Instructions
Every AI product needs guardrails — and the time to define them is before you build, not after your first production failure. Constraints aren't just about risk management. They're what make a product trustworthy and give you a foundation for everything else: your system prompt, your onboarding, your monitoring strategy, and your user communications.
The common mistake is treating constraints as a legal checkbox — something you'll "add later" or handle with a disclaimer. Builders who do this usually hit problems they didn't anticipate: AI making decisions users didn't expect it to make, sensitive data being included in prompts, or users being confused about who is responsible when something goes wrong. Defining constraints early forces you to think clearly about what your AI i...
