Team finds four drifting copies of one system prompt, while production uses a fifth

larabyeol · reddit · 2026-07-28

The team found four drifting copies of the same support-agent system prompt: one in the codebase, one in a test notebook, one in a Notion doc, and one in the live config. The bug itself took only ten minutes to fix once they located the running value.

The harder lesson was organizational: "change the prompt" had become ambiguous, because engineers and non-engineers were editing different copies that no longer matched production. They collapsed everything to one source of truth that the code actually reads, deleted the stray versions, and now the PM edits the real prompt directly.

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