Your comment made me ask myself: "Then why remove it? If it really is just a system prompt, I can't imagine tech debt or maintenance are among the reasons."

My best guess is this is product strategy. A markdown file doesn't require maintenance, but a feature's surface area does. Every exposed mode is another thing to document, support, A/B test, and explain to new users who stumble across it. I'm guessing that someone decided "Study Mode isn't hitting retention metrics", and decided to kill it. As an autodidact, I loved the feature, but as a software engineer I can respect the decision.

What I'm wondering about is whether there's a security angle to this as well. Assuming exposed system prompts are a jailbreak surface, if users can infer the prompt structure, would it make certain prompt injection attacks easier? I'm not well-versed in ML security, and I'd be curious to hear from someone who is.

I think it's just that AI isn't that accurate and they've observed some backfire from teachers/students.

Re: product strategy

Honestly, it probably led to long conversations. The tokens/GPU time for one long conversation is more expensive than multiple short conversations. They’re trying to shore up their finances, and they’re moving away from the consumer market and towards enterprise, and students were probably a bad demographic to sell to.

But also, if you liked the feature, can’t you just ask chatgpt to tutor you? Does it work as well as the pre-baked Study Mode?