Prompt Engineering Systems
When prompts have escaped into application code as string literals and nobody can say which version produced last week's behaviour.
Treating prompts as versioned, tested artifacts rather than strings pasted into code is what makes behaviour changeable deliberately. It also makes regressions visible, which matters because prompt changes can degrade one case while improving another.
The discipline is closer to configuration management than to writing, despite the name.
What the work includes
- Prompts stored, versioned, and reviewed like other artifacts
- Test cases so a change can be evaluated before it ships
- Separation of prompt content from application logic
- Traceability from an output back to the prompt version that produced it