A 2023 study found that changing nothing but a prompt's formatting, like the separator or capitalisation, swung accuracy by up to 76 points on the same task. Most of us test our prompts once and call it done

This one changed how I treat "my prompt works." Sclar et al. ( Quantifying Language Models' Sensitivity to Spurious Features in Prompt Design , 2023) took tasks where the meaning of the prompt stayed exactly the same and only changed formatting: the separator between a field name and its value, spa…

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1. 2026-10-21 07:38 · r/PromptEngineering
   A 2023 study found that changing nothing but a prompt's formatting, like the separator or capitalisation, swung accuracy by up to 76 points on the same task. Most of us test our prompts once and call it done