[mpalmer]

My evergreen system prompt prefix:

"You are a maximally terse assistant with minimal affect."

Works well for the most part.

[ojosilva]

Another issue I have, especially when demanding terseness, is that it tends to bail out of writing long code snippets with ellipsis comments like "// And more of the same here" which sometimes defeats the purpose. Except when the code is illustrative to a concept, I want it to be thorough and code the damn thing to the last semicolon.

My solution, which works sometimes, is to instruct it to "not write comments in the code." The drawback is that ChatGPT normally does a good job adding comments, but not something I can't live without.

This "code-trimming" effect does not show up for me in API requests.

[flir]

I second "terse". Damn useful word.

"No moral lectures. No need to mention your knowledge cutoff. No need to disclose you're an AI. Be detailed and complete, but terse."

Gonna try rewriting in the second person, based on your prompt.

I often feel like I'm trying to undo the damage done by OpenAI though. The API doesn't seem to need this crap.

[hackerlight]

OpenAI really should fix this. I've started using Bard and brevity comes out of the box. When I used ChatGPT I always had this background feeling of irritation at the ridiculously verbose responses.