> If you’ve ever resorted to MANDATORY or DO NOT SKIP, you’ve hit the ceiling of prompting.

using this is going to do the opposite of what you want

I think this is a good usecase for temporal + pydantic-ai

It speaks to how dumbed down the human userbase has become that these kind of articles are even presented as insightful. "Agents" are not intelligent. they are pattern extrapolators. If you want a reliable deterministic output you need a deterministic harness. Think of agents as a montecarlo sampling tool. The harness defines the result over noise. it is hilarious to me the industry is going head long into more "intelligent" agents while ignoring that intelligence is an adaptation to constraints not some magical abstract general thing that just appears and can do useful work. AGI is a lie. Stocastic parrots + harness is a useful tool.

This will remain a persistent problem without a definitive answer until models move from generative tools to actual AI.

all caps in a prompt is a code smell. when you're typing MANDATORY, you should be writing a wrapper, not refining the prose.

If we need control flows, then designing these control flows ought to be the future of agent engineering

Slowly and surely we are replacing AI with programming languages.

HUMANS need control flow. It's a very effective strategy that has worked wonders in healthcare

Yes. Humans are also unreliable and nondeterministic (though certainly more reliable). Accordingly we have built software dev practices around this. I imagine it would be super useful for example to have a "TDD enforcer":

Phase 1: only test files may be altered, exactly one new test failure must appear.

Phase 2: only code files may be altered. The phase is cleared when the test now succeeds and no other tests fail.

If you get stuck, bail and ask for guidance

How does one achieve this?