There is a recurring fantasy in prompt engineering: that somewhere out there is a set of magic words — a phrase you can drop into any prompt to unlock a better answer. The honest finding, both from our own work and from the research that followed, is that the magic isn't a phrase. It's a move: reformulate the question before you answer it.
We first introduced query reformulation as a core technique of the Synthetic Interactive Persona Agent (SIPA). The idea was straightforward — take the user's original question, transform it into a more detailed, precise, contextually richer version
