Glossary

In the context of contract-first prompting

Audit Trail
The conversation history, including contract negotiations, clarifications, and amendments. This record provides transparency for how compliance and intent alignment were achieved.

Clarification Loop
A process in which the language model asks targeted questions about the prompt or assignment until all gaps or ambiguities are resolved. This loop continues until a certain confidence threshold (e.g., 95%) is achieved, ensuring both parties understand exactly what is required.

Compliance
The act of ensuring that the model’s outputs adhere to the requirements, constraints, and expectations set out in the locked contract. Compliance involves explicit rubrics, self-testing, and human or model review to verify that the “contract” is fully honored.

Confidence Threshold
A percentage (such as 95%) representing the degree of certainty the model must reach before locking the contract. Achieved through questions and summarization steps.

Contract-First Prompting
An approach to prompt engineering where both the user and the language model establish an explicit, mutual understanding of the task, requirements, constraints, and deliverables before generating any outputs. The prompt acts as a “contract” guiding model behavior and evaluation.

Echo Check
A final summary step, where the language model restates the mission or main goal in a single, explicit sentence to confirm mutual understanding. This is usually the step before locking the contract.

Guardrails
Rules or boundaries in the contract that keep output within the intended scope, such as stylistic requirements, forbidden content, or strict adherence to facts.

Iterative Negotiation
The process of returning to the clarification loop or contract stage when outputs fail to comply, allowing for further refinement and amendments rather than starting over from scratch.

Locked Contract / Agreement
The state achieved when both the human user and the language model have fully clarified, summarized, and agreed upon the task and its criteria. Generation begins only after this “contract” is accepted by both parties.

Prompt Contract
Another term for the locked prompt; the full, mutually agreed prompt specification defining the agreed work, constraints, and criteria.

Rubric
A set of explicit, measurable criteria used to judge whether the model’s output meets the contract. Rubrics can cover required facts, tone, structure, style, and any “must-not” constraints.

Self-Testing / Self-Critique
A process where the language model evaluates its own output versus the locked contract, checking for alignment on deliverables, content, tone, and constraints. This may involve specific prompt instructions for the model to “mark its own homework”.

Token Efficiency
The principle of using prompt and process structure (such as contract-first negotiation) to achieve clarity and compliance without relying on excessively long or verbose prompts.

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