| > Why do I need a system prompt at all? That's like asking why you need employee onboarding. You could have Stephen Freaking Hawking and he still wouldn't know what you specifically want. > Why do I need another black box AIs to review the code of the black box AI why can’t these things get code right the first time. That's like asking why you need code reviews. Thinking about it from an antagonistic perspective is useful. You can combine it into all the "same system" if helpful. > Why is the best “coding model” in the world still making up APIs that don’t exist and do seemingly random unreleased changes that it wasn’t prompted for. Because....it still isn't perfect? > Why do these models (supposedly) keep getting “better” (on benchmarks) but continue to degrade in output quality That is disconnected from reality. |
System prompts (and user-made AGENTS.md on top of that) are simply the very didactic and direct way to provide that context to LLMs. I guess it would be more dignified from the LLM’s perspective and less weird for us to create blank agents and then to actually go through a real onboarding process.
If the question is “why these agents cannot come blank to us and not be semi-onboarded with vendor prompts, and leave all the onboarding to us...” well, that is I believe because they believe that the users will like the agents better when primed in those ways than if they were to come blank, and because the agents’ work will align better with their ideals that way.