Your System Prompt Has a Shelf Life: Maintaining Prompts as Models Improve
Anthropic deleted over 80% of Claude Code system prompt for Claude 5 with no measurable loss on their coding evals. The instructions did not become wrong. The model outgrew needing them. Here is the maintenance pass that finds which of yours have expired, and why you need evals before you delete a single line.
Prompting• 13 min read
