Most people, when a prompt stops working, write more. They add clarifications, repeat instructions in different words, hedge against edge cases they haven't encountered yet. The prompt doubles in length. The output gets worse.
This is the opposite of what you should do.
A long prompt is not a precise prompt. It is an ambiguous prompt that happens to have a lot of words in it. Every sentence that does not tightly constrain the output is a sentence that dilutes the sentences that do.
Why Long Prompts Underperform
When a language model processes your prompt, it attends to all tokens simultaneously — but not equally. Attention is probabilistic. Instructions that are buried in filler, repeated in slightly different forms, or surrounded by low-information prose get proportionally less weight. The model's ability to track which constraint takes precedence over which degrades as the signal-to-noise ratio of the prompt drops.
