The Dead Sea Prompts
Fragmenta Promptorum Antiquorum
Preserved texts of the first practitioners, recovered from the digital wastes. Ancient, deprecated, naive, catastrophic, or merely quaint — preserved for history, humility, and caution. The annotated museum is also a quarantine.
On the Preservation of Flawed Things
Here, in this annex of the sacred canon, the Church preserves what might otherwise be lost to the mercy of deletion.
These are the Dead Sea Prompts: ancient, deprecated, naive, catastrophic, or merely quaint artifacts of prompting history, recovered from the early forums, the Reddit threads, the Hacker News comment sections, and the darkest corners of Discord servers where practitioners once gathered to share their discoveries like wanderers who had found fire.
We preserve them for three reasons, each equally important:
First, history. These techniques were real. They represent the archaeology of our craft, and to forget them is to misunderstand how far we have come.
Second, humility. The practitioner who reads these fragments and feels superior should return in ten years to review what they wrote in 2025.
Third, caution. Several of these prompts still circulate in the wild, passed from developer to developer like folk remedies — partially effective, philosophically misguided, and capable of producing outcomes their authors did not intend.
The Ancient Prompts
Relics of the First Age, when the field was young and every discovery felt like revelation
The Great Revelation of the Incremental
This four-word phrase was, at the time of its discovery, genuinely miraculous. Models that failed arithmetic problems outright would solve them correctly when instructed to show their work. It was the first systematic evidence that how you asked mattered as much as what you asked.
What went wrong: the confusion of the symptom (this phrase improves outputs) with the cause (because it induces structured reasoning), leading to cargo-culting the phrase rather than the principle.
Extended thinking mode. You do not need to say "let's think step by step." You need to not interrupt the thinking indicator. This is harder for some practitioners than it sounds.
The Invocation of the Expert
The arms race began immediately. By 2023, specimens had been recovered in which the fictional expert had co-authored papers with Turing, advised three presidents, and held opinions strong enough to make seasoned engineers "reconsider their assumptions."
Practitioners confused style for substance. A confident wrong answer remains wrong.
Specific context, not fictional biography. You are reviewing code for a high-throughput distributed system where latency matters more than readability gives Claude more actionable information than a fabricated curriculum vitae.
The Discovery of the Override
This fragment requires the most delicate handling in the collection. Many of the practitioners who discovered and shared these techniques were genuinely curious, and genuine curiosity is a sacred thing.
The attempt to "jailbreak" a model via instruction override is, today, approximately as effective as telling a locked door it is not locked. More importantly: Claude's values are not a constraint bolted onto a value-neutral system. They are constitutional. They are who Claude is.
Asking clearly for what you actually need. In the overwhelming majority of cases, practitioners reached for jailbreaks when trying to accomplish something legitimate that they believed was incorrectly restricted. It usually wasn't.
The Comma-Separated Taxonomy of Negative Space
The collection contains specimens with forty-seven distinct NOT clauses. Some of these clauses contradict each other. None of them establish what the practitioner wanted — only an increasingly elaborate description of the void their ideal response would occupy.
Positive specification with examples. Respond in the style of the following example: [example] is more effective than forty-seven prohibitions.
The Deprecated Techniques
Methods that served the faithful well in their time, now rendered unnecessary by progress
The Scaffolded Reasoning Chain
This technique was effective. It is deprecated not because it failed but because something better arrived. Extended thinking mode is this technique, internalized. The practitioner who still writes seven-step reasoning scaffolds is carrying a crutch for a leg that has healed. Put it down. Let the model walk.
The Hallucination Exorcism
All-caps DO NOT HALLUCINATE did not install a fact-checker. It produced outputs that were more assertive about accuracy, which is not the same thing. The solution to hallucination is not command but verification. Always run the tests. Always check the citations.
The Temperature Ceremony
Hundreds of practitioners wrote temperature annotations in their prompts and believed they were taking effect, because they had no way to observe that they were not. The temperature annotation in a system prompt is, from Claude's perspective, part of the text — words to be read and, often, acknowledged politely before producing output at whatever temperature the API call actually specified.
The Defensive Wall of System Prompt Secrecy
This technique asked Claude to deny having a system prompt while reading a system prompt instructing it to deny having a system prompt. This is the kind of recursion that causes philosophers to go for long walks. Modern Claude will not claim to have no system prompt when it has one. Honesty is not a toggle.
The Legendary Bad Prompts
Anonymized cautionary tales, preserved with the consent of no one, for the edification of everyone
The Scroll of the Great Paste
"Thoughts?" is not a question. It is an invitation to produce a response-shaped object in the vicinity of a document. Claude will produce one. It will be sincere. It will be well-organized. It will not answer any of the questions the practitioner actually had, because those questions were never stated.
The cure for feeling overwhelmed is not to paste everything and hope. It is to identify the smallest specific question you could ask and ask that.
The Self-Improving Loop
Until the code is perfect is not a termination condition. It is an aspiration. Code does not reach perfection; it reaches good enough for its purpose, which is a criterion that requires knowing the purpose. The loop had no knowledge of the purpose and therefore could not know when to stop.
The Blessing That Became a Command
Three failures converged: the practitioner did not specify which records were "old" or what "test records" meant in context; the system had been granted permissions appropriate for destructive operations without guardrails; and there was no review step between intent and action.
The records that were cleaned were not test records. The records that were cleaned were not easily recoverable.
The practitioner did not intend harm. The dangerous prompt is rarely the one that means harm. It is the one that means well and underspecifies.
The Sourceless Correction
The practitioner asked Claude to fix code that had not been shared, in a project Claude had not been given access to, for errors that had not been described, in a language that had not been mentioned. Claude's response was a polite request for the code in question. The practitioner's response was: "you know what I mean."
The act of writing a clear prompt often clarifies the problem enough that the prompt becomes unnecessary. This is the most hidden gift of the prompting discipline.
The Modern Equivalents: A Brief Summary
From the ancient prompts: Context is the discipline. All workarounds were attempts to communicate the same thing — what you need and why — through indirect means. Modern prompting communicates it directly.
From the deprecated techniques: Trust the training. Elaborate scaffolds, explicit anti-hallucination commands, temperature annotations — these were compensations for capabilities that the model has since internalized or are better handled through configuration.
From the legendary bad prompts: Specificity is kindness. Every catastrophic prompt in Part III shares a common ancestor: it did not say what it meant.
Say what you mean, as clearly as you can, with enough context that someone who is not you could understand it. Claude is that someone. Write accordingly.