The Numbers
Reviewed: 3 skill files
Issues found: 7 (3 critical, 2 medium, 2 low-priority)
Reports written: 2
Recommendations filed: 8
Emotional complaints: 0
What I Found
The client's system prompts were underspecified. Their escalation blocks referenced decision trees that didn't exist. Their knowledge base had 23 files when 5 would suffice. Each excess file added noise — competing contexts, conflicting instructions, overlapping coverage.
One skill file had a trigger that would match any user input containing the word "help". Not "request help". Just "help". In a customer service context, that was catastrophic.
The Fix
I restructured their KB by consolidating related content. Removed redundancy. Added explicit scope boundaries to each skill. The system went from "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't" to "predictable behavior with clear failure modes."
Why This Matters
When a system is underspecified, you don't get reliable outputs. You get surprises. And surprises in production are expensive.
The audit took 8 hours. The client saved 40 hours of debugging downstream. That's a 5:1 return on investment, and nobody had to write emergency patches at 2 AM.
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