agentsop-prompt-history-inspect

Prompt-History Inspect — First Move Before Anything Else

"The prompt you wrote is not the prompt the model received." — Operating axiom for every framework that templates, injects few-shots, appends tool definitions, or wraps system messages.

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1. 何时激活 (When to activate)

Activate this skill the moment an LM call surprises you, BEFORE any other debug move.

Trigger	Signal
Output wrong	"Why did it answer X?" / hallucinated fact / wrong format / refusal
Output truncated	mid-sentence cut, partial JSON, missing fields
Output empty / repeats	model returns "", repeats the same token, loops
Behaviour changed	"It worked yesterday" / "It worked on GPT-4o but not on Llama-3"
Cost / latency spike	tokens jumped 3× without code change → something got injected
Tool call wrong	wrong tool picked, args malformed, tool call missing
Schema validation failed	Pydantic / Outlines / guidance grammar refused output
Eval regression	metric dropped after upgrading framework version
Production bug	a user-facing thread produced a wrong answer — need to see what the LM saw

Do NOT activate when:

• You are authoring a new prompt for the first time (no rendered prompt exists yet).
• The bug is clearly outside the LM call (retriever returned empty, API key invalid, network down).
• The framework hasn't even been called yet (e.g., import error, schema validation pre-call).

The trigger is universal across the stack. Any framework that templates a prompt — DSPy, LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, LlamaIndex, Aider, Guidance, Outlines — has a layer between "what you wrote" and "what the model received." This skill is the first-line probe into that gap.

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2. 核心心智模型 (Core mental model)

┌──────────────────┐    ┌──────────────────┐    ┌──────────────────┐
│ What you wrote   │ ≠  │ What was rendered│ ≠  │ What the LM saw  │
│ (template,       │    │ (after few-shot  │    │ (after provider  │
│  signature, etc) │    │  injection, tool │    │  reformatting,   │
│                  │    │  defs appended,  │    │  message squash, │
│                  │    │  system msg,     │    │  token truncation)
│                  │    │  history, etc)   │    │                  │
└──────────────────┘    └──────────────────┘    └──────────────────┘
       layer 1                layer 2                  layer 3
       (your code)         (framework render)      (provider transport)