The Token Trial: Putting Words on the Stand in LLMs
Prompt failures rarely announce themselves with a dramatic explosion. More often, they arrive as a polite, plausible answer that quietly ignores the one word that mattered. A compliance assistant misses “not.” A summarizer preserves the general topic but drops the exception. A customer-support bot treats “refund denied” and “refund approved” as neighbors because the surrounding sentence looks familiar enough. Nobody panics at first. The output is fluent. The dashboard is green. The meeting is calm. Then someone asks the inconvenient question: which part of the prompt actually controlled the answer? ...