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.

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.