Comment by mw888
9 hours ago
In toying with VS Code or other 'agent harnesses' I'm always annoyed to find very long verbose system prompts "You are CoPilot. You are an expert. You can do anything you put your mind to..." and on and on.
The token cost is amortized for longer conversations, but I find it bothersome that there's all this implicit instruction I didn't write or am now obligated to understand.
I make a custom agent prompt with "Defer to the user." and little else.
I suspect that kind of prompt is vestigial of an early LLM marketing strategy. It wants to make the LLM seem like a trainable consciousness.