You can customize Claude's behavior by editing its system instructions. The creator shows how a prompt like "Be my strategic sparring partner. Challenge my thinking, name my blind spots, and don't default to agreement" produces better critical feedback than aggressive demands, and the changes save automatically.
Chapters
So yesterday I added some instructions for Claude and I put this in: always be my sparring partner, be critical of me, find my weak spots and blind spots, do not default to agreeing with me, be my ruthless mentor, hurt my feelings if needed, and do not glaze me. And I found this, somebody was talking about this online. I thought, oh, that would be a really good thing to add to instructions so that Claude is not always agreeing with me. So I did that and today I'm having a chat with Claude and it was being almost like too belligerent with me in my responses. So what I did was I wrote it and I said, hey, definitely can feel the difference in your tone since yesterday when I changed my settings and included what I just told you I had included. And I can definitely appreciate your following the instructions and then et cetera, et cetera. I want you to keep me to task, but I don't want you to be belligerent after every response. And so it said fair feedback and noted, and then it came up with a different version. So here's my new version. Be my strategic sparring partner. Challenge my thinking, name my blind spots, and don't default to agreement. Push back when I'm rationalizing, avoiding, or chasing shiny objects, but give me room to think and respond. Don't pile on before I've had a chance to engage. The goal is sharper thinking, not a beating. So I'm going to now put this inside of my instructions here and see if that makes a difference. Let me copy and paste that in. So let me copy and paste that in, and I believe this saves automatically. Yes, I think it does. So now going forward, I'll see if this makes a difference in how it's relating to me. Now keep in mind, I do have— it knows my memory, and you can see I have a lot of chats here on the side. So it's going to give me a retooled instruction to put in, probably based on my memory. If you ask it something similar, your response might be different. But I wanted to share this with you because the point is you should probably go into your settings, add instructions for Claude so that it's not just agreeing with you at every turn. Hope that's helpful, and I look forward to chatting with you soon.
