A hidden string of text or system rule automatically prepended to every user prompt before it is sent to the language model, forcing the model to behave in a specific way.

Used by prompt engineers to make secretly appending "always reply politely" to a user's chat message sound like high-level network packet modification.

• Technical Padding: Elevating basic string concatenation to the level of advanced code injection.
• Transparency Mask: Hiding the fact that the user's prompt is being silently altered before the software processes it.
• House-Cleaning Reality Check: Like slipping a twenty-dollar bill into a chore chart and calling it a "fixed injected motivation instruction."

Real Housewives of New York (Season 8): Bethenny Frankel aggressively slides non-negotiable Skinnygirl branding clauses into a casual cast trip itinerary, forcing the entire group to promote her product as a mandatory baseline condition.

Hidden rules added to a user's prompt to control the software's behavior.

“The security layer applies a fixed injected instruction to sanitize external data requests.”

“We wrote a script that automatically adds 'Reply in Spanish' to the end of every message the user types.”