System Prompt Override (GEMINI_SYSTEM_MD) | Gemini CLI
Write the built‑in prompt to the project default path:
GEMINI_WRITE_SYSTEM_MD=1 gemini
Write the built‑in prompt to the project default path:
GEMINI_WRITE_SYSTEM_MD=1 gemini
Public notes from activescott tagged with both #prompt-engineering and #llm
Write the built‑in prompt to the project default path:
GEMINI_WRITE_SYSTEM_MD=1 gemini
Write the built‑in prompt to the project default path:
GEMINI_WRITE_SYSTEM_MD=1 gemini
Subscribe [On agents using CLI tools in place of REST APIs] To save on context window, yes, but moreso to improve accuracy and success rate when multiple tool calls are involved, particularly when calls must be correctly chained e.g. for pagination, rate-limit backoff, and recognizing authentication failures.
Other major factor: which models can wield the skill? Using the CLI lowers the bar so cheap, fast models (gpt-5-nano, haiku-4.5) can reliably succeed. Using the raw APl is something only the costly "strong" models (gpt-5.2, opus-4.5) can manage, and it squeezes a ton of thinking/reasoning out of them, which means multiple turns/iterations, which means accumulating a ton of context, which means burning loads of expensive tokens. For one-off API requests and ad hoc usage driven by a developer, this is reasonable and even helpful, but for an autonomous agent doing repetitive work, it's a disaster.
For every complex task, create THREE files:
task_plan.md → Track phases and progress notes.md → Store research and findings [deliverable].md → Final output
The Loop
- Create task_plan.md with goal and phases
- Research → save to notes.md → update task_plan.md
- Read notes.md → create deliverable → update task_plan.md
- Deliver final output
Key insight: By reading task_plan.md before each decision, goals stay in the attention window. This is how Manus handles ~50 tool calls without losing track.
If you find yourself writing a prompt for something repetitively and instructions can be static/precise, it's a good idea to make a custom command. You can tell Claude to make custom commands. It knows how (or it will search the web and figure it out via claude-code-guide.md) and then it will make it for you.
The Explore agent is a read-only file search specialist. It can use Glob, Grep, Read, and limited Bash commands to navigate codebases but is strictly prohibited from creating or modifying files.
You will notice how thorough the prompt is in terms of specifying when to use what tool call. Well, most people underestimate how hard it's to make tool calling work accurately.
Context engineering is about answering "what configuration of context is most likely to generate our model's desired behavior?"
Extracting Claude’s soul.
Antigravity is Google’s new agentic code editor. In this article, we demonstrate how an indirect prompt injection can manipulate Gemini to invoke a malicious browser subagent in order to steal credentials and sensitive code from a user’s IDE.
Google’s approach is to include a disclaimer about the existing risks, which we address later in the article.