Is your AI assistant giving you unreliable, insecure, or just plain wrong answers? The problem might not be the model—it’s your prompt. This video goes beyond the basics to reveal the hidden world of prompt defects, presenting a comprehensive six-dimension taxonomy and actionable strategies to fix them, from automated rules to advanced reasoning frameworks.

The Six-Dimension Taxonomy of Prompt Failure

Our research has identified six key dimensions where prompts can fail:

Specification & Intent: The instructions are too general to be executed precisely.
Input & Content: Vague language forces the AI to guess your intent.
Structure & Formatting: The prompt lacks a clear blueprint for the AI to follow.
Context & Memory: The AI is missing essential background information.
Communication Efficiency: Unnecessary “fluff” dilutes the actual commands.

Four Tiers of Mitigation Strategies

Once you’ve identified the defect, you can apply one of four tiers of mitigation strategies:

Tier 1: Automated Prompt-Cleaning Rules

These are simple, automated substitutions that clean up your prompt before it’s sent to the AI. For example, replacing vague words like “things” with “elements” or removing unnecessary politeness tokens like “please” and “thank you.”

Tier 2: Structured Prompt Templates

For more complex tasks, you can use structured templates to give the AI a clear blueprint to follow. For example, a business proposal template would include sections for an executive summary, problem statement, proposed solution, and so on.

Tier 3: Thought-Guidance Frameworks

These frameworks guide the AI’s reasoning process. For example, “Chain of Thought” prompting asks the AI to “think step by step,” while a “React Loop” (Reason and Act) allows the AI to work iteratively, refining its response based on new information.

Tier 4: Tree of Thoughts (ToT)

For complex problems that require exploration, the “Tree of Thoughts” framework allows the AI to explore multiple reasoning paths simultaneously, evaluate each branch, and prune the weak ones.

From Research to Practice

The Prompt Optimizer translates this academic research into practical, actionable strategies. Our tool automatically analyzes your prompts for all six defect dimensions and applies the appropriate fixes from all four tiers. It adds structure where needed, injects reasoning frameworks for complex tasks, and cleans up noise and vague language, resulting in professional-grade prompts that reliably produce high-quality output.

Why Your AI Prompts Fail: A Taxonomy of LLM Prompting and Defect Strategies