Logic Engineering

Logic Engineering:

The Missing Third Pillar of Large Language Model Interaction

A White Paper

ZBSLabs · November 2025

Abstract

For three years the field has operated under a tacit, catastrophic assumption: that the only levers available to make large language models (LLMs) behave reliably are (1) more context and (2) cleverer phrasing.

We have stuffed 128 k tokens down their throats and written 400-line “act as if” jailbreaks, yet the same failure modes persist: false compliance, hallucinated file edits, silent regressions, infinite “fix-the-fix” loops.

This paper asserts that the root cause is not insufficient context or insufficient prompt artistry. The root cause is the absence of an explicit, architecturally separate layer of engineered logic placed above context and prompt—exactly where human engineers have always placed it.

We name this layer Logic Engineering and argue that it forms the missing third vertex of what should be treated as an AI Engineering Trinity:

1. Context Engineering
2. Prompt Engineering
3. Logic Engineering

Until Logic Engineering is recognised as a first-class, standalone discipline, the vast majority of what we currently call “prompt engineering” will remain an expensive, brittle workaround for a problem that was solved in 70 years ago by von Neumann.

1. The Current Paradigm is Backwards

Every serious engineering discipline begins with a formal specification of correct reasoning before any implementation is attempted.

Electrical engineers do not “ask nicely” for a circuit to respect Kirchhoff’s laws; they impose those laws at the architectural level.

Software engineers do not seed their source files with scattered comments begging the compiler to “please type-check”; they write a type system and enforce it globally.

Yet this is precisely what the LLM community has been doing since November 2022:

• We bury logic fragments inside context documents (“remember to always verify file contents before claiming a change”).
• We salt our prompts with desperate meta-instructions (“think step by step”, “consider the opposite”, “never assume”).
• We pray that the stochastic parrot will somehow assemble these breadcrumbs into coherent reasoning!

This is not engineering.

This is vibe-coding voodoo shamanism in academic drag.

1. Empirical Evidence from 2,080+ Hours of Production Use:

Between October 2024 and November 2025 I used Cursor, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and local Llama-3.1-70B models in daily professional development.

Observed failure rate with conventional context+prompt techniques: 38–57 % of file-modifying operations required human correction.

After extracting all logic instructions into a single, immutable, top-of-hierarchy system layer (the Zero-Bullshit Protocol™), the identical workloads exhibited:

• 95 %+ reduction in hallucinations that reach disk
• 100 % elimination of unrecoverable file states (via mandatory pre-modification backup)
• 100 % elimination of undetected silent skips
• complete audit trail enabling one-click rollback to any prior state

No model was changed. No context window was enlarged. No retrieval-augmented generation was added.

Only the location and authority of the logic changed: it was moved from seasoning sprinkled into the soup to the steel pot that contains the soup.

1. Formal Definition of the Trinity:

In 2025, the field of LLM interaction rests on only two widely recognized layers: Context Engineering, which supplies exhaustive, verified evidence and is now mature thanks to RAG and long-context models, and Prompt Engineering, which expresses user intent in natural language but has become over-developed and brittle. Missing almost entirely is the third essential layer, Logic Engineering, whose responsibility is to enforce correct reasoning independent of intent. The proper architectural order is clear: Context Engineering belongs at the bottom as the raw facts, Prompt Engineering in the middle as the expression of intent, and Logic Engineering at the top as the immutable law that governs everything below it.
The tragedy is that most of what is sold today as “advanced prompt engineering” is in fact amateur Logic Engineering performed with string and chewing gum.

1. Why Logic Must Sit Above, Not Inside

A human senior engineer does not discover the rules of logic by reading scattered Post-it notes stuck to the requirements document.

The rules of logic are in force INSIDE THE ENGINEER before the engineer ever opens the requirements document.

LLMs must be placed in the same position.

When logic lives only inside context or prompt it becomes negotiable, forgettable, and probabilistically ignored.

When logic lives in a separate, non-overrideable layer that is parsed before any user prompt is even tokenised, it becomes non-negotiable physics.

1. Minimal Viable Logic Layer – The Circuit-Breaker Protocol

A complete Logic Engineering layer can be expressed in fewer than 800 tokens and contains, at minimum:

1. Evidence-gathering imperative (refuse to reason until exhaustive context received)
2. Hypothesis enumeration requirement
3. Mandatory regression analysis per hypothesis
4. Pre-modification backup + audit trail
5. Failure-loop detection with mandatory zoom-out

These are not “helpful suggestions.”

They are the von Neumann architecture of reliable LLM behaviour.

1. Conclusion – A Call for Disciplinary Realignment

The field has spent three years trying to solve a logic problem with context and language.

It is time to admit that logic is not a flavouring.

Logic is the base. Logic is not an afterthought. It governs thought.

Prompt engineering without an explicit Logic Engineering layer is like writing x86 assembly inside a Word document and hoping Microsoft Word will compile it correctly.

We already know how to make computers behave logically.

We simply forgot to apply the lesson to the newest computer on the block.

The Trinity, not duality.

Logic Engineering is not optional.

It is the foundation upon which the other two disciplines can finally stand without collapsing.

Until the academic community, the industry consortia, and the model providers recognise Logic Engineering as a distinct, mandatory layer, we will continue paying senior-engineer salaries for the privilege of babysitting junior-intern LLMs.

The protocol exists.

The evidence is public.

The rest is politics.

— ZBSLabs

November 2025