The Cost of Words

Remember: the system prompt is included in the input tokens on every API call. A 200-word system prompt in a workflow that runs 1000 times per day is 200,000 extra input tokens per day. At scale, every word costs money.

Keep your system prompt tight. Remove examples if they're not essential. Remove hedging language. Remove nice-to-haves. Keep only the rules and constraints that matter for reliable output.

A 100-word focused system prompt beats a 300-word verbose one.