Painting Windows
The house has a broken foundation. Your solution: repaint the window frames.
Your house has a broken foundation. Cracks in the walls. Water seeping through the floor. Your solution: repaint the window frames.
That is prompt-tuning in most AI systems. Model hallucinating? Add “be accurate.” Output inconsistent? Add “follow the template exactly.” Context wrong? Add “only use provided information.”
None of it works. The problem is not the prompt. It is the harness: state management, retry logic, context injection, memory architecture.
We spent weeks prompt-tuning before realising the agent was receiving stale context because the injection pipeline was not refreshing. No prompt engineering fixes a plumbing problem.
Stop painting windows. Start digging foundations.