Prompt Engineering for Local Models#

Prompting a 7B local model is not the same as prompting Claude or GPT-4. Cloud models are overtrained on instruction following, tolerate vague prompts, and self-correct. Small local models need more structure, more constraints, and more explicit formatting instructions. The prompts that work effortlessly on cloud models often produce garbage on local models.

This is not a weakness — it is a design consideration. Local models trade generality for speed and cost. Your prompts must compensate by being more specific.