3 ms·

> Maybe I'm fighting the model here > And no, telling it not to do this does not stick. You're fighting the model, don't argue with city hall. Set the standard

> Maybe I'm fighting the model here > And no, telling it not to do this does not stick. You're fighting the model, don't argue with city hall. Set the standards and let it figure out how to execute, stop getting bogged down in the minutia. I try, as much as I can, to treat the session as a black box - only the inputs and outputs matter, internal prompting of subagents is way out of scope. You can't change it via prompt, and you can't control the guardrails, so something else has to give - either your perspective or the system you're managing. If you really believe that the internal prompting is bad, turn off subagents and workflows and only let it execute in thread. But if you're going to do that, you'd better benchmark it against not doing that, because historically fighting the harness and model globally makes everything worse. I would bet you that the subagent prompting is excellent, and anything you do to change it will make it worse, but I wouldn't make it a large bet.

user43928 2mo ago
I think he has a point. I noticed the same with skills that invoke another agent harness. I just have a skill to review the changes in the current worktree. By default, it will put lots of instructions about locating the changes into the prompt, like explaining how to use git diff. These instructions are obviously unnecessary. I can believe that the same issue of needlessly verbose prompts might exist with subagent spawning. I would not go to customize that one however. With skills, it is a more natural fix.
- drdec 2mo ago
  IMHO, the verbosity is an attempt to make the results more deterministic. The more specific the prompt, the less wiggle room.
- jaggederest 2mo ago
  Remember, it's not just about the model "knowing" something. It's about the frame of mind it's in, if I may extend a metaphor. Including git diff in the prompt doesn't just teach it about git diff, it makes it more likely to use it. A lot of this is obsolete with newer models, but funnily enough, the newer models don't know that - their theory of mind is at least partially obsolete in itself, so they continue to do the old "you are a software architect, don't make mistakes" prompt style.
adrian17 2mo ago
If I ask a model to do a change involving editing a file, and it starts investigating internals of my build system, then sure it might not be counterproductive or break the task, and might have taken only extra 30 seconds; but for all I know, my quick rejection of a shell invocation (with a simple "irrelevant to the task" comment) might have just saved me half of today's Opus tokens, which already makes it worth it.

user43928 2mo ago

I think he has a point. I noticed the same with skills that invoke another agent harness. I just have a skill to review the changes in the current worktree. By default, it will put lots of instructions about locating the changes into the prompt, like explaining how to use git diff. These instructions are obviously unnecessary. I can believe that the same issue of needlessly verbose prompts might exist with subagent spawning. I would not go to customize that one however. With skills, it is a more natural fix.

drdec 2mo ago
IMHO, the verbosity is an attempt to make the results more deterministic. The more specific the prompt, the less wiggle room.
jaggederest 2mo ago
Remember, it's not just about the model "knowing" something. It's about the frame of mind it's in, if I may extend a metaphor. Including git diff in the prompt doesn't just teach it about git diff, it makes it more likely to use it. A lot of this is obsolete with newer models, but funnily enough, the newer models don't know that - their theory of mind is at least partially obsolete in itself, so they continue to do the old "you are a software architect, don't make mistakes" prompt style.

adrian17 2mo ago

If I ask a model to do a change involving editing a file, and it starts investigating internals of my build system, then sure it might not be counterproductive or break the task, and might have taken only extra 30 seconds; but for all I know, my quick rejection of a shell invocation (with a simple "irrelevant to the task" comment) might have just saved me half of today's Opus tokens, which already makes it worth it.