[xlbuttplug2]

My probably incorrect, uninformed hunch is that users convinced of how AI should act actually end up nerfing its capabilities with their prompts. Essentially dumbing it down to their level, losing out on the wisdom it's gained through training.

[podgorniy]

I am with you on this one.

I've experienced in times of gpt 3, and 3.5 that existence of any, even 1-word system message changed output drastically in the worse direction. I did not verify this behaviour with recentl models.

Since then I don't impose any system prompts on users of my tg bot. This is so unusual and wild in relation to what others do that very few actually appreciate it. I'm happy I don't need to make money for living with this project thus I and can keep it ideologically clean: user's control over system prompts, temperature, top_p, giving selection of the top barebones LLMs.

[joshstrange]

I often wonder this as well, things are moving so quickly that unless you want to keep chasing the next best prompt/etc then you are better running as close to vanilla as you can IMHO.

Similar for MCP/Skills/Prompts, I’m not saying they can’t/don’t help but I think you can shoot yourself in the foot very easily and spend all your time trying to maintain those things and/or try to force the agent to use your Skill/MCP. That or having your context eaten up with bad MCP/Skills.

I read a comment the other day about sometime talking about Claude Code getting dumber then they went on to explain switching would be hard due to their MCP/Skills/Skill router setup. My dude, maybe _that’s_ the problem?