It seems that a lot of the Claude system prompts are there just to cover themselves from liabilities... I noticed a few prompts related to not quoting source material directly like music lyrics. This is to prevent copyright violation.
A lot of these prompts would distract Claude from what the end user asked.
In my experience working with LLMs, each prompt has a certain amount of 'intellectual capacity' and the more different questions and ideas you try to cram in a single prompt, the dumber the response, the more likely it makes mistakes.
These formatting rules and constraints are orthogonal to what the user will ask so likely highly distracting.
It's kind of like a human; if you give someone more work to complete within the same amount of time, they will do worse.
But then I'm not sure how those system prompts are used. Are they trained into Claude or are they prepended to the start of the user's own prompt? What I'm saying applies to the latter which is what I suspect is happening.
A lot of these prompts would distract Claude from what the end user asked.
In my experience working with LLMs, each prompt has a certain amount of 'intellectual capacity' and the more different questions and ideas you try to cram in a single prompt, the dumber the response, the more likely it makes mistakes.
These formatting rules and constraints are orthogonal to what the user will ask so likely highly distracting.
It's kind of like a human; if you give someone more work to complete within the same amount of time, they will do worse.
But then I'm not sure how those system prompts are used. Are they trained into Claude or are they prepended to the start of the user's own prompt? What I'm saying applies to the latter which is what I suspect is happening.