Yeah I swapped it out a while back as an experiment to see if I could start one over from scratch and apparently just rolled with that.
Wow, it's weird reading my past self's writing within this context. I spent a month putting off the task of writing a system prompt, until we found ourselves stuck in some parking lot in the Pyrénées as my dad yelled at the Airbnb folks to ask where our apartment was, why are you moving our apartment at the last minute, wait a minute this isn't what we agreed to, etc. and I just sat back in the car writing every line I could think of adding to an eventual system prompt, on the notes app of my phone, bored out of my mind, and this is what came out of it.
I never edited it, until a few months later where I just wrote a new one up (I should do this again). I'm surprised we're similar enough that this is useful to you; it was very much meant to be bespoke. Also it was meant for Claude Sonnet 3.6 (but 3.7 came out a day later), and every time I've tried it on a GPT something felt off. I'm quite glad a lot of people seem to enjoy it and use it regularly though!
I know the dates thanks to Google Photos of course, amazingly intuitive interface for human brains to comprehend time, but also I find it useful to refer to models by their full name, e.g. when someone says "Claude did", I don't immediately know what model they're talking about, and am annoyed by the human instinct to say "ChatGPT did" when ChatGPT was never a person across time.
(Of course, nor are people; Eliezer is the only person I've seen besides myself who instinctively says 'Eliezer1998' or whatever instead of 'Eliezer'.)
And so since I don't have this problem I'll be scrolling down my notes doc and notice my past self getting all worked up by something "Claude Sonnet 3.5" did, or see references to a single conversation topic stretched over 3 months switch from Claude Opus 4.1 to Gemini 2.5 Pro to Claude Sonnet 4.5 to Claude Opus 4.5 and marvel at how fast everything is going.
> I forked Croissanthology’s spectacular system prompt. It’s not mine to share.
If anyone is curious, the prompt, as of like a few weeks ago, is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qH7yxm7JYqexYYWP7jsqce1km9PLSR5AKjVxILsRAKQ/edit?tab=t.0
I think it may've changed a bit, Lydia feel free to plaster yours anywhere
oh, awesome!
your prev one was quite different. here's what i have equipped (as of Nov '25): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R9zEudUBOgzQbAw-wm8DVxjnRuzvsSHTWgOf6eux4Kc/edit?usp=sharing
Yeah I swapped it out a while back as an experiment to see if I could start one over from scratch and apparently just rolled with that.
Wow, it's weird reading my past self's writing within this context. I spent a month putting off the task of writing a system prompt, until we found ourselves stuck in some parking lot in the Pyrénées as my dad yelled at the Airbnb folks to ask where our apartment was, why are you moving our apartment at the last minute, wait a minute this isn't what we agreed to, etc. and I just sat back in the car writing every line I could think of adding to an eventual system prompt, on the notes app of my phone, bored out of my mind, and this is what came out of it.
I never edited it, until a few months later where I just wrote a new one up (I should do this again). I'm surprised we're similar enough that this is useful to you; it was very much meant to be bespoke. Also it was meant for Claude Sonnet 3.6 (but 3.7 came out a day later), and every time I've tried it on a GPT something felt off. I'm quite glad a lot of people seem to enjoy it and use it regularly though!
I know the dates thanks to Google Photos of course, amazingly intuitive interface for human brains to comprehend time, but also I find it useful to refer to models by their full name, e.g. when someone says "Claude did", I don't immediately know what model they're talking about, and am annoyed by the human instinct to say "ChatGPT did" when ChatGPT was never a person across time.
(Of course, nor are people; Eliezer is the only person I've seen besides myself who instinctively says 'Eliezer1998' or whatever instead of 'Eliezer'.)
And so since I don't have this problem I'll be scrolling down my notes doc and notice my past self getting all worked up by something "Claude Sonnet 3.5" did, or see references to a single conversation topic stretched over 3 months switch from Claude Opus 4.1 to Gemini 2.5 Pro to Claude Sonnet 4.5 to Claude Opus 4.5 and marvel at how fast everything is going.