Questions tagged [system-prompt]
Post a PromptReusable system/instruction prompts that shape a model's behavior.
20 prompts
13votes
0answers
1.6kviews
Stop conditions and loop budget for a ReAct agent so it terminates instead of spinning
Classic ReAct thought/action/observation loop. Two failure modes: it either declares victory too early (before the task is actually verified) or it never stops, re-checking the same thing while convin
51votes
2answers
6.3kviews
A reusable system prompt for consistent design direction across a whole landing page
The hardest part of prompting UI isn't any single section, it's consistency. Ask for a hero, then a pricing block, then a footer in separate turns and you get three subtly different design languages:
47votes
3answers
5.3kviews
Reduced-motion-first system prompt so every animation ships with a safe fallback
We had animations scattered across the codebase and maybe half respected prefers-reduced-motion. Auditing after the fact is miserable. I wanted motion to be safe by construction, not by review. So I m
57votes
2answers
5.3kviews
How do you stop a tool-use agent from calling the same function five times in a row?
I have a research agent with search, fetch, and a calculator tool. It gets into loops: searches, gets a mediocre result, searches again with a nearly identical query, and burns tokens/latency without
21votes
1answers
2.9kviews
Getting a chatbot to say 'I don't know' instead of confidently making things up
The hardest moment for any assistant I build is the one where it should admit it doesn't know. Left alone, models fill silence with fluent nonsense, and one confident fabrication costs more trust than
23votes
2answers
4.2kviews
Support-agent system prompt with escalation rules that actually hand off cleanly
I build customer support bots and the recurring failure is the bot pretending it can do things it can't (issue refunds, change a subscription) and then dead-ending the user. Or the opposite: it escala
26votes
2answers
5.3kviews
System prompt for a docs chatbot that says "I don't know" instead of confidently making things up
We shipped a docs assistant and the failure mode wasn't rudeness or refusals, it was fluent, confident answers about features that don't exist. Worse than useless because people trusted it. The fix wa
27votes
1answers
4.6kviews
RAG chatbot system prompt that refuses to answer beyond the retrieved context
Building a docs assistant over our internal knowledge base. The naive version blended retrieved chunks with the model's prior knowledge, so it would answer questions our docs never covered and sometim
13votes
2answers
3.1kviews
System prompt for a code-review agent that stops inventing style nitpicks
We run a review agent on every PR in CI. The first version was useless: it left 20 comments per PR, half of them were "consider renaming this variable" on code that hadn't changed, and it flagged form
27votes
1answers
3.5kviews
Self-verification step that catches an agent's own hallucinated file paths and APIs
My coding agent kept confidently importing functions that don't exist and referencing files it never opened. The plan looked great, the code didn't run. Classic. What moved the needle was a mandatory
14votes
1answers
2.8kviews
PR-review agent that outputs findings bucketed by severity with a fix-first ordering
Reviewers on my team were drowning in unordered agent output: a security bug buried under six style suggestions. Even good findings got missed because there was no triage. I restructured the review ag
24votes
2answers
4.2kviews
System prompt for a dark-mode-first design token set that isn't just inverted grays
Every "add dark mode" prompt gives me pure black backgrounds, fff text, and one flat gray for everything. It looks like a terminal, not a product, and the contrast is actually too harsh at night. I tu
14votes
1answers
2.7kviews
Guardrail prompt to stop an autonomous coding agent from running destructive commands
My coding agent has shell access in a sandbox, and twice it decided the cleanest fix for a failing test was git reset --hard or rm -rf nodemodules && reinstall mid-task, nuking uncommitted work. Sandb
16votes
2answers
4.0kviews
LLM-as-judge rubric prompt for scoring agent answers without grade inflation
I needed automated evals for an agent and reached for LLM-as-judge. First attempt: "rate this answer 1-10." Everything got a 7 or 8, the scores didn't correlate with human labels, and a slightly longe
23votes
2answers
2.8kviews
System prompt to give a chatbot a consistent personality without it getting cutesy
Giving a bot "personality" usually means it starts every message with a quip and an emoji and becomes exhausting by the third turn. I wanted a distinct, dry voice that stays out of the way. The approa