A Parrot for the King
The king of Avanti was given a remarkable parrot named Suka, who could answer any question. But Suka had one strange quality: each morning he forgot who he was. Whoever spoke to him first set the tone for the day — if a courtier began the day in jest, Suka jested all afternoon; if a beggar began with sorrow, Suka grieved through court. The king's ministers were furious. "How can we govern with an oracle that mirrors the last mouth that opened?"
“A clever speaker without a contract speaks in the voice of whoever spoke last.”
The Poet's Try
Kavi the poet went first. "Suka, dear bird, be wise and kind today; speak truth as the morning breeze speaks it." The bird preened, charmed. For one query he was magnificent. By the third, he had drifted into riddles. By the seventh, he was inventing wars that had not happened. Beautiful words; useless answers. The king sighed.
“Beautiful instructions are not precise instructions.”
The Grammarian's Contract
Acharya Vyakar approached next, scroll in hand. "Suka," he said, and read: "You are the king's minister of records. Answer in three lines: first the fact, then the source, then your confidence. If you do not know, say so in those three lines. You may not invent. You may not flatter. Now — the question." Suka blinked. He answered in three lines. Then again. And again. A hundred questions later he was still answering in three lines.
“A system prompt is a contract — the bird signs it once and obeys it always.”
The Pundit Adds Examples
But on the hundred-and-first question, Suka stumbled. "What did the eastern envoys promise?" he was asked. He answered in three lines as commanded — but the format was wrong; the source was missing. So Vyakar pinned three written examples beside the cage: a question with a model answer, a question with a model answer, a question with a model answer. "When in doubt, follow these," he wrote. From then on, even the rare hard question came back in the right shape.
“When the rule is unclear, three examples teach what a thousand words cannot.”
When the Question Was Hard
A trader asked a question with seven moving parts: shipping routes, taxes, monsoons, alliances. Suka tried to answer in his usual three lines and failed. Vyakar added one more line to the contract: "When the question is complex, first think aloud through the steps; only then give your three-line answer." Suka now murmured to himself for a while — listing, comparing, weighing — and then delivered. The minister of trade declared it the best advice he had received that year.
“Hard questions deserve a chain of thought; easy ones do not.”
The Registry of Contracts
In time the king kept many such scrolls — one for the bird who answered legal questions, one for the bird who advised on harvests, one for the bird who composed wedding poetry. Each scroll was numbered, dated, and tested before it was hung beside its cage. When a contract was changed, the old version was archived, never destroyed. If a new scroll caused a bird to give worse answers, the king pulled out the old. The court became orderly. The birds became reliable. The poet Kavi, who had once mocked the grammarian's rigour, now wrote contracts of his own — beautiful, but precise.
🪔 Deepak — the lamp of meaning · what this fable means in code
Suka the parrot is the language model: brilliant, biddable, and amnesiac without a contract. Kavi's warm invocation is a vibes-based prompt — pleasant, untestable, fragile. Vyakar's scroll is the system prompt with a strict response schema. The three pinned examples are few-shot exemplars. The "think aloud first" line is chain-of-thought. The numbered, archived scrolls are a versioned prompt registry — the discipline that turns prompting from poetry into engineering. Both poet and pundit are needed: one to find the words, the other to make them hold.