> Use shorter prompts: In internal evaluations, replacing long, explicit system prompts with minimal prompts improved scores by roughly 10–15%, while reducing total tokens by 41–66% and cost by 33–67%.
When has this ever not been the case? I don't think this is a GPT 5.6 specialty!
Information density of the prompt is the most important factor in my experience.
And interestingly, LLMs seem particularly bad at writing prompts for other LLMs for this reason (you can guide them to be more dense, just speaking by default).
Conciseness is usually a byproduct of information density though.
> LLMs seem particularly bad at writing prompts for other LLMs for this reason
Claude is terrible at this! Probably for the same reason that its writing style in prose is so annoying and full of claudisms.
Claude use to be leader, too. Their metaprompt was great at the time with opus 3
Lexical-priming->semantic-space-constraint;specialized-lexis+=sharp distributional-signature;∴ tight concept-cluster; generic-lexis->diffuse-activation, broad candidate-set;Attention-heads key/query-match domain-tokens;"Hamiltonian"->{operator,eigenstate,quantum,energy}->register+domain locked;Net:constrained-decoding,vocab=soft-prior over output-distribution; register-matching;#taskdef=decompress->continue
Information density of the interpretability of the intent from the perspective of a human (or human-like).
If the intent is not easy to understand, it's information sparse. Because it takes a lot of CPU (or brainpower) to interpret.
You can run gzip on an English sentence to make it more textually dense, but clearly it is not more information dense in this context.
Chatbot expanded this into something that made sense, but I've no idea if it's what you meant. There's an irony there somewhere.
How do you make these compressed prompts like that
There was a fad a while back of building insanely long prompts - tens of thousands of tokens - including having models write prompts for themselves. I always thought it was counterproductive, especially if you're going to use the prompt more than a couple of times. (That said, the e.g. Claude Code system prompt is insanely long, so if you genuinely have a lot of information to provide maybe it's beneficial. Like, shorter is better, but you don't want to be under-specified.)
For Gemini 2.5 and ~GPT5.0-5.1, longer prompts with lots of explicit instructions and examples produced better conformance. Seems like heavily second guessing the models started to get counter productive around the end of last year.