arxivcs.CLcs.AI2026-07-21
Prompt Design at Scale: How Format, Instruction Count, and Context Length Shape Instruction Adherence and Hallucination in Large Language Models
Practitioners make three prompt-design decisions with almost no controlled evidence behind them: how to format instructions and context (markdown, plain text, prose, or tabular), how many simultaneous instructions a system prompt can carry before compliance degrades, and how much…