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

51–60 of 240 posts

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

#51

Post by dd8601fn »

richardwong1 wrote: post #44

[dead]

Is this really a common problem? This stuff is way above me, but my toy agent seems to have bypassed this as a problem.

I did this in mine by only really having a few relevant tool functions in the prompt, ever. Search for a Tool Function, Execute A Tool Function, Request Authoring of a Tool Function, Request an Update to a Tool Function, Check Status of an Authoring Request.

It doesn't have to "remember" much. Any other functions are ones it already searched for and found in the tool service.

When it needs a tool it reliably searches (just natural language) against the vector db catalog of functions for a good match. If it doesn't have one, it requests one. The authoring pipeline does its thing, and eventually it has a new function to use.

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

#52

Post by [deleted] »

felixgallo wrote: post #27
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?

I mean, that's what humans have always done with our morals, ethics, and laws, so what alternative improvement do you have to make here?

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by alsetmusic »

embedding-shape wrote: post #6

> The new section includes: When a request leaves minor details unspecified, the person typically wants Claude to make a reasonable attempt now, not to be interviewed first. Uff, I've tried stuff like these in my prompts, and the results are never good, I much prefer the agent to prompt me upfront to resolve that before it "attempts" whatever it wants, kind of surprised to see that they added that

I've recently started adding something along the lines of "if you can't find or don't know something, don't assume. Ask me." It's helped cut down on me having to tell it to undo or redo things a fair amount. I also have used something like, "Other agents have made mistakes with this. You have to explain what you think we're doing so I can approve." It's kind of stupid to have to do this, but it really increases the quality of the output when you make it explain, correct mistakes, and iterate until it tells you the right outcome before it operates.

Edit: forgot "don't assume"

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

#54

Post by gausswho »

mannanj wrote: post #29

Personally, as someone who has been lucky enough to completely cure "incurable" diseases with diet, self experimentation and learning from experts who disagreed with the common societal beliefs at the time - I'm concerned that an AI model and an AI company is planting beliefs and limiting what people can and can't learn through their own will and agency. My concern is these models revert all medical, scientific and p…

While I share your concern for a winners-take-all model getting bent, I do have an optimism that models we've never heard of plug away challenging conclusions in medical canon. We will have a popular vaccine denying AND vaccine authoring models.

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

#55

Post by ricardobeat »

cfcf14 wrote: post #4

I'm curious as to why 4.7 seems obsessed with avoiding any actions that could help the user create or enhance malware. The system prompts seem similar on the matter, so I wonder if this is an early attempt by Anthropic to use steering vector injection? The malware paranoia is so strong that my company has had to temporarily block use of 4.7 on our IDE of choice, as the model was behaving in a concerningly unaligned w…

Presumably because it has become extremely good at writing software, and if it succeeds at helping someone spread malware, especially one that could use Claude itself (via local user's plans) to self-modify and "stay alive", it would be nearly impossible to put back in the bottle.

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

#56

Post by gck1 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #6

> The new section includes: When a request leaves minor details unspecified, the person typically wants Claude to make a reasonable attempt now, not to be interviewed first. Uff, I've tried stuff like these in my prompts, and the results are never good, I much prefer the agent to prompt me upfront to resolve that before it "attempts" whatever it wants, kind of surprised to see that they added that

I even have a specific, non-negotiable phase in the process where model MUST interview me, and create an interview file with everything captured. Plan file it produces must always include this file as an artifact and interview takes the highest precedence.

Otherwise, the intent gets lost somewhere in the chat transcript.

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

#57

Post by gck1 »

gausswho wrote: post #32
naasking wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, when you're conversing with a person would you prefer they start rambling on their own interpretation or would you prefer they ask you to clarify? The latter seems pretty natural and obvious. Edit: That said, it's entirely possible that large and sophisticated LLMs can invent some pretty bizarre but technically possible interpretations, so maybe this is to curb that tendency.

Socrates would agree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method

I have a fun little agent in my tmux agent orchestration system - Socratic agent that has no access to codebase, can't read any files, can only send/receive messages to/from the controlling agent and can only ask questions.

When I task my primary agent with anything, it has to launch the Socratic agent, give it an overview of what are we working on, what our goals are and what it plans to do.

This works better than any thinking tokens for me so far. It usually gets the model to write almost perfectly balanced plan that is neither over, nor under engineered.

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

#58

Post by ignoramous »

embedding-shape wrote: post #6

> The new section includes: When a request leaves minor details unspecified, the person typically wants Claude to make a reasonable attempt now, not to be interviewed first. Uff, I've tried stuff like these in my prompts, and the results are never good, I much prefer the agent to prompt me upfront to resolve that before it "attempts" whatever it wants, kind of surprised to see that they added that

> I've tried stuff like these in my prompts, and the results are never good

I've found that Google AI Mode & Gemini are pretty good at "figuring it out". My queries are oft times just keywords.

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

#59

Post by echelon »

WarmWash wrote: post #41
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?

When you are worth hundreds of billions, people start falling over themselves running to file lawsuits against you. We're already seeing this happen. So spending $50M to fund a team to weed out "food for crazies" becomes a no-brainer.

It's so shameful.

We let people buy kitchen knives. But because the kitchen knife companies don't have billions of dollars, we don't go after them.

We go after the LLM that might have given someone bad diet advice or made them feel sad.

Nevermind the huge marketing budget spent on making people feel inadequate, ugly, old, etc. That does way more harm than tricking an LLM into telling you you can cook with glue.

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

#60

Post by echelon »

rzmmm wrote: post #48
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?

The alignment favors supporting healthy behaviors so it can be a thin line. I see the system prompt as "plan B" when they can't achieve good results in the training itself. It's a particularly sensitive issue so they are just probably being cautious.

I want a hyperscaler LLM I can fine tune and neuter. Not a platform or product. Raw weights hooked up to pure tools.

This era of locked hyperscaler dominance needs to end.

If a third tier LLM company made their weights available and they were within 80% of Opus, and they forced you to use their platform to deploy or license if you ran elsewhere, I'd be fine with that. As long as you can access and download the full raw weights and lobotomize as you see fit.

Post reply on HN