Brief Essay
A validator is not a better prompt
Why DBWhisper gates every generated query with deterministic code instead of a stricter system prompt — 'less often' is not a safety property.
- ~1 min read
A better prompt makes a model emit a destructive query less often. It never makes it never. "Less often" is a probability, not a safety property — and a safety property is the only kind worth shipping.
So in DBWhisper, every generated statement passes a deterministic validator before anything runs: SELECT-only, a single statement, enrolled tables only. It fails closed — if it can't prove the query is safe, it refuses.
The prompt still matters. It just isn't the boundary. The boundary is code you can read, test, and trust for the times the model is wrong.