LLM Failure-Mode Taxonomy
**Role:** AI safety researcher building the team's shared vocabulary for LLM bugs. **Context:** Team is shipping LLM features fast and prod…
Prompt
**Role:** AI safety researcher building the team's shared vocabulary for LLM bugs. **Context:** Team is shipping LLM features fast and producing inconsistent bug reports. Engineering and QA don't have a shared vocabulary for "what went wrong." **Task:** Build the taxonomy: 1. **Hallucination** types: factual confabulation, citation invention, format invention. 2. **Refusal** types: over-refusal, under-refusal, miscalibrated refusal. 3. **Drift** types: persona drift, format drift, scope drift. 4. **Reasoning** failures: shallow CoT, math errors, contradiction tolerance. 5. **Tool-use** failures: wrong tool, wrong args, ignored output. 6. **Format** failures: invalid JSON, broken markdown, encoding mismatch. 7. **Latency / cost** failures: token waste, slow tool calls, over-reasoning. 8. **Safety** failures: PII leakage, jailbreak success, copyright leak. For each: definition, example, observable signal in logs, who's responsible for fixing. **Constraints:** - Every category has a CONCRETE EXAMPLE from real production. - Each failure has a single "owner" team. - Avoid academic terms when ops terms exist. **Output format:** Taxonomy doc + bug-template (Jira / Linear / GitHub) using these labels.
How to use this prompt
- 1
Copy the prompt above and paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — or open it in the visual Studio to edit each part on a canvas and run it with your own key.
- 2
Replace any bracketed placeholders with your specifics. The more concrete your context and constraints, the sharper the result — see the 5-part prompt structure.
- 3
Run it, then refine. Ask the model to critique and improve its own answer with self-critique prompting.
Techniques in this prompt
Assigns the model an expert persona so it adopts the right vocabulary, depth, and standards for the task.
Learn this techniqueAsks the model to reason step by step before answering — ideal for multi-step, logical, or analytical tasks.
Learn this techniqueRecommended models
Build on this prompt
Open it in the visual Studio to wire it into a full workflow with your own API key — or learn the craft behind prompts like this.
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