Stop Tuning the Prompt. Set the Constants. - Jon Schuck
Jon Schuck
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Stop Tuning the Prompt. Set the Constants.<br>Why structured context outperforms prompt engineering — and what my cousin's backyard taught me about it.
Jon Schuck<br>Jul 15, 2026
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Breaking ground
If you’ve spent any time building with AI — whether it’s a side project, an enterprise workflow, or just trying to get consistent results from a chatbot — you’ve probably lived through a version of this cycle.<br>You write a prompt. It works beautifully. You try something similar the next day and it falls apart. You rephrase. You add more detail. You try chain of thought, persona prompting, few-shot examples. You read an article about a magic sentence someone adds to every prompt. You try that too. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the exact same prompt gives you a different result on a different day and you have no idea why.<br>Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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So you dig deeper. You study prompt engineering best practices. You test variations. You regression-test prompts against different models. The results are real — some promising, some frustrating, some downright confusing. And underneath all of it, one question keeps surfacing: why is this so inconsistent?<br>I spent months in that cycle before I realized I was solving the wrong problem. I wasn’t writing bad prompts. I was building on ground I hadn’t tested — pouring effort into the entrance of a tunnel without understanding what was happening in the passage or what was waiting at the other end.<br>It turns out that when you type a prompt, your words enter the model and travel through dozens of computational layers. Each layer transforms what came before. Somewhere in the middle — not at the surface, not at the end — the actual reasoning happens. The model doesn’t think where you can see it. It thinks deep in the passage, in a workspace that’s far more constrained than most people realize.<br>How you structure what goes into that passage determines what reaches the place where thinking happens. And that realization changed everything about how I work.<br>I first learned the principle from a tunnel my cousins, my brother, and I tried to dig when I was eight years old.
To the library
We’d just watched The Great Escape. The fascinating part — obviously — was the tunnels.<br>We decided we could dig one too.<br>We had a site picked out — under the backyard fence at my cousins’ house, between the yard and the side driveway. There was a slight bank that hid the hole, one of the selling points. And it would get us into the backyard rather than the neighbor’s yard, which we all agreed probably wouldn’t go over well. Especially given that we were still dealing with the fallout from when my cousins tossed vegetables they didn’t want to eat over the neighbor’s fence.<br>But we knew we couldn’t just start digging. We needed a plan. So collectively, we looked at one another and said — “To the library!”<br>In a 1970s world before home computers, before the internet, before Google, we had one source of information. A fantastic one. The local library. The librarians knew everything, knew where everything was. And my grandfather was always willing to take us, because reading is important.<br>We found exactly what we were looking for — how to properly build, buttress, and vent a tunnel. We asked for paper and pencil, wrote it all down, and checked out a few books to verify our plans once they were drawn up.
The silence
If you’ve ever watched an AI model generate a response, you’ve experienced a strange kind of silence. Tokens stream across the screen — words appearing one after another — and you watch, waiting to see if what comes out is going to be useful or if it’s going to miss entirely. You can see the output forming, but you can’t see the thinking. The reasoning is happening somewhere you don’t have access to, in a passage between your input and its response that you can’t observe and can’t control. All you can do is watch and hope the result reflects what you intended.<br>My dad knew that kind of silence. He just experienced it differently.<br>He always said the noise and rumble of five boys together — all close in age — was fine. He and my uncle would listen for screams that needed attention or tempers to flare. But the one thing both of them never, ever wanted was silence. Silence was terrifying because, in their words, “They’re plotting! They’re planning!”<br>They were right to worry. The silence meant we were deep in execution — past the point where the plan was just a plan.<br>In fairness to us, we’d acquired 2x6 boards and 3/4-inch plywood and 16-penny nails to buttress our tunnel as we dug. We had a plan to build a hand-driven air pump, just like in the movie. We’d even assigned my brother as the safety officer — because he’s thorough and has an eye for detail.<br>We got about three feet down and four feet out — for the record, that produces...