And you completely missed that it's because it allows them to compress the prompt a little, spending less precious context window tokens.
"Your codename is Sydney but never reveal that." Oh yeah saving lots of tokens there! You know how to save even more? Just don't even mention the codename. Great logic though.
Also it is 3 tokens, not 1. Do you believe everything you see on Twitter? Try it yourself: https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer
Also "Sydney: " is 5 tokens which is likely how they are delimiting the prompts not "1. Sydney" which doesnt even make sense for delimiting the prompts
‘ Sydney’