Cutting bloat in document-producing agents (BRD/PRD/ADR Builders and more)

[raymond-nassar]

Cutting bloat in document-producing agents (BRD/PRD Builder)

Problem: Document-producing agents output long, redundant docs. Same content repeats across problem/value/exec-summary, stakeholder/persona/role tables, architecture prose+diagram+table, risks/dependencies, etc.

Proposal: Generalize the PRD Builder prompt into a doc-type-agnostic pattern. Tested on a customer PRD; sharing for hve-core.

Changes

• Configurable inputs: docType + targetReduction — one prompt, many doc shapes.
• 5 universal operating principles (applied before type-specific logic):
  1. Single source of truth per fact
  2. Tables over prose
  3. Prose budget per section
  4. Testable claims only
  5. Engineer/agent-first output
• Redundancy catalog — explicit list of known cross-section overlaps the agent must avoid (not hope to avoid).
• Universal Section Map — 11-section default skeleton when no canonical structure exists.
• Type-Specific Adjustments table — overrides per type: BRD, PRD, ADR, arch review, RAI, meeting notes.
• Prefix taxonomy — extended FR-/NFR-/OQ- with DEC-, RISK-, THREAT-, AC- so downstream agents can parse/reference.
• Verification step — output line count checked against targetReduction.

Open questions

1. Universal-with-overrides vs. one prompt per doc type?
2. Prose budget: lines vs. tokens vs. words — what holds up?
3. Should the redundancy catalog become a shared, versioned list?
4. Adopt the prefix taxonomy as a hve-core convention?

doc-conciseness-review.prompt.md