In my experience, not too important, except that if you have extended thinking on it makes things a little slower.
Also, often you can make your system prompt shorter by just replacing phrases with shorter ones and seeing if it has the same effect, etc…
The way I do things is my first system prompt is always a long list of everything I think I want, and then after time I can prune it down and delete all my inevitable repeats.
How important is it to keep the system prompt short? I guess this would depend on the model, but does anybody have useful tips on that?
In my experience, not too important, except that if you have extended thinking on it makes things a little slower.
Also, often you can make your system prompt shorter by just replacing phrases with shorter ones and seeing if it has the same effect, etc…
The way I do things is my first system prompt is always a long list of everything I think I want, and then after time I can prune it down and delete all my inevitable repeats.