Prompt Sensitivity

Rewording a prompt slightly can change tone, structure, refusal behaviour and occasionally substance. This makes prompts brittle in a way that resembles code with no tests: an edit intended to clarify one case alters behaviour across many, and the regression surfaces weeks later as a vague complaint about quality. Sensitivity is why prompt edits deserve change control — not because prompts are complex, but because their blast radius is invisible at the point of editing.

Prompts and skills in Centralpoint are versioned records, so an edit can be staged and compared against its predecessor rather than replacing it irreversibly. Because the Interaction Log retains full assembled context per execution, a before-and-after comparison reflects which skills loaded and what was retrieved rather than only the final text — which distinguishes a wording effect from a retrieval one.