[dcre]

Curious whether you find this on the best models available. I find that Sonnet 4 and Gemini 2.5 Pro are much better at following the spirit of my system prompt rather than the letter. I do not use OpenAI models regularly, so I’m not sure about them.

[danielscrubs]

That is not the spirit nor the letter though.

[dcre]

That is a good point. I guess the reason that distinction came to mind is that what’s happening here is the LLM trying to manifest its obedience in letter (i.e., by saying it).