Prompt Iteration

Prompt iteration is the practice of systematically improving prompts through testing, measurement, and refinement rather than ad-hoc trial and error. Effective prompt iteration treats prompts like code: teams use version control, evaluation suites, and side-by-side comparison to converge on better instructions, rather than relying on intuition or anecdotal feedback from a single session. Small changes to prompts can produce large, non-obvious shifts in agent behavior, so the developers who get the best results are those who instrument their prompts, measure outputs quantitatively, and iterate on data rather than gut feeling.