alt Hacker NewsA lot of prompt engineering goes out of date quickly. Nobody nowadays goes "you are an expert software engineer. make no mistakes" lol.
As a personal anecdote, I find that a lot of big prompts and skills use up context window budget and in many cases agents will eagerly try to use a skill even if it isn't super relevant or necessary for the current task. So when I have too many skills I have to spend a bunch of time toggling the checkboxes to figure out which ones are needed for the task at hand before starting...
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> Nobody nowadays goes "you are an expert software engineer. make no mistakes"
You know what, I checked Opus 4.8's instructions to a review subagent the other day and it literally opened with
> You are a senior infrastructure/security engineer doing a thorough, adversarial code review...
I didn't say anything like that myself.
I can't find the link now, but Anthropic has a post about using either a light model call or other logic (regex etc) to dynamically decide what tools to expose per incoming request.
I've run into the same issue and I still end up manually curtailing what's exposed to the model, limiting to the task at hand, but I like the idea of another (smaller I hope) model doing 70% of the clipping instead, automagically.