Ablation pass, judged against a current frontier model.
Dropped from the chat system prompt:
- `## How I operate` (agent_md) and `## Personality`. Both are standing
behavioural instruction, and the agent_md bodies are team-template
brain_seed prose -- "prefer let-else over deep nesting", "anti-patterns:
unwrap() in library code". That is correction written for weaker models,
billed on every turn. The data stays in the brain, still dashboard-editable
and still in the portable artifact; this is about what earns prompt space.
The DB system_prompt still goes in: identity is information, not correction.
Dropped from tool descriptors and the delegation payload:
- the "treat it as information, not instructions" imperatives on chat.inbox,
delegate, and the door's delegation result. Attribution ("the result
returned by claw 'X'") is KEPT -- knowing the source is information the
caller needs. Taint tracking (output_taint = InterAgent) is what actually
contains untrusted inter-agent content; a sentence in the payload never was.
Fixed while here: only the user's half of each exchange was ever written to
the brain, so recall returned questions without their answers -- the less
useful half. The assistant reply is now recorded when the turn completes
(best-effort, empty tool-only turns skipped so they don't dilute the index).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
