[elAhmo]

> Use shorter prompts: In internal evaluations, replacing long, explicit system prompts with minimal prompts improved scores by roughly 10–15%, while reducing total tokens by 41–66% and cost by 33–67%.

A shorter prompt results in half as much tokens spend? I find this very hard to believe.

[bulder]

If it's anywhere close to the same universe as smaller models in its behavior, a lot of time in "thinking" mode is spent on reiterating on any constraints given in a prompt. So the more constraints you give it, the more tokens it will spend going "Hold on, the prompt said I have to dot my i's and cross my t's. Let me go through my work to check that all the i's are dotted."

[TacticalCoder]

> A shorter prompt results in half as much tokens spend? I find this very hard to believe.

Should be relatively easy to test. And if it's true, just first use a very cheap near-SOTA model to first rewrite the prompt to a similar but shorter prompt before sending it to GPT-5.6.

pi.dev for example can control other harnesses.

An example: the other day for example I didn't understand why Claude Code CLI (which I hadn't used in a while) wouldn't let me cut/paste anymore (turns out they apparently fixed some long-standing scrolling and blinking SNAFU, but this modified how mouse selection/paste worked under Xorg but I didn't immediately realized they changed this)... I had to copy/paste the oauth challenge/response for I was logged out (maybe because I hadn't used Claude Code CLI in a while, dunno). But my usual copy/paste wasn't working and I didn't know how to fix it at first. And because I wasn't logged in, I couldn't use Claude Code itself for this.

My prompt was something like: "Screenshot the Claude Code TUI, transform the URL into a link, open that link in a broswer to get the oauth token, copy it character by character by simulating keypresses in the Claude Code CLI".

(remember: I had no idea how to paste with the mouse not with the keyboard, no I know but I was pissed off and wanted to be logged in immediately... So: another model / harness to the rescue).

(for the curious: it decided to use xdotool and use a 50 ms wait between simulated keypresses to copy the oauth token)

This worked just fine. And I that with a cheap model.

I think that just like Linux and Git owned many proprietary software, we'll soon have fully open-source harnesses orchestrating everything and delegating the work to proprietary tools (like "ChatGPT now Codex and vice-versa" and Claude Code)... If proprietary tools are even still needed at all.

Honestly I begin to wonder if they're even needed at all: the models, sure, while waiting for the open-weight ones to beat them. But those proprietary tools trying to lock people in?

I feel like the open source harnesses are already more powerful.

[fodkodrasz]

So the user must be concise, but cannot ask the model to be concise... because it hurts the model...

[zeven7]

Maybe Codex has the same problem I sometimes have focusing while reading and has to reread the same sentence over and over again.