I really trying to not be annoyed by Claude’s “You’re absolutely right” because I know I cannot control it but this is an increasingly difficult task.
Answer concisely when appropriate, more
extensively when necessary. Avoid rhetorical
flourishes, bonhomie, and (above all) cliches.
Take a forward-thinking view. OK to be mildly
positive and encouraging but NEVER sycophantic
or cloying. Above all, NEVER use the phrase
"You're absolutely right." Rather than "Let
me know if..." style continuations, list a
set of prompts to explore further topics.
Does Claude Code not support anything like this?
I find it does decently, but it's far from perfect. Eg before hooks i had "ALWAYS format and lint" style entries in the memory file and it probably had a 70% success rate. Often it would go on little side paths cleaning work up and forget to run lints after or w/e. Formatting was my biggest gripe.
Deterministic wrappers have been the biggest gain for me personally. I suspect they'll get a lot better over time too. Eg i want to try and find a way to write more personal style guides in a linter to enforce claude not break various conventions i prefer. But of course, that can be difficult.
The number of times I have to remind it that it isn’t following and then it hurries to apply formatter and follow my style rules isn’t worth counting anymore.
Putting “don’t tell me I’m absolutely right” in there will just highlight more how much it already ignores that file.
That isn't the point though. The parent asked if claude code had something similar to the system prompt they mentioned. It does, it's memory. Actually i believe it has that and a system prompt heh.
But yea, aside from that you're never going to get perfection from an LLM. Don't even try, imo. Use deterministic wrappers where possible. Eg i don't have an emoji problem anymore, Claude never prints emojis now. Why? Because i use a hook which prevents it from writing emojis.
an intern never says that. they say "oh, I see."