system prompt
The instructions sitting above the conversation that set the model's role and constraints. You usually do not see it; the tool writes it, and your rules get appended to it.
Where it comes up
Cursor x Slack
“reported uh paper cuts in Slack?" And um if we could build a consistent pattern for how we want to report this, would this meaningfully improve agent output? And so, we built a skill, and then from that skill sort of markdown file, uh we ba…”
Cursor 101
“shipped this recently, you can see what makes up that context. So a very small amount to system prompt and a lot more to the conversation here. So, as the chat goes longer and longer, the context window is going to fold and the majority of…”
Cursor 201
“>> Okay, so the yeah, so the piece you're seeing here and this is this is relatively new that we're we're kind of breaking it breaking it down this way. I mean it's just into the into the categories like the system prompt hopefully is alway…”
Cursor 201
“Style guidelines. Um, and rules compared to um, uh, just markdown files uh, that you have in your code around certain documentation is that rules are um, always uh, injected into the system prompt. Uh, you can also specify them uh, only whe…”
Cursor for Java Developers
“you can say um a channel name of XYZ and then you can go ahead and kick that off in This spins up a brand new uh VM that has all your um all your information of what your GitHub repository look like. Uh it has all the system prompt that you…”
Refactoring Legacy Codebases
“It's instructions, so like a system prompt. That's tools. So, you have first party tools, uh, which are things like editing files, searching your codebase, running shell commands. Then you also have third party tools. Those are MCP servers…”
Training Composer 2
“Uh but I certainly could see in the future we would add that. And then think some questions about overall team structure and how we do stuff. Who owns the agent harness? Is this driven by the product team or the research team? And similar w…”