People still throwing giant “You are a world-class expert engineer...” prompts into production are wasting tokens. The biggest improvements for us came from: Prompt chaining Explicit output contracts Negative prompting Validation steps between generations This simple chain reduced retries by almost 40% on our support automation pipeline: { "step_1": { "goal": "Extract user intent", "input": "Raw customer message", "output_format": { "intent": "string", "priority": "low | medium | high", "missing_information": ["array"] }, "negative_prompt": [ "Do not answer the customer", "Do not infer missing facts" ] }, "step_2": { "goal": "Generate structured action plan", "input": "Output from step_1", "output_format": { "actions": ["ordered list"], "requires_human_review": "boolean" }, "negative_prompt": [ "Do not generate final response text", "Do not invent company policy" ] }, "step_3": { "goal": "Generate final customer response", "input": "Validated output from step_2", "output_format": { "response_email": "markdown" }, "negative_prompt": [ "Do not mention internal reasoning", "Do not expose chain logic" ] } } This simple chain reduced retries by almost 40% on our support automation pipeline: Ever since we stopped relying on one mega-prompt, costs and hallucinations dropped hard.