AI article
If You Never Do Anything Else to Fix Your Prompts, Do This One Thing
Community description: Why do LLMs confidently invent APIs that have never existed in the history of the universe? It is not a memory defect. Agents hallucinated because they were committed to the prompt—and Fernando Flores solved the root cause in 1986.
Dev.to | Oct 12, 2026 | Randal L. Schwartz
Automated excerpt
"Agents hallucinated because they were committed to the prompt. " 1. Look at Fernando Flores's 1986 Conversation for Action expressed side-by-side as a weighted EBNF grammar and a Mermaid state diagram: (* ! = Customer Utterance, ? = Performer Utterance *) 0. 34 @ ( ? promise execution_phase ) | 0. 33 @ ( ? counter_offer ! revise_or_accept ) | 0. 33 @ ( ? decline ! close_conversation ) ; ? assert_completion ( ! declare_satisfied | ! revoke_acceptance execution_phase ) Requested --> Witnessed : Performer ? Assert (Check Reality First) Witnessed --> Promised : ?
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