They're also prefix cached, so the cost to Anthropic and performance hit is greatly reduced.

Having them in context is super easy and cheap. It is trivial to change and is 100% cacheable.

That would make the model quite inflexible.

A system prompt is about guiding the behavior for the rest of the conversation.

If I'm writing an agent for financial analysis I don't want the crap that belongs to a chat-based one, or a code-oriented one.

1. Less context window to work with.

2. Things were "different" in the early days. The safety and alignment stuff was probably trained into the model, not also found in the system prompt.

3. Safety and alignment meant something different 3 years ago. Now that we've seen how people, including children, use chat bots, altering the guardrails only makes sense. Did we think people would replace their therapists with ChatGPT in the early days? No. Do we know now that they will? Yes.

(Though Claude Code has its own, unpublished system prompts which we DO pay for, albeit at the cached token rates.)

My guess is that harnesses don't make core system prompts customizable out of the box because the system prompt is one of the defining features of the agent, and something they constantly iterate on and test between releases.

Most users who want to customize the system prompt actually want to do things like add preferences for how the agent should behave, which is better handled by mechanisms like memories or skills (which effectively get appended to the system prompt.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46125184

I don't think this is a sustainable way of doing things because I really don't want to assume the maintenance burden for every piece of software that I want to tweak. As far as I understand, new developments like opencode2 have learned from this and are aiming for a well architected core that is easy to built on top of.

I think the more likely reason is it doesn't work as well as in context learning. Otherwise they would prefer to avoid polluting context and degrading performance.

The other explanation may be that these AI labs may be expecting more government scrutiny, and "here's a document" would probably go better than "here's some vector representation of our values" when talking to politicians.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09685

[2] https://vgel.me/posts/representation-engineering/

[3] https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticit...

The article rests on the claim that water usage of data centers on continent X threaten water availability for humans on continent Y.

I hope you can see how self-evidently illogical that is. The article tries to bend logic into a narrative it is trying to push.

> This was from United Nations and it was flagged.

Indeed! It exposes a level of lack of rigor and critical thinking which is astounding - this is meant to be an organization that thinks clearly, which it clearly does not.

That said, there is also a vocal anti-AI crowd here, or at least there used to be. Most of those people seemed to have left for greener pastures seeing how half the HN front page is "someone made XYZ but now with AI" these days.

There are other places that discuss tech that aren't so focused on making money, and those are probably less biased in favour of the latest AI gadget.

On the other hand, since the day ChatGPT was unleashed upon the general public, you should assume all online interaction is happening through AI and should probably be ignored. The human internet died the day we taught computers how to write a coherent paragraph.

I have mentioned this here before, but the majority of my organization has reacted viscerally to this verbosity that LLM-text has been forbidden: in comments, in PR/commit messages, in correspondence, in Jira tickets.

A couple non-coders who want to make PRs without writing the description are now rebelling and saying this can be fixed if we spend our time writing skills for Claude so it becomes readable again.

1. ycombinator supports many AI companies.

2. There are too many marketers from AI companies.

(Answer number one before that is usually "I don't have internet access, from memory it is either A or B, but I cannot recall what you want to know." ChatGPT or Gemini can often do the search, while google.com AI assistant or perplexity just tell blatant lies. Copilot.com can do the search, but external links are invalid made-up stuff for harder questions, which seems to be the case 9 out of 10 times.)

Which is great, since it could answer with made-up BS, but does not.

AI, except for doing better web searches for a year now, hasn't really improved for my tasks in the last three years, except for coding. Then again, AGI benchmarks seem to go through the roof only above Sonnet 5 and self-hosting, so perhaps the questions I ask not too hard for long now.

And self-hosting, eve 1bit/1.5bit models are a pondering a little too long to comfortable run in summer, but cheap on the RAM and insanely good at coding since a month now all of a sudden.

The first example was flagged by users. It fits the pattern of other political clickbait stories. The top comment is calling out problems with it. This type of story pops up and gets flagged all the time on different topics.

Some people assume a conspiracy or moderation misbehavior, but when most of the comments in the thread are people calling out obvious problems with the article it leads to a lot of users clicking the flag button. Articles with poor logic or tortured claims don't last long here.

The second one is an Ask HN on a contentious topic with more comments than upvotes. There’s an automatic filter on this website designed to detect flame wars and I suspect it down ranks threads that aren’t getting many upvotes but are attracting a lot of comments. Happens to many Ask HN threads.

The third one doesn't even strike me as anti-AI. I don't know why you included it as an example of an anti-AI agenda because it's still about a future where everyone is using AI. It has other problems though because it's willfully ignoring the fact that inference is getting cheaper at a fast rate. It probably got dropped from the front page because the ratio of comments to upvotes was bad, like the other story.

There isn’t a conspiracy theory to be found in these examples. This is just what happens to tired topics on this site.

Anti-AI topics are on the front page all the time. I think that story you tried to post was just a badly written anger bait piece, it got called out in the comments, and people started flagging it.

maybe someone has a diff of this (would be interesting!)

unfortunately Anthropic only publishes the system prompts of Claude app/web

It's important to remember that we are talking about a calculator that doesn't have an understanding of common sense. Unironically, this is common sense.

I could be wrong about that, though.

Models are being deployed recklessly with not even a fraction of enough oversight, and people are suffering harm and sometimes death because of it.

If it's still doing it, I can only imagine how bad it had to be before they added the prompt...

I haven’t seen it when using the app lately.

See anything below too?

https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49290062

https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49318906

https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49319582

Edit: previous sibling comments explain pretty well + imagine moving the needle on AI on HN with negative coverage of it!

One session while working it, I said a much more expressive form of “I’ve been working myself ragged on this stupid thing” and then went on asking something else. It picked up on that and it was like a record scratch. It committed the work in progress and basically said “dude, what you’ve got now is perfectly acceptable. Ship it! You are seeking perfection you don’t need”

Granted I’m horribly paraphrasing the prompt I used but it basically, snapped me out of myself and got me thinking if what I was doing “globally” actually made any sense at all. With some serious introspection I realized I was falling back to earlier trauma in my life and doing something stupid.

So weirdly… that little bit they add to the prompt (plus a bunch of model training we can’t see) saved my sanity, marriage and family.

From then on, if I’m feeling some stress about whatever I’m working on, I’ll mention it as context as a way to cross check myself and make sure I’m not letting myself spin.

(Meta: talking about this stuff is so weird. Not sure why)

There is still a vocal anti-AI crowd here. The problem is that they don't seem to be very good, overall, at upholding HN commenting guidelines. (This is probably just a fatigue effect.) I keep seeing green accounts making pithy, uncivil snipes on this topic, with heavy use of sarcasm and reference to anti-AI "thought-terminating cliches" (e.g. mentioning the topic of water use and expecting that mention to stand in for an entire argument, while not acknowledging any of the well-established refutations).

But the thing about "someone made XYZ but now with AI" is that most of it is posted by "someone", or someone with a connection to "someone". Hence the complaints about the state of Show HN. And the thing about "someone"s is that they do not care how many anti-AI people are lurking around. There's nothing the anti-AI people could do, in principle, to stop it. Consequently, the presence of those posts is not evidence that the anti-AI people are leaving.

> On the other hand, since the day ChatGPT was unleashed upon the general public, you should assume all online interaction is happening through AI and should probably be ignored.

…And yet you're still here?

If anything, they don't get flagged nearly consistently enough.

That’s what they mean. It’s too easy to flag something here, as it is too easy to downvote.

Every prompt will get this info, probably not only initially, since it could run out of context window. But every re-prompt in existing chats, even, gets one system prompt per model used per chat dialogue done.

Adds a fraction of cent of electric power just to every usage.

At home, I work with 65k context window, and if my system prompt and agents.md were both this length, I would spend two-thirds of the input window, before compacting which perhaps alleviates the issue for my use case, on re-feeding what mostly the reinforcement-learning should have implicitly baked in.

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”

Whatever these things are doing, it’s not the same as what a person does. Trying to decide if whatever they do fits into the box we label as “intelligence” is completely uninteresting, in my view. What’s interesting is figuring out just what they can do and how best to use them, which sounds like a related question but really isn’t.

False. I occasionally flag items, never as part of nor acting on behalf of any particular interest group.

Read the comments. People were actually reading the topic and calling it out. This gets topics flagged.

It’s not coordinated interest groups conspiring to remove stories.

> Give me a break, Mr. "nothing to see here".

Okay, Mr. “I just created an alt account for this comment”

He didn’t say that at all. He said there was bias towards removing negative AI posts. He showed no knowledge of the flagging system and that it could just be working as intended.

But I really wish those tools behaved more like tools.

Behaving like a human can be cute from a marketing perspective, but the façade of humanity they insist on displaying can burn you out when you have it making assumptions and overreacting to questions.

"Why did you do X this specific way?" <-- legit question

"Sorry, my bad. I will revert all the work."

The only observable side effect, as a user, is that the system does what you want more often than one without this prompt. Or, it stays more aligned with the provider’s guidelines. Or some combination of both.

If it was a 65k context window, then it might be a bigger deal. But it isn’t, so the comparison is moot.

It gets them what they want for their legal safety, but it actively harms the performance.

Pi with its 300 words system prompt outperforms Claude Code and Codex both in token usage and passing rate, when using the same model + effort configuration [1].

So yeah not only does it bloat context, but it runs worse too.

[1]: https://www.databricks.com/blog/benchmarking-coding-agents-d...

Well, no, I never have, but if I did, my first reaction would be to think I struck a nerve and had a bunch of people react, not that there was a conspiracy.

I do agree I dont think there is any larger bias other than a homogeneous group but it does question if such a group will up/down vote similar homogeneous content producing overall lower quality discussion and content.