in my book anything that is (I'm sure well intentioned) and injected to help the agent — but doesn't help it — is a waste of tokens

but even injected context that when I read it sounds useful can oversteer the model and make it second guess or take a more complicated route than it normally would

(you can see this when looking at traces with and without that injected context)

often harnesses also mention in their system prompt locations of markdown files that the model can consult if the model thinks they might help

that hint alone as part of the system prompt can be strong enough to make the model read in more tokens than would have been necessary

'spam' is maybe a harsh way to say it

unfortunately I don't see an easy way other than to invest time and tokens into finding out which parts of the added context (in system prompt, injected in turns etc etc) are actually helpful or harmful and when

I'm just doing the easiest thing I could think of: start from nothing or close to nothing

that seems to work better than what most harnesses are doing

turns out GPT 5.6 Sol is all you need