What is Guardrails?

Guardrails are the rules and checks around a model's behaviour — what it refuses, what it must include, and validators that catch bad output before it reaches a user.

Guardrails live in three places: in the prompt (hard rules and refusals), in code (validators that check format, banned content or missing fields), and in process (a human reviews anything high-stakes). The prompt alone is not a guardrail — models can be talked out of instructions.

For personal use, a guardrail is simply a rule you never drop: "cite the passage", "flag uncertainty", "don't write the essay for me". For products, it's the difference between a demo and something you can ship.