The Prompt You Write Isn't the Prompt the Model Reads (opens in new tab)

The Simple Version When you type a prompt into an AI product, your text gets wrapped in additional instructions, reformatted, and sometimes filtered before the model ever processes it. What the model reads is often substantially different from what you wrote. There Is a Layer You Are Not Seeing Most people who use AI tools think of the interaction as direct: you write something, the model reads it, the model responds. That mental model is wrong in a useful way. Every production AI application...