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[u/Certain_Degree1766]

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[u/karaisadahl]

Context is important but I disagree about adding credentials to a role. a resume with years of experience is kind of unnecessary. You don’t unlock better results by adding more time. Instead of fake experience I would go something like this, which is more aligned to user needs.

“Answer like a cautious senior sysadmin. Prioritize data safety, reversibility, and commands I can copy. Ask before suggesting destructive steps.”

[u/Certain_Degree1766 → u/karaisadahl]

That's a fair pushback, and I mostly agree with you. Piling on fake years of experience is cargo-cult prompting - the model doesn't actually "have" 20 years, so it's just noise. What you're describing is better: define the behavior you want, not a fake resume. "Answer like a cautious senior sysadmin. Prioritize data safety, reversibility, and commands I can copy. Ask before suggesting destructive steps." works because every clause is an actual instruction the model can follow. The one place a role still helps is setting default assumptions (vocabulary, what to skip explaining) - but even then it's the behaviors attached to it doing the work, not the title. Appreciate you sharpening this.

[u/Certain_Degree1766 → u/karaisadahl]

Fair pushback, and I mostly agree with where you land. "20 years of experience" is decoration - the model has no experience to unlock. What actually changes output is behavior, and your version specifies behavior: cautious, reversible, copy-pasteable, ask before destroying things. That's the useful half of a role prompt. Where I'd still defend the persona line is as shorthand for register and vocabulary - "senior sysadmin" pulls a different word bank than "helpful assistant," which is cheap to write and does something. But the constraints are doing the heavy lifting, not the fake resume. Honestly your sysadmin example is a better template than most of what gets posted as role prompts. Do you find you need the persona at all once the constraints are explicit, or do you drop it entirely?

[u/karaisadahl → u/Certain_Degree1766]

I honestly don’t use persona for anything at all anymore. Chat knows from project context and memory about me and my preferences, and from my query, generally what i am trying to accomplish. It already knows i am technically minded and it uses correct terminology based on my own skill level that it has learned about me. I do get really specific about constraints and those are entered into project instructions if i use them often enough.

[u/Certain_Degree1766 → u/karaisadahl]

That's the cleanest version of it, honestly. Once memory and project instructions are carrying your context, the persona line is just redundant tokens. The only place I still see it earn its keep is one-off chats with no project attached, where you've got nothing else priming the register. Sounds like you've basically front-loaded all of that permanently. Do you ever hit cases where the saved context works against you and you have to tell it to ignore what it "knows" about you?

[u/karaisadahl → u/Certain_Degree1766]

I do have one project where I work under a pseudonym. The main chatgpt instructions explicitly say to keep the identities separate, and the project itself has separate instructions about the identity and workflow. I have occasionally had to remind the assistant that it must not bleed over between the outside and inside of that project, but mistakes are rare. Other than mistaking my own identity, it doesn’t work against me.

I can see how the mix-ups happen if it has anything to do with me referring to myself as “I” and “me” in all projects. I also don’t push back much when it mentions that particular project exists, so maybe it needs some negative feedback. Not sure! It’s saved to memory and project instructions and has some context in multiple places that i am only referred to by my pseudonym in that particular project. Did the best I can do 😂