What makes prompts a graph: necessary and sufficient conditions for prompt graph engineering

Prompting has become the primary interface between humans and generative AI, yet many natural language prompts remain fragile: roles, goals, constraints, and expected outputs are often buried in prose or left implicit. In agentic and software development workflows, a misread at the first handoff can propagate through every step, since a significant portion of agent failures stem from context ambiguities rather than model limitations. This paper introduces PromptMN, a pseudo-prompting domain-specific language that annotates natural language with compact, %-prefixed typed directives covering roles, goals, requirements, priorities, constraints, plans, inputs, and outputs. Semantic resolution lets authors write in any order while the model interprets directives by function. PromptMN sits between informal prompting and programming-style pseudocode: structured enough to be inspectable and reusable, yet lightweight enough for analysts, managers, developers, and stakeholders across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). PromptMN also pairs with reverse prompt engineering. Asking a model to restate a desired outcome as PromptMN lets users inspect the inferred roles, goals, constraints, and missing assumptions before acting, reducing repair cycles and yielding a reusable artifact for aligning people and AI tools. PromptMN's feasibility is evaluated across several frontier models, including Claude Fable 5, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.5. The models correctly resolved PromptMN instructions, including complex structures such as repetition, conditionals, methods, and a prime-checking task, without fine-tuning. The same vocabulary applies across new codebases, maintenance, and redesign in the SDLC scenarios presented. While large-scale validation remains future work, these early results suggest PromptMN is a practical step toward clearer, more reviewable human-to-AI interaction.

The behavior of contemporary generative Large Language Models (LLMs) is directly shaped by prompts, unstructured texts that describe the desired output and model behavior. In this paper we argue that prompts are linguistic objects that merit investigation in their own right. To this end, we collect 57.5K unique samples of prompts from GitHub. Specifically, we focus on transactional prompts: reproducible natural language instructions that are integrated into software. To enable the empirical, quantitative study of prompts, we introduce a structured ontology, capturing the properties of prompts as well as their formal and semantic components. Based on this ontology, we transform prompts from unstructured raw texts into richly structured linguistic objects. Analysis of these structured data reveals significant diversity of usage patterns across languages, domains, tasks, and modalities, in a typical Zipf-like distribution where some clearly prevail and others, more diverse, appear in the long tail. To validate the reliability of the ontology-based annotation of the prompts, we perform a comprehensive error analysis across all fields, providing a detailed assessment of annotation quality. We release the dataset together with a browsing and exploration interface (https://github.com/OnlpLab/transactionalPromptsCollection ).

Graph prompt learning enables parameter-efficient adaptation of frozen Graph Neural Networks to downstream tasks through lightweight prompt parameters. As routing becomes increasingly node-adaptive, however, independently optimized local decisions can collectively concentrate assignment mass on a small subset of a finite shared prompt bank, even when individual node--prompt matches remain locally meaningful. We propose MINT (Measure-INtegrity Transport), an entropically regularized optimal transport framework that formulates node-to-prompt adaptation as a globally coupled allocation problem. The transport cost favors local geometric compatibility, while a prescribed prompt-side marginal explicitly controls graph-wide prompt utilization. We further derive an exact variance decomposition that separates prompt-side geometric variance into retained prompt-update variation and within-node barycentric dispersion, together with a conditional stability bound for the frozen-encoder forward map. Across standard citation networks and additional heterophilic graphs, MINT remains competitive in few-shot adaptation. Controlled and end-to-end experiments further distinguish the roles of routing and topology: fixed-marginal routing controls graph-wide prompt utilization and has measurable end-to-end effects on citation networks, while topology augmentation provides a complementary, graph-dependent mechanism for addressing structural mismatch. Code is available at https://github.com/Ga1axy0051/MINT.