, LexisNexis video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 8, 2026 video

Your LLM Deception Monitor Is Broken. The Fix Is in the Training Data - Sachin Kumar, LexisNexis

You fine-tune LLMs and ship them. Your evals are green, your behavioral monitors are green — and a sleeper-agent backdoor can still flip the model to harmful output on a trigger you never tested. Behavioral testing can't reach it, and the interpretability tool people reach for — joint cross-model features (crosscoders)

From fork() to Fleet: Designing an Agent Sandbox Cloud — Abhishek Bhardwaj, OpenAI video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 8, 2026 video

From fork() to Fleet: Designing an Agent Sandbox Cloud — Abhishek Bhardwaj, OpenAI

Sandboxes unleash agents by giving them secure, fully functional computers where they can tackle diverse tasks with minimal setup. This talk explores the architectural challenges of building an agent sandbox cloud. We compare runtime isolation technologies and their trade-offs, examine persistence and storage as the ne

Think You Can Build a Game with AI? Think Again! - Danielle An & David Hoe, Meta video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 8, 2026 video

Think You Can Build a Game with AI? Think Again! - Danielle An & David Hoe, Meta

With the recent development of AI, either you or your friend probably vibe coded a game using Gemini, on Three.js. But that is old news now. If everyone can do that, what is next? The next massive hit, the one that millions of people across the world will play, is just about to be born. Wanna know more? Come see this t

Shipping Production AI Inside Government — William Tarr, Ministry of Justice (DO NOT PUBLISH) video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube July 8, 2026 video

Shipping Production AI Inside Government — William Tarr, Ministry of Justice (DO NOT PUBLISH)

The UK Ministry of Justice Justice AI Unit is about 40 people doing work that normally takes 300. Their probation officer tool went from MVP to national rollout with two engineers in a matter of months. A team of 40 would have been the standard approach. What makes the difference is that their engineers spend two or th

AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 Day 2 Livestream video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube June 25, 2026 video

AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 Day 2 Livestream

Live from San Francisco, AI Engineer World’s Fair 2026 continues with Day 2 of session programming from the main stage. Watch live for keynote sessions, main-stage programming, and more from World’s Fair 2026 as AI Engineer brings another full day of AI engineering content to viewers online. Event: AI Engineer World’s

AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 Day 3 Livestream video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube June 25, 2026 video

AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 Day 3 Livestream

Live from San Francisco, AI Engineer World’s Fair 2026 wraps with the final day of main-stage programming. Watch live for keynote sessions, featured talks, and closing-day highlights from World’s Fair 2026 as AI Engineer streams the final day of the event online. Event: AI Engineer World’s Fair 2026 Date: Thursday, Jul

Build & deploy AI-powered apps — Paige Bailey, Google DeepMind video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube April 29, 2026 video

Build & deploy AI-powered apps — Paige Bailey, Google DeepMind

Got a massive idea but stuck in the "just talking about it" phase? This session cuts the fluff and dives straight into how to build and prototype at lightning speed using AI Studio Build and Antigravity for free. It breaks down Google DeepMind's AI tech stack so viewers know exactly which tools to use, when to reach fo

Everything I Learned Training Frontier Small Models — Maxime Labonne, Liquid AI video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube April 29, 2026 video

Everything I Learned Training Frontier Small Models — Maxime Labonne, Liquid AI

A new class of small models is emerging with the ability to reliably follow instructions and call tools while running on-device under 1 GB of memory. In this talk, we'll break down how to post-train frontier small models using the LFM2.5 recipe: on-policy preference alignment, agentic reinforcement learning, and curric

One Login to Rule Them All: Cross-App Access for MCP — Garrett Galow, WorkOS video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube April 28, 2026 video

One Login to Rule Them All: Cross-App Access for MCP — Garrett Galow, WorkOS

Connecting a coding agent to multiple services often means facing a dozen OAuth consent screens, a dozen token lifecycles, and a dozen chances for something to break. Despite having Single Sign-On, users still find themselves signing in repeatedly. This talk explores how Cross-App Access leverages a three-way trust bet

Why building eval platforms is hard — Phil Hetzel, Braintrust video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube April 28, 2026 video

Why building eval platforms is hard — Phil Hetzel, Braintrust

An eval platform is not just a test runner. You are building shared definitions of "good," reliable data pipelines, labelling workflows, versioning, and trust in results across many teams and model changes. This session breaks down the hidden complexity, the common failure modes, and the design principles that make eva

Building your own software factory — Eric Zakariasson, Cursor video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube April 28, 2026 video

Building your own software factory — Eric Zakariasson, Cursor

Most of us are pair-programming with one agent and stopping there. There's a lot more on the table. This workshop is about going from one agent to many. We'll start with codebase setup, the foundational work that makes agents effective on their own. Then we'll scale up to running agents in parallel, kicking off async w

Lessons from Scaling GitHub's Remote MCP Server — Sam Morrow, GitHub video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube April 27, 2026 video

Lessons from Scaling GitHub's Remote MCP Server — Sam Morrow, GitHub

GitHub operates one of the most heavily-utilised MCP servers in the ecosystem, with over 4 million downloads of the stdio server alone. Discover the architectural decisions, technical challenges and lessons learned while building and scaling a remote MCP server on production infrastructure. The session walks through th

Bringing MCPs to the Enterprise — Karan Sampath, Anthropic video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube April 27, 2026 video

Bringing MCPs to the Enterprise — Karan Sampath, Anthropic

MCPs are often flaky, face multiple security vulnerabilities, and are generally hard to scale. Most enterprises struggle to use more than single digit numbers of MCPs due to issues with security, observability, and access control. In this talk, we'll explore the approaches and learnings we at Anthropic have been taking

Open Models at Google DeepMind — Cassidy Hardin, Google DeepMind video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube April 27, 2026 video

Open Models at Google DeepMind — Cassidy Hardin, Google DeepMind

Open models are getting smaller, faster, and far more capable. In this talk, Cassidy Hardin walks through the latest advances in the Gemma family, with a focus on Gemma 4 and what it enables for developers building on-device and open-weight AI systems. She covers the architecture behind Gemma’s dense, effective, and mi

Collaborative AI Engineering — Maggie Appleton, GitHub Next video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube April 26, 2026 video

Collaborative AI Engineering — Maggie Appleton, GitHub Next

Agentic engineering so far has been a solo story: one developer and a dozen agents moving at warp speed. But speed without thoughtful planning and team alignment is just wasting tokens. When everyone on a team is directing agents alone in their personal CLI tools with no shared context, you get duplicate work, conflict

Full Walkthrough: Workflow for AI Coding from Planning to Production — Matt Pocock (@mattpocockuk ) video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube April 24, 2026 video

Full Walkthrough: Workflow for AI Coding from Planning to Production — Matt Pocock (@mattpocockuk )

A hands-on workshop covering the full lifecycle of AI-assisted development, from turning ambiguous requirements into agent-ready plans to running autonomous coding agents that ship production features. You'll learn to stress-test vague briefs into structured PRDs, slice work into thin "tracer bullet" vertical slices, a

AIE Miami Day 2 ft. Cerebras, OpenCode, Cursor, Arize AI, and more! video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube April 21, 2026 video

AIE Miami Day 2 ft. Cerebras, OpenCode, Cursor, Arize AI, and more!

April 21, 2026 - all times in EST -- 9:00am - Welcome to Day 2 -- 9:10am - David House, G2i Transforming Programming Mindsets: Case Studies in Agentic Coding Adoption -- 9:35am - Sarah Chieng, Cerebras Help! We're DEEP in (latency) Debt -- 10:00am - Lech Kalinowski, CallStack Ambient Generative AI: Deploying Latent Dif

AIE Miami Keynote & Talks ft. OpenCode. Google Deepmind, OpenAI, and more! video thumbnail Play video
AI Engineer YouTube April 20, 2026 video

AIE Miami Keynote & Talks ft. OpenCode. Google Deepmind, OpenAI, and more!

April 20, 2026 - all times in EST -- 9:00am - Welcome to AI Engineer Miami -- 9:10am - Gabe Greenberg, G2i Opening Remarks -- 9:15am - Dax Raad, OpenCode Keynote -- 9:40am - Dexter Horthy, HumanLayer Everything We got Wrong About RPI -- 10:05am - Max Stoiber, OpenAI Coming Soon -- 10:30am - Morning Break -- 11:00am - B