Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 240 posts

Re: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

#151

Post by ChadNauseam »

nozzlegear wrote: post #142
ChadNauseam wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get cancer from drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes or breathing particles emitted by ICE engines in their standard course of operation, you generally can't sue the manufacturer.

Notably, that's because they include warning labels telling you not to do those things because they're known to cause cancer.

That's just not true. Makes me wondered if you've ever bought a bottle of alcohol before lol. There's no label that says it causes cancer. (Maybe in california because of prop 65?) And I expect cars also have no such labelling, not that it would matter, considering they cause cancer in random passers by who have no opportunity to consent to breathing in auto exhaust or read any labels

Re: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

#152

Post by [deleted] »

slashdave wrote: post #120
ceejayoz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> edit: to be fair Anthropic should be giving money back for sessions terminated this way. I asked it for one and it told me to file a Github issue. Which I interpreted as "fuck off".

You asked the agent directly for a refund?

[deleted]

Re: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

#153

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #79
walthamstow wrote: post #24

The eating disorder section is kind of crazy. Are we going to incrementally add sections for every 'bad' human behaviour as time goes on?

That part of the system prompt is just stating that telling someone who has an actual eating disorder to start counting calories or micro-manage their eating in other ways (a suggestion that the model might well give to an average person for the sake of clear argument, which would then be understood sensibly and taken with a grain of salt) is likely to make them worse off, not better off. This seems like a common-sen…

> This seems like a common-sense addition.

Mm, yes. Let's add mitigation for every possible psychological disorder under the sun to my Python coding context. Very common-sense.

Re: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

#154

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

MoltenMan wrote: post #88
zozbot234 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That part of the system prompt is just stating that telling someone who has an actual eating disorder to start counting calories or micro-manage their eating in other ways (a suggestion that the model might well give to an average person for the sake of clear argument, which would then be understood sensibly and taken with a grain of salt) is likely to make them worse off, not better off. This seems like a common-sen…

The problem is that this is an incredibly niche / small issue (i.e. At some point you just have to accept that llm's, like people, make mistakes, and that's ok!

People think these LLM's are anthropomorphic magic boxes.

It will take years until the understanding sets in that they're just calculators for text and you're not praying to a magic oracle, you're just putting tokens into a context window to add bias to statistical weights.

Re: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

#157

Post by ehnto »

zmmmmm wrote: post #107
mwexler wrote: post #45

Interesting that it's not a direct "you should" but an omniscient 3rd person perspective "Claude should". Also full of "can" and "should" phrases: feels both passive and subjunctive as wishes, vs strict commands (I guess these are better termed “modals”, but not an expert)

Yes I was interested in that too. It suggests that in writing our own guidance for we should follow a similar style, but I rarely if ever see people doing that. Most people still stick to "You" or abstract voice "There is ..." "Never do ..." etc. It must be that they are training very deeply the sense of identity in to the model as Claude. Which makes me wonder how it then works when it is asked to assume a different…

I almost exclusively use the royal We. "We are working on a new feature and we need it to meet these requirements...", "it looks like we missed a bug, let's take another look at.."

I also talk this way with people because I feel it makes it clear we're collaborating and fault doesn't really matter. I feel it lets junior memberstake more ownership of the successes as well. If we ever get juniors again.

Re: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

#158

Post by xvector »

varispeed wrote: post #7

Before Opus 4.7, the 4.6 became very much unusable as it has been flagging normal data analysis scripts it wrote itself as cyber security risk. Got several sessions blocked and was unable to finish research with it and had to switch to GPT-5.4 which has its own problems, but at least is not eager to interfere in legitimate work. edit: to be fair Anthropic should be giving money back for sessions terminated this way.

Pretty sure that was a bug, I had the same issue but updating fixed it

Re: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

#159

Post by nwienert »

xvector wrote: post #156
Grimblewald wrote: post #106

I miss 4.5. It was gold.

Rose tinted glasses

4.5 was clearly better than .6 and .7. Like, clear as day.

.6 is some sort of quantized or distilled .5 with a bit more RL, and the current .5 is that same cost reduced model without the extra RL.

Re: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

#160

Post by xpct »

stingraycharles wrote: post #133
j-bos wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Sprawling system prompts like that are building for the least common denominator, nerfing for anyone or anytime going further.

You do realize that similar biases are also present in the training data?

Sure, but now we have to remodel whatever bias we want for our use case with every new release because the system prompt changes, whereas the underlying data does not.
Post reply on HN