Your AI agent has a system prompt. It’s a few paragraphs of text you set in the configuration. Usually it describes how the AI should behave specifically with you. What to do, what not to do, what matters to you, what to keep in mind in its work — and so on.
This prompt is taken into account on every request. Even when you type “hi, how’s it going?”, the model receives the entire system prompt along with that request. Every single time.
But this isn’t a post about how to configure your agent. This is a post about you. And about me.
Your personal — “non_artificial” — intelligence has a system prompt too. And it has a trained model too. And it, too, has billions of parameters.
My whole life is reinforcement learning. Watched a film, read a book — the model’s weights shifted a little. Talked to someone — the model got fine-tuned. Any feedback from the universe nudges the weights a little. Not all of them. And usually not by much.
Just as with large language models, I can’t read my entire model and fully grasp how it works. That’s a property of emergent systems.
In childhood the model is small and runs on default weights. Learning happens at lightning speed. A single input can flip half of all the weights. Childhood traumas? Right this way.
With age the model gets bigger. The cost of fine-tuning rises. To change something seriously, you need either a great deal of time or a very strong impact. A strong impact over a short stretch of time is what we usually call a “crisis.”
Who is training your model — and mine?
Any signal dissolves into the weights of your latent space. The whole cultural background around us. Every series we watch. Every YouTube clip. All the music. All the poems.
Speaking of poems.
For a language model, poetry is a very important modality. Poetry works not only on the semantic field but on the very structure of the model itself. Brodsky put it well:
There are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished for.
Verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of consciousness, of thinking, of comprehending the universe.
On top of that, poetry is the oldest memory technology: meter and rhyme are redundancy plus constraint. Through them, an error-correcting code is built into a poem. It’s no accident that preliterate cultures stored their laws, genealogies, and cosmology in verse — so that the text could repair itself in transmission.
And it isn’t only Brodsky, Dante, or Kipling who use this. Advertising rhymes and rhythms have lodged themselves in my head forever. “I’m lovin’ it…”, “The holidays are coming…”, “Have a break, have a Kit Kat…” — and they settle into the weights of our model for good. Perfect examples of a hack on the fine-tuning system.
And no, you can’t erase it. Nothing can be erased from the model at all — you can only lower the weight of individual elements. But they’re still there. And you know it.
And yes — the weight of individual parameters can be raised. That’s exactly why, to recalibrate the weights, I rewatch films that matter to me or reread books that matter. It’s important to me that they keep carrying weight in my model.
So what about the system prompt?
It isn’t the model. It’s a set of clear instructions that are always in force. And there can’t be many of them. A technical limitation.
Any poem you read sinks into the weights. But the few you’ve learned by heart are promoted to the rank of system prompt: the only text that’s always loaded, instead of being fetched from unreliable memory on request.
That’s why I memorize poems. Only a few. Technical limitations, after all. But I make sure the most important things stay in my personal system prompt. Because it shapes everything else — even when some weights in the model have started to go stale.
An AI can’t rewrite its own system prompt. It can read it, it can discuss it with you. But it can’t fix it on its own — not without you. You can. That’s the difference. That’s your power.
What’s in your system prompt?