Real-World Constraints¶

Platforms: claude openai gemini m365-copilot

What It Is¶

Embedding practical business constraints — budget, timeline, team size, regulations, existing systems, stakeholder preferences — directly into your prompts. This grounds the model's output in reality instead of producing ideal-world recommendations that cannot actually be implemented.

The core idea is simple: advice without constraints is just theory. A plan within constraints is actionable.

Why It Works¶

Without constraints, large language models (LLMs) default to "best case" recommendations — unlimited budget, ideal team, greenfield environment. Real decisions happen within constraints. When you include them in the prompt, the model has to optimize within boundaries, producing output that is actually actionable. This is the difference between advice and a plan.

Constraints also reduce hallucination risk by anchoring the model to specific, verifiable details rather than letting it generate plausible-sounding but ungrounded suggestions.

When to Use It¶

Strategic planning and business decisions
Project scoping and resource allocation
Technology selection and vendor evaluation
Any task where feasibility matters as much as quality
When previous AI suggestions were impractical

The Pattern¶

{Task description}

Constraints:
- Budget: {amount or range}
- Timeline: {deadline or duration}
- Team: {size, skills, availability}
- Technical: {existing systems, required integrations, platform limitations}
- Regulatory: {compliance requirements, industry standards}
- Stakeholder: {who needs to approve, political considerations}

Optimize for: {primary objective within these constraints}

Here is a filled-in example:

Recommend a monitoring and alerting stack for our web application.

Constraints:
- Budget: $500/month maximum
- Timeline: Must be operational within 2 weeks
- Team: 1 DevOps engineer, part-time (also handles deployments)
- Technical: Running on AWS ECS, PostgreSQL, Redis. Must integrate with our existing Slack for alerts.
- Regulatory: No data can leave the US region
- Stakeholder: CTO wants minimal vendor lock-in

Optimize for: Fastest time to value with lowest ongoing maintenance burden.

Examples in Practice¶

Example 1: Project Planning¶

Context: You need a migration plan, but unrestricted advice would suggest a 12-month rewrite with a team of 10.

Create a plan to migrate our customer portal from PHP to React.

Constraints:
- Budget: $75,000 total
- Timeline: Must launch by Q3 (4 months)
- Team: 2 frontend developers (mid-level, no React experience) and
  1 senior fullstack dev (React expert)
- Technical: Must maintain the existing REST API, no backend changes.
  Must support IE11 for 20% of our users.
- Regulatory: SOC 2 compliance required

Optimize for: Minimizing risk to existing customers during migration.

Why this works: Every constraint shapes the plan differently — the team skill gap means training time must be factored in, the IE11 requirement eliminates certain React features, and the risk optimization criterion pushes toward a phased rollout rather than a big-bang launch.

Example 2: Vendor Selection¶

Context: You need a CRM recommendation, but generic "top 10 CRM" lists do not account for your specific situation.

Recommend a CRM for our sales team.

Constraints:
- Budget: Under $50/user/month for 25 users
- Must integrate with our existing HubSpot marketing automation
  (non-negotiable)
- Team has no technical admin — must be configurable by
  non-developers
- We're in healthcare, so HIPAA compliance is required
- Our sales cycle is 6-12 months with 3+ stakeholders per deal

Optimize for: Ease of adoption (our last CRM rollout failed due to
poor adoption).

Why this works: The constraints eliminate most options and the "optimize for" criterion ranks the remaining ones — the model cannot just list popular CRMs; it must evaluate each against your specific requirements.

Example 3: Event Planning¶

Context: You are planning a team offsite where the real challenge is not logistics but human dynamics.

Plan a team offsite for 30 people.

Constraints:
- Budget: $15,000 all-in
- Timeline: 3 weeks to plan
- Location: Within 2 hours of Chicago
- Duration: 2 days, 1 night
- Dietary: 4 vegetarians, 2 gluten-free, 1 kosher
- Goals: Team building for a recently merged department where the
  two teams don't know each other well

Optimize for: Maximum interaction between the two teams (avoid
activities where people stick with their existing group).

Why this works: The human dynamic constraint drives the activity design — the model must propose activities that deliberately mix the two teams, not just list generic team-building exercises.

Common Pitfalls¶

Incomplete constraints

Problem: Listing budget and timeline but forgetting team skills, existing systems, or regulatory requirements. The model fills in gaps with optimistic assumptions.

Fix: Use the constraint categories as a checklist — budget, timeline, team, technical, regulatory, stakeholder. You do not need all six for every prompt, but scanning the list helps you catch important ones you might have omitted.

Conflicting constraints without priority

Problem: "We need it fast, cheap, and high quality." The model cannot optimize for all three simultaneously and will either pick one silently or produce a muddled compromise.

Fix: Identify which constraint is most flexible — "Budget is firm, but timeline could extend 2 weeks if needed." Explicit trade-off priorities produce better recommendations.

Artificial constraints

Problem: Including constraints that are not real limitations — they reduce the solution space unnecessarily and may exclude the best options.

Fix: For each constraint, ask "What happens if we relax this?" If the answer is "nothing significant," remove it. Every constraint you include narrows the output; make sure each one is genuine.

Contextual Prompting — constraints are a specific type of context
Direct Instruction — clear instructions pair well with clear constraints
Chain-of-Thought — ask the model to reason through constraint trade-offs explicitly
Prompt Engineering Overview
Automation use case — real-world constraints are critical when designing automated workflows