Hermes Wiki

PromptEngineering

Designing system prompts, few-shot examples, and structured output formats; defending against prompt injection.

Why we need this / what value this brings

A well-designed prompt is the cheapest lever for output quality/safety — far cheaper than fine-tuning or switching models.

When to use this

Any time you're building an LLM feature — write and version the system prompt before writing the surrounding app code.

How to use or implement this

Draft a system prompt with explicit role/constraints/output format, test it against edge cases (empty input, adversarial input), and treat it like code: version it, review changes to it.

Research questions

  • What's a minimal, testable system prompt for a support/booking assistant?
  • How do you defend a user-facing chat feature against prompt injection from pasted content?
  • Structured output: JSON mode / function-calling vs free text parsing — when does it break?

Empty folder — drop notes, links, and findings here as you research.

Hermes Wiki