Comment by bobbylarrybobby
11 hours ago
I almost wonder if Claude reads that it “keeps responses focused, brief, and concise” and interprets that as built-in behavior and concludes that it doesn't need to spend additional effort enforcing it, just as it doesn't need to expend effort being “accessible via this web-based, mobile, or desktop chat interface”.
Prompts don't matter when you've heavily trained the model for verbosity (because that's what gets you the best benchmark scores).
Claude doesn't "interpret" anything. That's not how LLMs work. They are still sentence completing machines. You give input in, the model network fires the chain that produces the most likely related output. That's it.
I think you might be right, though that this would have influence on other output tokens since it is phrased as a substantive property, rather than an instruction.