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tosh • today at 5:14 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

maybe a bit counter-intuitive but:

I found that removing

  - system prompt
  - skills
  - agents.md
  - mcps
+ reducing tools to just 1 (sh)

gives better results than having 'more' of them

(e.g. look at these traces to see more vs less in action:)

https://smolenv.com/t/nested-template-includes-60636/

not saying the right context does not help

(it definitely does!, but it's not trivial to provide the right context)

Replies

bisonbear • today at 5:55 PM

This is the right direction (Anthropic removing 80% of the system prompt https://claude.com/blog/the-new-rules-of-context-engineering...)

However what I wonder how we make these decisions on what to remove. Certainly some subset of the skills / AGENTS.md / prompt / tools do actually help agent performance, the problem is in identifying those, throwing away the rest, and validating that this didn't actually hurt the agent performance

radlad • today at 5:18 PM

'better results' in terms of what though? A benchmark, or code that I would actually click "approve" on in a pull request scenario?

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