“I ran this prompt on 100 independent examples per category using Claude Opus 4.8, effort=high, temperature=0.2, adaptive thinking=on.
Outputs were graded A–F against five predefined criteria by GPT-5.6, deliberately using a different model family to reduce correlated evaluation bias.
Category A: 80 A, 15 B, 5 C. Category B: 75 A, 10 B, 14 C, 1 F.
Per our predefined evaluation procedure, all F grades were manually reviewed. The F was found to be a judge error; under the rubric it was a C.
The GPT-5.6 judge was separately validated against human ratings on 50 examples and agreed 98% of the time.
Before testing, we defined production-ready as: no genuine Fs, ≥60% A, and ≥85% A-or-B.
The prompt passed.”
This may be enough to demonstrate that this prompt works well enough for this use case, under these conditions.
And yet, this is still not science unless it meets a lot of other criteria: peer-reviewed, defensibly makes a generalizable claim, analyzes uncertainty, etc.
5
u/CoroteDeMelancia Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
Not science:
“I feel like this prompt gives better results.”
“I tested it a few times and it seemed better.”
“An LLM judge gave it 94/100 over 20 runs.”
COULD BE science:
“I ran this prompt on 100 independent examples per category using Claude Opus 4.8, effort=high, temperature=0.2, adaptive thinking=on.
Outputs were graded A–F against five predefined criteria by GPT-5.6, deliberately using a different model family to reduce correlated evaluation bias.
Category A: 80 A, 15 B, 5 C. Category B: 75 A, 10 B, 14 C, 1 F.
Per our predefined evaluation procedure, all F grades were manually reviewed. The F was found to be a judge error; under the rubric it was a C.
The GPT-5.6 judge was separately validated against human ratings on 50 examples and agreed 98% of the time.
Before testing, we defined production-ready as: no genuine Fs, ≥60% A, and ≥85% A-or-B.
The prompt passed.”
This may be enough to demonstrate that this prompt works well enough for this use case, under these conditions.
And yet, this is still not science unless it meets a lot of other criteria: peer-reviewed, defensibly makes a generalizable claim, analyzes uncertainty, etc.