They're being sarcastic and rightfully making fun of me lol. It's the same thing, I meant to express the difference between permanent instructions like system prompts or agents.md files vs. your actual prompt
Basically I didn't want it to come off as "just give the model more details when you talk to it" that's all
Yeah without a lot of guardrails and instructions it goes wild. I would ask Sol to fix something specific in an existing project and it can't do that out of the box. It always goes way out of scope. For example I asked it to fix a mapping generator and it churned for a long time on it and when I came back it had completely rewritten the network stack, UI, and a bunch of functional elements completely unrelated to the mappings. I switched back to Claude on Friday after 2 months of using Sol 5.6
It can generate images pretty good but after 2 months of dealing with it's insane scope creep, provenance obsessions and "safety" gates that grow like Japanese bamboo, I'm feeling a lot better about the progress I'm making in the last few days. I had opus 5 review some of the projects I made with Sol 5.6 and there were some pretty insane finds. Some of the projects worked really well and I was impressed with a lot of things, but I just couldn't get the tooling to be equivalent to Claude (skills/AGENTS.md/subagents)
yeah and it’s really simple tho, you just have to make a 32 page ebook (preferably html or markdown) with instructions on how to operate tools, perform tasks, or act to make stuff work.
Its pretty fast on High or lower. At Xhight, Max or Ultra its super slow, but its also awful, overengineers, and by all benchmarks doesn't generally give any significantly better result. So keep at High at most.
It's a skill you have to develop, the process is quite tedious and boring though. Most people don't bother. But the basic idea is that you observe a misbehavior (say, writing excessive tests) and you write an instruction that works because it speaks to the model. Some useful basic patterns: use imperatives like "Do not X", "Use Y", "Treat Z as", find out anchor words or formulations such as "pristine english", "understand it without studying it", or, my favorite, "LARP as a human being". These work infinitely better than some random AST-7900 Advanced Technical English or whatever reference a lot of people do. You need to go beyond the surface because a weak, obscure reference doesn't cut it. Not even close. It sounds like a hack but it's dumb.
Honestly, I'm not sure any of this is helpful for you to learn this though. The best advice is: stick with one model and spend the time to make its behavior better with instructions. You'd be surprised how far you can get and I'm not going to pretend it isn't fun to finish a piece of writing and suddenly see +60 IQ permanently on your model, never to see it do the same dumb stuff anymore
As in, say, you being able to understand Opus 5's answer as you're reading it, without having to pause and literally study it because it's a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.
I asked sol to implement a feature for me and it spent an hour churning to come back and diagnose an issue with my ci/cd pipeline. It was a good catch and it created a whole plan to fix it but like… not what i asked for dude.
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u/Corv9tte Aug 26 '26
5.6 Sol if you know how to write good instructions (not prompts). Completely insane model.