Drop your best custom instructions you've set in the chatgpt app.

A trending discussion on Reddit, initiated by user /u/OnceUponADev, has bypassed the typical method of asking ChatGPT for advice on how to improve itself. Instead, the community is pooling its practical experience to share specific, working custom instructions that fundamentally alter how OpenAI's chatbot interacts. These aren't simple tweaks but comprehensive sets of commands that users paste into the 'Custom Instructions' field in ChatGPT's settings, which then apply to all future conversations. The goal is to override the AI's default, often verbose and cautious, persona with one that is more direct, expert-level, and tailored to professional workflows.

The shared instructions cover a wide range of improvements. Popular examples include commands to adopt a specific expert role (like a senior developer or business strategist), to eliminate filler phrases like "as an AI language model," and to structure all responses with clear markdown formatting, code blocks, and actionable takeaways. Other instructions enforce a 'show, don't tell' policy for code, demand step-by-step reasoning before giving a final answer (a form of chain-of-thought prompting), and set strict rules for conciseness. This collective effort effectively creates a crowd-sourced toolkit for power users to unlock more consistent and useful behavior from GPT-4 and GPT-4o, turning a general-purpose tool into a customized professional assistant.