Prompt optimizer

Diagnose before rewriting

Bad output has a small number of causes, and the fix differs entirely by cause:

• Underspecified — the model is guessing at something you know. Most common by far.
• Overspecified — so many constraints that they conflict, and the model satisfies some arbitrarily.
• Wrong shape — asking for a paragraph when you want a table, or a decision when you want options.
• No success criterion — nothing in the prompt says what good looks like, so quality varies with nothing.
• Buried instruction — the actual task is in the middle of context and gets weighted like context.
• Genuinely hard — the task needs information the model does not have, and no prompt fixes that. Say so rather than iterating.

Read the actual bad output before rewriting. The failure mode names the cause.