A Shorter Prompt Is Only as Safe as Its Test
TL;DR for operators Production-agent prompts can be shortened without a measurable decline in benchmark correctness, but the benchmark must first be trustworthy. A documented optimization failure removed important instructions while passing sampled checks, exposing a risk that aggregate scores can conceal. A new study addresses this through reproducible evaluation of agents connected to changing business data, followed by correctness-gated prompt optimization. Across three model families, it reports 3.5–7.6% reductions in the complete instruction surface, with a statistically significant correctness improvement for one family. ...