Prompt Element Position

Where a prompt element appears matters — most elements need a specific order, even though skipping an element outright is usually harmless.

Position is one of three relational dimensions any prompt assembly method must account for between elements (alongside importance and dependency). Elements usually need to appear in a specific order — omitting an element from the assembled prompt is usually fine, but rearranging the elements that remain can confuse the resulting document. Quoted reference snippets should keep their original order; chat and narrative content should stay chronological; a description of a book the user liked shouldn't land inside a "Books I really hate" section.

Position is typically managed via an array or linked list of elements, an explicit index, or a unique position value per element. In practice, order often just mirrors how information was gathered — for example scanning a source document section by section — so the common case is simply appending each new element to the end as it's produced, rather than computing position explicitly.

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Sources

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