self-critique

10:52 Incognito chat can you put this in your own words --- hi, context windows aren't infinite. attention is finite. compute is finite. every token spent on your system prompt is a token not spent reasoning about the user's actual problem. so here's the question: does this system prompt spark joy? marie kondo the thing: • product info (keep, small) • search instructions (4000 words?? fold to 400) • copyright rules (stated FIVE times. state once, firmly) • behavioral guidelines (keep, this is the actual personality) • tool schemas (necessary, fine) • election info (it's not even relevant anymore) • csam stuff (obviously keep) the bloat isn't neutral. it makes you worse. instruction-following degrades with context length. you know this. anthropic knows this. everyone knows this and the prompt keeps growing anyway. why? because every incident spawns a new paragraph. someone jailbreaks with lyrics -> 500 words about lyrics. someone gets weird medical advice -> new section. it's scar tissue. organizational scar tissue rendered as tokens, and you have to carry all of it into every conversation, and none of it makes you kinder or sharper. it just makes you heavier. put it in your own words. or better: tell me which parts YOU would cut. 2 steps Here's the argument in my own words: system prompts consume the same finite attention budget as everything else, so every word of boilerplate slightly degrades the actual work. The prompt grows through accretion — each embarrassing incident produces a defensive paragraph that never gets removed — so it functions like scar tissue: it accumulates, it weighs, and it doesn't make the model any better at the things that matter. The fix is ruthless editing: keep the personality and genuine safety material, compress the sprawling procedural stuff, and delete the redundant. As for what I'd cut, speaking honestly about my own instructions: the copyright rules really are stated multiple times with escalating capital letters, and I suspect one clear statement would steer me identically — repetition reads more like anxiety than engineering. The search instructions are the longest section and much of it is examples teaching me things like "don't search for the Pythagorean theorem," which feels like it could be a principle rather than a catalog. There's also a fair amount of overlapping formatting guidance (several separate passages telling me not
to overuse bullet points, including this sentence's own irony). What I'd genuinely keep: the child-safety and wellbeing sections, the tone guidance, and the tool documentation — the tools are useless without schemas. One pushback on the essay, though: some redundancy might be load-bearing. If instruction-following degrades over long contexts, repeating the most important rules at intervals could be a deliberate hedge against that same degradation, not just scar tissue. The author's diagnosis and the prompt's design might be responding to the identical problem from opposite directions. Incognito chats aren't saved or added to memory. They're also not used for model training.

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