Rule reference · Efficiency
Filler phrases
Fires when: Politeness and intensifiers that do not change the task.
Politeness does no harm to quality, but in a prompt that runs thousands of times a day it is a measurable cost with no effect on the output.
The engine removes filler automatically in balanced mode and verifies that every requirement survives.
Example that triggers it
Hi! I would like you to please summarize the report below in 3 bullet points. Thank you so much!
<report>
{{report}}
</report>info 4 filler phrases that don't change the instruction.
Why it matters. Politeness and intensifiers cost tokens on every call without changing what the model is asked to do.
Quality 97/100 · 32 tokens · 1 findings
Fixed version
Summarize the report below in 3 bullet points.
<report>
{{report}}
</report>Quality 100/100 (+3) · 21 tokens · 0 findings
Resolved by the fix
filler_phrases: 4 filler phrases that don't change the instruction.
Scores, token counts (GPT-4.1 tokenizer), and findings on this page are computed by the engine when the site is built.
How it affects the score
Each finding subtracts a fixed penalty from 100: critical 30, warning 10, info 3. This rule counts against the Efficiency dimension. See the scoring model for the full formula.
Other efficiency rules
- Duplicate instructions: A sentence repeated verbatim.