Turns out "place it slightly left of center" is doing nothing useful in your prompts
Small thing that took me way too long to notice: words like "slightly left," "off-center," or "toward the edge" in a composition instruction are basically decorative. The model interprets them however it wants, and the actual result drifts all over the place between generations — sometimes dead center, sometimes way off, with zero consistency. What actually fixed it: replacing vague positioning language with an approximate numeric anchor. Instead of "slightly left of center," something like "position the visual center of the subject at approximately 35–40% of the frame width from the left edge." Same idea for "near the top," "lower third," etc. — give it a number, not a direction word. It's a tiny change but it's the difference between a composition you can actually reuse across a batch of images and one that's a coin flip every time. Anyone else have a "small wording change, big consistency improvement" moment like this? Curious what other vague terms turned out to be silently useless.