Minimal Prompt Crafter

Fill the token budget from the end of the content backward, keeping the most recent elements with no scoring or prioritization needed.

For iterative development, start prompt assembly with a minimal prompt crafter: order the prompt elements, then keep as many as possible starting from the end of the content, filling the token budget backward from there. No evaluation or prioritization of individual snippets is needed — position alone decides what survives.

This works because models are trained to handle document suffixes well, so truncating from the front is a safe default. It suits applications built around one main text (truncate the oldest parts of a long document) or chat-like applications where the most recent exchanges are the most relevant, matching the recency effect behind lost in the middle. Reach for greedy prompt assembly once elements genuinely need to be ranked against each other rather than just kept-or-dropped by recency.

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Sources

• Prompt Engineering for LLMs (John Berryman), ch. 6