An imported prompt arrives lecturing

I took two requests for the same task: one written on the spot, in three lines, and another copied from a template I had used before. The pasted one arrived more imposing — a character, ten rules, a list of prohibitions — and delivered less. The reason is mundane: an imported prompt was written for a conversation that knows nothing, so it spends half the text re-explaining what the machine already has in front of it. A direct request states the goal, the limit, and what counts as done, and stops talking. What repeats does not become a bigger prompt: it becomes a file.