Prompt Guidance for GPT-5.4

6 hours ago

GPT-5.4 is designed for production-grade assistants and agents, excelling in multi-step reasoning, evidence-rich synthesis, and long-context tasks.
Explicit prompting is beneficial for tool routing, dependency-aware workflows, reasoning effort selection, research tasks, and irreversible actions.
Core prompt patterns include keeping outputs compact and structured, setting clear defaults for follow-through, and handling mid-conversation instruction updates.
GPT-5.4 improves token efficiency, sustains multi-step workflows reliably, and performs well on long-horizon tasks.
Specialized workflows benefit from explicit guidance on image detail, research and citations, strict output formats, and tool boundaries in coding agents.
Personality and writing controls can be separated for customer-facing workflows, with clear personas, channels, emotional registers, and formatting rules.
Reasoning effort should be treated as a last-mile tuning knob, with recommended defaults based on task requirements.
Migration to GPT-5.4 should be done one change at a time, starting with matching current reasoning effort and then iterating based on evals.
GPT-5.4 performs well in research-heavy tasks with multi-pass research modes, citation rules, and explicit completion criteria.

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