Why the best AI startups write bad prompts (& how to fix this)
Wulfie Bain@wulfie_bain_I've spent the last 1.5 years working with the best AI startups globally. This leads to spaghetti prompts, with contradictions and ambiguity. I propose a very simple structure at the end.Prompting decisions are product decisions, and using structure to make unambiguous, maintainable prompts is critical for making great agents.
- ▪Wulfie Bain@wulfie_bain_I've spent the last 1.5 years working with the best AI startups globally.
- ▪This leads to spaghetti prompts, with contradictions and ambiguity.
- ▪I propose a very simple structure at the end.Prompting decisions are product decisions, and using structure to make unambiguous, maintainable prompts is critical for making great agents.
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Record
| Original publisher | X (formerly Twitter) |
| Canonical URL | https://twitter.com/wulfie_bain_/status/2098060386813566990 |
| Publication time | Tue, 15 Sep 2026 03:41:52 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-15T03:56:51.884Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-15T03:56:51.884Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | EmngoMCdl_dr · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Wulfie Bain@wulfie_bain_I've spent the last 1.5 years working with the best AI startups globally. This distills my learnings on prompts. Engineers & builders, I hope it's useful 🤝 Why the world's best AI startups write bad prompts (& how to fix this)30334161.2K/*! tailwindcss v4.3.3 | MIT License | https://tailwindcss.com */ @layer properties{@supports (((-webkit-hyphens:none)) and (not (margin-trim:inline))) or ((-moz-orient:inline) and (not (color:rgb(from red r g b)))){*,:before,:after,::backdrop{--tw-border-spacing-x:0;--tw-border-spacing-y:0;--tw-border-style:solid;--tw-leading:initial;--tw-font-weight:initial;--tw-outline-style:solid}}}@layer utilities{.absolute{position:absolute}.fixed{position:fixed}.static{position:static}.inset-s-3{inset-inline-start:calc(var(--spacing,.25rem)…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at X (formerly Twitter).
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