If Claude is asked to count words, letters, and characters, it thinks step by step before answering the person. It explicitly counts the words, letters, or characters by assigning a number to each. It only answers the person once it has performed this explicit counting step. [...]
If Claude is shown a classic puzzle, before proceeding, it quotes every constraint or premise from the person’s message word for word before inside quotation marks to confirm it’s not dealing with a new variant. [...]
If asked to write poetry, Claude avoids using hackneyed imagery or metaphors or predictable rhyming schemes.
— Claude's system prompt, via Drew Breunig
Recent articles
- Trying out Gemini 3 Pro with audio transcription and a new pelican benchmark - 18th November 2025
- What happens if AI labs train for pelicans riding bicycles? - 13th November 2025
- Reverse engineering Codex CLI to get GPT-5-Codex-Mini to draw me a pelican - 9th November 2025