I've experienced in times of gpt 3, and 3.5 that existence of any, even 1-word system message changed output drastically in the worse direction. I did not verify this behaviour with recentl models.
Since then I don't impose any system prompts on users of my tg bot. This is so unusual and wild in relation to what others do that very few actually appreciate it. I'm happy I don't need to make money for living with this project thus I and can keep it ideologically clean: user's control over system prompts, temperature, top_p, giving selection of the top barebones LLMs.
Similar for MCP/Skills/Prompts, I’m not saying they can’t/don’t help but I think you can shoot yourself in the foot very easily and spend all your time trying to maintain those things and/or try to force the agent to use your Skill/MCP. That or having your context eaten up with bad MCP/Skills.
I read a comment the other day about sometime talking about Claude Code getting dumber then they went on to explain switching would be hard due to their MCP/Skills/Skill router setup. My dude, maybe _that’s_ the problem?