🔧 O3 Prompt Failures and the Hidden Engine of Everything

Tonight was one of those sessions where everything looks like it's working… until you change one core assumption. Switching over to the o3 model triggered a cascade of new issues. Nothing wrong with o3. One of my prompts was just not strong enough to get a good result.

It started simple enough: I updated the code so o3 had the right inputs and parameters. I got a bit stuck then. The model couldn’t handle one of the layer prompts properly. The framework was patched to improve compatibility, and that helped a bit, but it quickly became clear that pushing the framework harder was a dead end. The deeper truth was this: the prompt itself just wasn’t good enough.

That’s when I ran it through my scoring system (the informal one I just added as an afterthought awhile ago, only 3 lines long). Suddenly, I got a successful run. That confirmed it: prompt strength isn’t optional. It’s the hidden engine of everything.

I spent the rest of the evening iterating on the prompt-scoring prompt. It took about 8 iterations to fully shape the new prompt into something robust, now that I have it, I think I might just have a working foundation for the system.

Now I’ve got a real scoring rubric. Not just a three-line “make sure it covers X” checklist, but a fully fleshed-out system that actually improves output quality in a measurable way. I've got a framework that's tuned around o3's capabilities and quirks. It feels weird that it’s working. All these components (runner loop, patch engine, context expansion, prompt scoring) are starting to fit together.

I think I might be ready to close out my first real block. It’s not a small one . This is the foundation block, the bootstrap for the whole thing. It’s strange, looking back, how much of it was discovered on the fly. Not through luck exactly, but through persistent goal-seeking: test, observe, improve, repeat. The kind of iterative alignment that only happens when you’re in it.

What’s next: Morning test cycle to confirm stability, and when it all passes, I get to declare my first block "done". The next block on the list: audits of the codebase.