[hbarka]

>> Same reason that "Pretend you are an MIT professor" or "You are a leading Python expert" or similar works in prompts.

This pretend-you-are-a-[persona] is cargo cult prompting at this point. The persona framing is just decoration.

A brief purpose statement describing what the skill [skill.md] does is more honest and just as effective.

[rescbr]

I think it does more harm than good on recent models. The LLM has to override its system prompt to role-play, wasting context and computing cycles instead of working on the task.

[LEDThereBeLight]

It’s not cargo culting, it does make a difference and there are papers on arxiv discussing it. The trouble is that it’s hard to tell whether it’ll help or hurt - telling it to act as an expert in one field may improve your result, or may make it lose some of the other perspectives it has which might be more important for solving the problem.