Meta-prompt: have a reasoning model write the production prompt for your cheap model
Digital Applied·medium signal
A 2026 workflow is to ask a high-effort reasoning model (e.g. GPT-5.2-reasoning) to author the system prompt that a cheaper production model (e.g. GPT-4.1-mini) will actually run. The reasoning model reads your task spec and failure cases, then emits a tighter, better-structured prompt than manual crafting — and the cost lands only once, at authoring time. Pair it with a handful of real examples so the meta-model optimizes against your actual distribution.