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Ask HN: What ChatGPT custom instructions have worked for you?

6 points by kingkongjaffa ↗ HN
it has been a while since https://openai.com/blog/custom-instructions-for-chatgpt was released, now that the community has had time to play around with this feature, what are some custom instructions that have yielded useful results for you?

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paradite
After some initial trial and error, I've came up with a pretty good custom instruction that has been working well for over a year (for both ChatGPT and Claude):

  Instructions for the output format:
  - Output code without descriptions, unless it is important.
  - Minimize prose, comments and empty lines.
  - Only show the relevant code that needs to be modified. Use comments to represent the parts that are not modified.
  - Make it easy to copy and paste.
  - Consider other possibilities to achieve the result, do not be limited by the prompt.
It is worth noting that ChatGPT will use the same custom instruction for all chats, even if it is not related.

Sometimes it will mess up other conversations. Even if the conversation is not coding related, ChatGPT will still respond with code.

So I built a dedicated tool to help me solve this problem and streamline the ChatGPT coding workflow: https://prompt.16x.engineer/