Prompt Hygiene
The practice of keeping prompts clean, structured, and free of accumulated noise. Preventive maintenance against Context Debt.
Prompt Hygiene is the discipline, not the state. Where Context Clarity describes what a good prompt looks like, Prompt Hygiene describes the practice of maintaining it. It means regularly auditing system prompts for outdated instructions, removing contradictory guidelines, trimming conversation history to what's relevant, and structuring context so the model can parse it efficiently. Teams that practice Prompt Hygiene avoid Context Debt before it accumulates rather than paying it down after it causes problems.
More in Context Quality
Context Debt
Accumulated ambiguity, redundancy, and disorder in a conversation or prompt.
Context Load
The total volume and complexity of context a model must process in a single call.
Prompt Bloat
Oversized, redundant context that forces unnecessary reasoning.
Context Clarity
A state where the prompt contains only what the model needs — no ambiguity, no redundancy, high signal. The opposite of Context Debt.
Signal Density
The ratio of useful information to total tokens in a prompt. High signal density = low reasoning tax.
Context Freshness
How current and relevant the context is to the task at hand. Stale context — old instructions, outdated facts — increases reasoning cost even when well-structured.
Structured Context
Context organized with clear hierarchy, roles, and boundaries — making it machine-parseable, not just human-readable. The architectural practice behind Context Clarity.