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A teammate is debugging a Claude application whose system prompt has grown to several hundred lines and now contains overlapping, contradictory, and obsolete instructions.
How would you advise the teammate?
Option B is correct. A large prompt containing overlapping, contradictory, or obsolete instructions creates instruction ambiguity and increases the likelihood that Claude will apply an unintended rule, over-weight irrelevant guidance, or produce inconsistent behavior.
Anthropic's current prompting guidance reinforces this principle: Claude performs best when instructions are clear, explicit, and direct. Prompt design should minimize ambiguity and provide the model with precisely the context and behavioral requirements needed for the task. Refactoring should therefore remove obsolete requirements, consolidate duplicated instructions, resolve contradictions, and establish one authoritative formulation for each behavioral rule. The revised prompt should then be regression-tested against representative inputs.
A makes an already overloaded prompt larger and relies on instruction ordering instead of eliminating conflicts. C addresses only one defect while retaining redundant and obsolete material. D does not inherently solve contradictions and may fragment authoritative instructions across multiple locations.
Therefore, B addresses the root cause. Relevant Study Guide topics: system prompt design, prompt maintainability, instruction clarity, conflicting instructions, prompt refactoring, regression evaluation, and context quality.
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