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Comment by rahidz | Hacker News Reader

For GPT at least, a lot of it is because "DO NOT ASK A CLARIFYING QUESTION OR ASK FOR CONFIRMATION" is in the system prompt. Twice.

https://github.com/Wyattwalls/system_prompts/blob/main/OpenA...

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Are these actual (leaked?) system prompts, or are they just "I asked it what its system prompt is and here's the stuff it made up:" ?

It's interesting how much focus there is on 'playing along' with any riddle or joke. This gives me some ideas for my personal context prompt to assure the LLM that I'm not trying to trick it or probe its ability to infer missing context.

Out of curiosity: when you add custom instructions client-side, does it change this behavior?

For claude at least I have been getting more assumption clarification questions after adding some custom prompts. It is still making some assumptions but asking some questions makes me feel more in control of the progress.

In terms of the behavior, technically it doesn’t override, but instead think of it as a nudge. Both system prompt and your custom prompt participates in the attention process, so the output tokens get some influence from both. Not equally but to some varying degree and chance

It does. Just put it in the custom instructions section.

Not for me, at least with CharGPT. I am slowly moving to Gemini due to ChatGPT uptime issues. I will try it with Gemini too.

It changes some behavior, but there's some things that are frustratingly difficult to override. The GPT-5 version of ChatGPT really likes to add a bunch of suggestions for next steps at the end of every message (e.g. "if you'd like, I can recommend distances where it would be better to walk to the car wash and ones where it would be better to drive, let me know what kind of car you have and how far you're comfortable walking") and really loves bringing up resolved topics repeatedly (e.g. if you followed up the car wash question with a gas station question, every message will talk about the car wash again, often confusing the topics). Custom instructions haven't been able to correct these so far for me.

So this system prompt is always there, no matter if i'm using chatgpt or azure openai with my own provisioned gpt? This explains why chatgpt is a joke for professionals where asking clarifying questions is the core of professional work.

The system prompt is there if you use a chat app like ChatGTP. The system prompt is one of the things that controls the behavior of the app.

If you use an LLM endpoint in Azure OpenAI, no system prompt is in effect unless you provide one.

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