In addition to having long system prompts, you also need to provide agents with the right composable tools to make it work. I’m having reasonable success with these seven tools: read, write, diff, browse, command, ask, think. There is a minimal template here if anyone finds it useful: https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami
This is really cool, thanks for sharing. uv with PEP 723 inline dependencies is such a nice way to work, isn’t it. Combined with VS Code’s ‘# %%’-demarcated notebook cells in .py files, and debugpy (with a suitable launch.json config) for debugging from the command line, Python dev finally feels really ergonomic these last few months.
Claude's system prompt is over 24k tokens with tools
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Re: Claude's system prompt is over 24k tokens with tools
#82I somehow feel cheated seeing explicit instructions on what to do per language, per library. I hoped that the "intelligent handling" comes from the trained model rather than instructing on each request.
I'm the opposite - I look at how long that prompt is and I'm amazed that the LLM 'understands' it and that it works so well at modifying it's behaviour.
Having one massive model that you tell what you want with a whole handbook up front actually feels more impressive. Though I suppose it's essentially doing the submodels thing implicitly internally.
Re: Claude's system prompt is over 24k tokens with tools
#83In addition to having long system prompts, you also need to provide agents with the right composable tools to make it work. I’m having reasonable success with these seven tools: read, write, diff, browse, command, ask, think. There is a minimal template here if anyone finds it useful: https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami
Maybe you could ask one of the agents to write some documentation?
Re: Claude's system prompt is over 24k tokens with tools
#84Re: Claude's system prompt is over 24k tokens with tools
#85I'm far from an LLM expert but it seems like an awful waste of power to burn through this many tokens with every single request. Can't the state of the model be cached post-prompt somehow? Or baked right into the model?
Yes prompt caching is already a widely used technique. https://www.anthropic.com/news/prompt-caching
Re: Claude's system prompt is over 24k tokens with tools
#86I would love to know if there are benchmarks that show how much these prompts improve the responses.
I'd suggest trying: "Be careful not to hallucinate." :-)
Re: Claude's system prompt is over 24k tokens with tools
#87> "...and in general be careful when working with headers" I would love to know if there are benchmarks that show how much these prompts improve the responses. I'd suggest trying: "Be careful not to hallucinate." :-)
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...
Re: Claude's system prompt is over 24k tokens with tools
#88> "...and in general be careful when working with headers" I would love to know if there are benchmarks that show how much these prompts improve the responses. I'd suggest trying: "Be careful not to hallucinate." :-)
You can prompt an llm not to hallucinate, but typically you wouldn't say "don't hallucinate, you'd ask it to give a null value or say i don't know" which more closely aligns with the models training.
Re: Claude's system prompt is over 24k tokens with tools
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like it's token caching, not model caching.
That’s what this is. It’s caching the state of the model after the tokens have been loaded. Reduces latency and cost dramatically. 5m TTL on the cache usually.
Re: Claude's system prompt is over 24k tokens with tools
#90All kidding aside, with that many tokens, you introduce more flaws and attack surface. I’m not sure why they think that will work out.