The Death of Naïve Prompting

Hosted by Adam Ingram and Kelley Scharf

Thu, Oct 1, 2026

4:00 PM UTC (2 hours)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

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What you'll learn

Why prompt tweaking fails at scale

See why conversational LLM outputs create untrustworthy edge cases in production, and how to engineer around them.

The Spec-First Engineering Framework

Learn the exact workflow that turns fragile, non-deterministic model outputs into reliable, testable system components.

Walk away with a working refactor

Get a system prompt structure and structured-output schema you can drop into Cursor or Claude Code today.

Why this topic matters

Naive prompting works in a demo and breaks in production. Engineers who can't explain why their AI system failed — or prove it won't happen again — can't ship with confidence, and it shows in code reviews and incident postmortems. This lesson gives you a repeatable framework for structuring AI outputs, so you walk away thinking like a systems engineer instead of a prompt tinkerer.

You'll learn from

Adam Ingram

Director, Technical Training & Development at GenSpark

Adam Ingram is Director of Technical Training & Development at GenSpark, a Pyramid Consulting company, where he designs enterprise technical training for Fortune 500 clients across financial services, technology, and consulting.

Adam has built and led training curricula across 20+ technology domains, from software development and cloud infrastructure to quality engineering, cybersecurity, and now generative AI. His programs reach learners across the US, Canada, Australia, and Mexico.

His recent focus is bringing practical, tool-agnostic GenAI skills into the workplace, helping non-technical professionals use AI confidently without vendor lock-in. He built and leads GenSpark's Introduction to GenAI at Work program.

Kelley Scharf

Training Operations Manager

I’m the Training Operations Manager at GenSpark, where I coordinate large-scale training initiatives and serve as a liaison between clients, consultants, and internal teams. I manage everything from onboarding and upskilling to consultant performance tracking and client relationship development to ensure our programs deliver impact at every level.


For every cohort, I focus on keeping the program moving forward, from managing logistics and tracking outcomes to supporting trainers and ensuring you have the resources you need to succeed.


Outside of work, I’m usually organizing something in a spreadsheet or spending time with my wife and 6-year-old Siberian Husky, Ace.

Currently at...

Pyramid Consulting
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