Skills
Urgency framing in prompts measurably degrades code correctness and security
The first large-scale empirical test of psychologically-informed prompt design in software engineering operationalized eight influence tactics from organizational psychology into templates, then evaluated them on five open-weight models across two code-generation benchmarks, scoring correctness, quality, maintainability, and security. Framings that emphasized urgency or time pressure were associated with reduced correctness and security — the opposite of the folk practice of telling a model a task is critical or rushed. Accepted to Empirical Software Engineering (2026); the takeaway is to strip motivational pressure language from system prompts and agent task templates.
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