Holy sweet LLM, this gist is crazy. Why did they do this to themselves? I am going to try this at home, it might actually fix Claude.

Remember Sonnet 3.5 and 3.7? They were happy to throw abstraction on top of abstraction on top of abstraction. Still a lot of people have “do not over-engineer, do not design for the future” and similar stuff in their CLAUDE.md files.

So I think the system prompt just pushes it way too hard to “simple” direction. At least for some people. I was doing a small change in one of my projects today, and I was quite happy with “keep it stupid and hacky” approach there.

And in the other project I am like “NO! WORK A LOT! DO YOUR BEST! BE HAPPY TO WORK HARD!”

So it depends.