Episode Details

Daniel built an AI agent to lightly edit his podcast prompts, and it works. So why does he keep turning it off? This episode digs into the measurable mechanics of AI over-editing — from a 2026 coding-model study showing reasoning models rewrite more by default, to brevity bias and context collapse that erode a prompt across iterations. We walk through the draft system prompt in full, find the broken worked example hiding inside it, and map three production patterns that fix the problem: surgical find-and-replace editing, formal drift bounds with length caps, and delta-based merges instead of full rewrites. If you've ever gotten back something functionally correct that no longer sounds like you, this one's for you. Episode #808516 — open it directly at myweirdprompts.com/808516