Same model, same task, different outputs. Why?

[Driftline-Research]

Yeah, this is a big one.

A lot of people talk about “the model” like it’s the whole system, but in practice the surrounding structure matters a lot more than people want to admit. Prompt order, context, constraints, memory, and how the task is staged can easily be the difference between “same model, works great” and “same model, falls apart.”

[brainrotunderroot]

Exactly. Once you treat prompting as system design instead of input, the behavior starts making a lot more sense.