TechFlow News, July 14. According to Decrypt, OpenAI has released a new prompt engineering guide for its flagship model GPT-5.6 Sol, with the core concept of "Outcome-First Prompting"—clarifying goals and termination conditions while avoiding lengthy procedural instructions. Internal programming agent tests show that streamlined system prompts improved evaluation scores by approximately 10–15%, while reducing total token usage by 41–66% and lowering costs by 33–67%.
The guide also introduces the text.verbosity API parameter for globally controlling output verbosity, as well as a new "Programmatic Tool Calls" section that supports delegating intermediate tasks such as filtering and batching to code, reducing the model's decision burden. Additionally, the guide warns that GPT-5.6 strictly follows prompt rules, and conflicting instructions within the prompt will consume a large amount of inference tokens and may lead to erroneous output.
