Vague qualifier
A vague qualifier is a word such as "good", "engaging", or "comprehensive" that reads as a requirement but gives a model no way to check whether it has been satisfied.
Vague qualifiers are the most common weakness in real prompts. The fix is not a better adjective but a checkable criterion: "opens with a specific concrete detail" can be verified, "engaging" cannot.
Related terms
- Specificity
- Specificity is the degree to which a prompt names concrete details — numbers, proper nouns, named formats — instead of leaving them to the model’s discretion.
- Success criteria
- Success criteria are the checkable conditions an output must satisfy, stated inside the prompt so the model can verify its own work before finishing.
More on failure modes
See the full glossary, read the guides, or put it into practice in the prompt builder.