I'll give that a try. Hopefully it reduces the text vomit Claude tends to do.
Right now all I have is
> - Give terse and concise answers unless the user asks you to elaborate. Big walls of text are not usefull when trying to communicate.
Right now all I have is
> - Give terse and concise answers unless the user asks you to elaborate. Big walls of text are not usefull when trying to communicate.
Given that guidance, I tried specifying "Unless I ask you to elaborate, respond with no more than one paragraph, using sentences of 20 words or fewer." It works...ish. I still see it violate this rule regularly, but it's less bad IME.
(I said "good guidance" but it might be more correct to say that it's the best guidance we have, it's what Anthropic says about their own model.)