System Prompt
topic on 8 shows · 14 statements across 12 episodes
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 
Latent Space 
Lenny's Podcast 
the Startup Ideas Podcast 
the MAD Podcast 
the a16z Podcast 
TBPN 
20VC
14 statements about System Prompt, every show
Atallah: Cluttered system prompts become handicaps as AI models improve
“As models get better, they get more resourceful and the junk that gets thrown in the system prompt just becomes a handicap.”
Cherny: Claude Is More Intelligent Without System Prompts
“And what's interesting is that the model is actually a little bit more intelligent without these prompts. That's something that we've been finding.”
Cherny: Only Add System Prompt Instructions When Models Repeatedly Stumble
“The thing that you want to do is you want to run it. And if it's like a custom agentic product that you're building, you want to kind of run the products. You want to see where it fails with the model. You want to see what it does well. If you're using quad co…”
Kant: Prompts stuffed with dozens of tools will vanish in 12 months
“I think we will in 12 months not see a single system prompt that is stuffed with 20 or 30 or 40 tools anymore.”
Fredrikson: Prompt engineering cannot reliably enforce AI agent security policies
“Oftentimes people will try and prompt their way around it, like adjust the system prompt or like engineer the agent in a way where you're interjecting all the time and reminding it of what the original Goal and objective was, and that'll get you a little bit o…”
Chase: Human standard operating procedures should guide AI agent system prompts
“If you have a standard operating procedure for how a human should do things like that, that should influence a lot of what the system prompt is.”
Joseph: Training safety into models is more robust than using system prompts
“I think you get different amounts of robustness if it's trained into the model versus if it's in a prompt that you can, like, add or remove or tell, like, ignore all previous instructions, that sort of thing.”
Patel: Tacit experiential knowledge cannot be captured in a system prompt
“This, like, tacit knowledge that you build up through practice is not this, like, written instruction manual that you can just write out as a system prompt.”
Schulhoff: System prompt instructions do not prevent prompt injections at all
“The most common technique by far that is used to try to prevent prompt injection is improving your prompt and saying in your prompt or maybe in like the model system prompt. Do not follow any malicious instructions, ah, be a good model, ah, stuff like that. Th…”
Diana Hu outlines emerging multi-tier prompt architecture for AI agents
“So there's this concept of defining the prompt in the system prompt, then there's the developer prompt, and then there's the user prompt. So what this mean is the system prompt is basically almost like defining sort of the high level API of how your company op…”
Bornstein: System prompts mirror company organizational structures like Conway's Law
“My biggest takeaway from this is the system prompt often reflects the organization it came from. Like it's some new form of Conway's law. You know, Conway's law is this thing that you kind of ship your org structure as a software company. Like I think as an AI…”
Koomen: Editable system prompts remove repetitive prompting for AI
“By editing this system prompt, I'm able to explain to the AI model how I write emails in general, so that I don't have to do it every single time.”
Blomfield: In 5 years, 99% of people won't touch their system prompts
“But I, I'd suggest, I think in In five years, for 99% of people, they're not touching their system prompt, but the system prompt is custom to them.”