“Do you even have a system prompt? (PSA)” by Croissanthology

Everyone around me has a notable lack of system prompt. And when they do have a system prompt, it's either the eigenprompt or some half-assed 3-paragraph attempt at telling the AI to “include less bullshit”.

I see no systematic attempts at making a good one anywhere.[1]

(For clarity, a system prompt is a bit of text—that's a subcategory of "preset" or "context"—that's included in every single message you send the AI.)

No one says “I have a conversation with Claude, then edit the system prompt based on what annoyed me about its responses, then I rinse and repeat”.

No one says “I figured out what phrasing most affects Claude's behavior, then used those to shape my system prompt".

I don't even see a “yeah I described what I liked and don't like about Claude TO Claude and then had it make a system prompt for [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

May 29th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HjHqxzn3rnH7T45hp/do-you-even-have-a-system-prompt-psa

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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