Your system prompt has a hidden fight going on inside it, and you probably don’t know it. One user on r/ChatGPTPromptGenius spent hours chasing a rule that worked 80% of the time and just vanished the other 20%, no pattern, no logic. They rewrote the rule three times. They added emphasis, bolded it, moved it to the top of the prompt. Nothing stuck. Turns out the rule was fine the whole time. The example sitting three lines below it was breaking the rule, and the model believed the example.
That’s the part that stings. This wasn’t a model failure. It was a prompt that quietly contradicted itself, and nobody caught it because nobody reads their own prompt looking for a fight.
The Key Idea
Instructions and examples aren’t the same thing to a model, even though we write them like they are. An instruction says “do this.” An example says “this is what good looks like.” When they contradict each other, the model doesn’t average them out, and it doesn’t pick the instruction just because instructions sound more official. It leans toward the example, especially if that example is specific or repeats more than once. Specificity beats abstraction almost every time. A rule that says “be concise” is vague. An example that shows a long, detailed answer is concrete. Concrete wins.
This matters because most people build prompts the way they’d build a sandcastle: add a rule here, toss in an example there, keep going until it feels complete. Nobody goes back and checks whether the pieces agree with each other. The prompt looks coherent when you read it top to bottom because your brain fills in the gaps. The model doesn’t fill in gaps. It just resolves the conflict, silently, in whatever direction the strongest signal points.
Old Way vs New Way
Old way: instructions and examples live in the same paragraph, written whenever you thought of them. You add a rule about tone, then two sentences later drop in an example that doesn’t quite match that tone because you wrote it on a different day, in a different mood, chasing a different problem. Nobody checks if the example actually follows its own rule. The prompt grows by accretion, and every new addition is a chance for a new contradiction to sneak in unnoticed.
New way: instructions and examples get separated into labeled sections, and every example gets audited against the rules sitting next to it. You’re not just organizing for tidiness here. You’re creating a structure where conflicts become visible instead of hiding in prose. When “Instructions” and “Examples” are two clearly marked blocks, you can literally hold them side by side and ask “does this example break any of these rules?” You can’t do that when they’re tangled together in one wall of text.
The case that made it click: the instruction said “keep responses under 3 sentences.” The example response two paragraphs up ran five sentences and opened with “That’s a great question, let me walk you through this in detail.” The model wasn’t confused. It was resolving a conflict the prompt writer created and didn’t notice. Every single output that leaned long wasn’t a random failure. It was the model doing exactly what a stronger, more specific signal told it to do. The instruction was a suggestion. The example was a demonstration. Demonstrations win.
How To Fix It
- 🔍 Pull up your system prompt right now and search for every example block, even the small ones you forgot you added months ago
- ✅ Check each one against the rules stated near it, line by line, and don’t skip the ones that “obviously” look fine
- ✂️ Cut or rewrite any example that breaks a rule you wrote yourself, even if the example is otherwise a good one
- 🗂️ Split the prompt into clearly labeled sections: Instructions, then Examples, so future you can spot the fight before it starts
Do This Today
Open your best-performing prompt and your worst one. Run the audit on both. If the worst one has an example quietly fighting an instruction, you just found your inconsistency bug, and it was never random. Fix that one conflict and watch what happens to the 20% of outputs that used to feel like a coin flip. They stop being a coin flip. That’s the whole trick.
Instructions vs examples: the distinction inside a system prompt nobody talks about, and it’s probably causing half your inconsistent outputs
by u/ClickOk5811 in ChatGPTPromptGenius