It's Not a Prompt Problem — It's a Context or Harness Problem
· 10 min read
Have you ever spent half an hour refining a prompt — making the instructions clearer, more detailed, adding examples, adding constraints — and the agent kept failing in exactly the same way?
You've been there: the model hallucinates even with a perfect prompt. Or worse: the agent acts on the world, does something it shouldn't, and you find out in production. Not in the test chat, not in the sandbox. In production, with real data.
That's not a prompt problem. And polishing the system prompt text won't fix it.
This article is about understanding where the problem actually lives — and why conflating these three layers of AI engineering wastes time, money, and sometimes causes incidents.