The first version of most AI features is not a system.
It is one giant prompt doing too many jobs.
It is supposed to understand the user, check account facts, retrieve policies, write a response, avoid legal risk, match the brand tone, and maybe decide whether to escalate. Then one edge case arrives — a refund request with a partially used subscription — and the prompt starts negotiating with itself.
That is usually when teams say, “We need better prompting.”
Often, the real problem is architectural.
