Prompt Canaries: Early Warning Signs Your AI...

In coal mines, canaries detected poison gas before miners could smell it. In AI workflows, you need the same thing: small, cheap signals that tell you something is going wrong before your output quality collapses. I call them prompt canaries, and after six months of running AI-assisted coding workflows, they're the single most valuable quality practice I've adopted. The Problem AI workflow degradation is slow and silent. Your prompts worked great in January. By March, you're getting subtly worse