7.1 — Diagnosing and Resolving Underperforming Prompts and Poor Outputs

CCAO-F Domain 7 · Task 7.1

What You Need to Know

Diagnosing means naming why a reasonable-looking request produced a poor output, before changing anything.

The Routing Question

Did that happen once, or does it happen every time?

• Once → prompt problem (better brief)
• Every time from the same Project → configuration problem (fix the instructions or knowledge once)

Six Causes (Cover Nearly Everything)

1. Context starvation (by far the most common)
2. Instruction overload
3. A configuration defect
4. A degraded conversation
5. Stale or superseded material
6. A feature or setting mismatch

Starvation: supply what was missing. Asking more forcefully supplies nothing. Overload: break into substeps, group and prioritise.

When the Conversation Itself Is the Problem

A long chat accumulates superseded drafts and unrelated topics. Fix: start a fresh conversation carrying a verified summary of what still matters. Projects handle large recurring material through retrieval.

Failure Modes Anthropic Names

• Fabricated quotes that look right → scrutinise high-stakes claims; review cited sources
• Hallucinated capability (working-looking links that fail, claim to have sent an email) → Claude has no access to tools not integrated
• Too brief → retool the prompt; give Claude the previous prompt and response
• Error messages (capacity, length-limit) → retry, or chunk/summarise/start fresh — not reword the prompt

The Escalation Reflex

Reaching for the most capable model because the output disappointed is the domain’s favourite trap. A vague brief fails at every tier. Reach for feature/setting changes only after the brief is sound.

Key Concept: Classify the symptom before reading the options: once or every time, and which named failure mode. The keyed answer fixes the cause.

Exam Traps

• Rewriting today’s prompt when every output has the same defect
• Escalating to a more capable model or higher effort as the first response to a disappointing output
• Treating an error message as a quality defect and rewording the prompt
• Chasing the delivery of an email Claude claims to have sent in a chat with no email integration