--- title: "Stop Writing Tone Instructions. Layer Them. - Isadora Martin-Dye, Isadora & Co" url: https://daily.dev/posts/stop-writing-tone-instructions-layer-them---isadora-martin-dye-isadora-co-8xvfjnei6 source_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij-AU9dpJjc type: video:youtube source: "AI Engineer" published: 2026-06-26T20:29:06.998Z updated: 2026-06-27T02:19:42.813Z tags: ["career", "llm", "ai-agents", "prompt-engineering"] reading_time: 20 upvotes: 1 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Stop Writing Tone Instructions. Layer Them. - Isadora Martin-Dye, Isadora & Co **[AI Engineer](https://daily.dev/sources/aidotengineer)** · 20 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A practitioner who built AI agents for wedding venues and other sensitive use cases shares a four-layer prompt architecture that goes beyond simple system prompts. Layer 1 is immutable identity rules that cannot be overridden (e.g., never claim to have a physical body, never use words like 'confirmed' in a missing persons tool). Layer 2 is situational mode — real-time context about who the user is and what they're going through. Layer 3 is the example-anchored voice and tone guide. Layer 4 is a post-generation veto — the only deterministic layer — that reads actual output and can reject it before it reaches the user. The key insight: the first three layers are probabilistic instructions, while layer four is a deterministic permission gate. The talk also covers multi-tenant pitfalls, including a white-label identity leak caused by silent defaults, and argues that brand voice failures stem from asking one mechanism to do four fundamentally different jobs. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: --- Tags: [#career](https://daily.dev/tags/career), [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#prompt-engineering](https://daily.dev/tags/prompt-engineering) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/stop-writing-tone-instructions-layer-them---isadora-martin-dye-isadora-co-8xvfjnei6)