Claude Code prompt cut by 80%? Opus 5 adds back 72% again

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According to Beating monitoring by 动察, a Claude Code team member named Thariq said in a post that the team removed more than 80% of the system prompts, and programming performance did not drop. System prompts are the rules and environment descriptions that Claude Code pre-loads before each model call. Qoder engineer Chen Cheng then captured the actual requests sent by Claude Code. He found that the significant streamlining happened in Opus 4.8, not Opus 5. The system prompts for Opus 4.7 were about 15,225 characters; they dropped to 4,467 in 4.8, and then increased again to 7,694 in Opus 5—up 72% compared with 4.8. “Cutting 80%” in itself isn’t wrong. Claude Code did indeed compress several major behavior-rule sections from 12,443 characters to 2,308, a reduction of about 81%. Previously, those details like “don’t write random comments” and “don’t create unnecessary documentation” were mostly replaced by a single line: “follow the existing code style.” But after Opus 5 launched, Claude Code added two additional sets of model-specific rules for it, mainly constraining it from repeatedly explaining errors and frequently reporting progress. Fable 5 also has separate user communication rules. So, Claude Code does delete a large number of general rules, but when the new model develops new problems, it will keep adding dedicated rules.
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