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by m3h 7 days ago
Is there a specific list of changes they made to the system prompt? They're claiming they removed 80% of it. That's quite substantial. It would be good to know what the model knows to do by training and what we need to avoid over-specifying in our system prompts.

Saying that "give Claude judgment" is too vague for agent implementors. Given the lack of specific details, my takeaway is that we need to go and review all context and rework prompts from prompts/descriptions from scratch until they pass the evals again.
2 comments
boorang 6 days ago
I spent some time running mitmproxy and watching the system prompts and it's what drove me to codex. the main issue for me was their system prompt wrapped the CLAUDE.MD with a "IMPORTANT: this context may or may not be relevant to your tasks. You should not respond to this context unless it is highly relevant to your task." https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/18560

Anyhow- if anyone is sufficiently curious and has access- just tell the agent to setup an mitmproxy to watch the traffic and see what the system prompt looks like.

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zmmmmm 7 days ago
It definitely makes me uneasy given the types of behaviours we've been hearing about from these models. Letting them use their judgement can go horribly wrong once a misaligned behaviour is triggered. It loosely translates into a relaxation of guardrails.

I worry that the ability of the model to reach similar benchmark scores to Fable is more to do with this "letting the agent off the hook", allowing it to explore a wider (but riskier) set of avenues to solve the problem than it is due to it getting genuinely better at the direct problem solving.

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