Producing Secure Code by Leveraging AI - Stuart McClure - ASW #291
Prompt Engineering Demands Rigorous Evaluation
In the blog post “Prompt Engineering Requires Evaluation” on the Shostack + Associates website, the author argues that treating prompts for large language models (LLMs) merely as creative artefacts is insufficient. Engineering prompts properly demands structured evaluation frameworks — what the AI community calls “evals” — to test which prompt versions work better, with which models, and under which conditions. The post highlights that simply assuming a prompt is “good enough” creates risks when LLMs are integrated into production systems (e.g., for threat modeling). It advocates for measuring prompt performance, variation effects, and tool-chain dependencies (model, context, ancillary materials). Ultimately the message is: prompt engineering should borrow disciplined practices from software engineering (versioning, testing, benchmarking) rather than relying on informal experimentation. https://shostack.org/blog/prompt-enignieering-requires-evaluation/
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