I was wondering today why Claude was rushing ahead, making decisions without asking me. Asking surfaced this snippet in the system prompt: "The user is not watching in real time and cannot answer questions."

I was a little floored because this is flat-out incorrect most of the time (for me at least) and sounds like it would encourage reckless behavior.

I get that some people want the model to behave more autonomously, but this should be something that is surfaced to the user, not casually placed in the system prompt.

IMO this is one of the worst system-prompt crimes since the "never write comments" line (that has since been removed, as far as I know).