The first layer of the agent lineage as a field guide. Six levers — role, examples, output contract, reasoning-first, quoting the data, temperature — each redrawing the same 15-column strip, so the poster says once what six techniques have in common: none of them makes the model smarter, each deletes continuations you did not want.
6 levers that narrow what the model may say next the rest is folklore
task · turn this bug report into a ticketschematic · the room the prompt leaves open, not sampled logits
None of these makes the model smarter. Each one deletes continuations you did not want — which is the only thing a prompt can do to a machine whose job is to continue text.
