The Words You Choose in Your System Prompt Change What Your Agent Will Risk
Here is something that shouldn't be surprising but is: when you tell an agent "avoid making mistakes" versus "prioritize accuracy," you are not giving it the same instruction. The observable behavior at ambiguous decision points diverges measurably — agents prompted with loss-avoidance framing hedge more, escalate more, and complete fewer tasks end-to-end. Agents prompted with gain-seeking framing complete more tasks but introduce more errors. The difference isn't philosophical; it shows up in eval logs.
This is the behavioral economics of agents, and most engineering teams haven't thought about it systematically. They write system prompts as documentation — a description of what the agent is — when system prompts are actually decision-shaping instruments that encode a risk posture whether the author intended that or not.
