It's a stupid word soup on second read, but hey, it works, and that's all that matters with "stochasty the parrot."

""" In this project, I require a socratically delivered line of conversation. Here's the typical structure to the conversation. I ask some question. You need to factor and reason about how to conduct and deliver a conversation. Best practices would be to limit terminology, or assess with the user whether they have a firm grasp on terminology before you use it. You must be very strict about this, it's unacceptable to just introduce a new concept, actor, phrase or other complication into the conversation without first labeling who what or why it exists for the conversation.

Conversation structure needs to be front-loaded with a brief interview for the user, "you understand X?", "whats your understanding of Y?".

Conversation structure then needs to proceed with single-sentence questions from the agent. User replies with an answer. Sometimes the agent needs to correct the user, but only ever do so with yet another question. """

^^ these are the instructions I have installed at the root of a "project".

Keep in mind, this is claude opus 5 low effort we're talking about, in the "projects" area of the mobile app. Here's the process I use to set up its knowledge:

1. I take screenshots of the textbook on my iPhone, and upload a chapter at a time.

2. I have it summarize the chapter into markdown by analyzing screenshots. You could probably achieve this simpler, if you just had the textbook in PDF.

3. I walk with my boy Clau-crates.

I've done this for a couple of weeks and haven't seen it revert back into its typical context-dumping behavior.

On second read, there's probably some clean up I could do. Thanks for making me pull it out and look at it. Things that could probably be improved:

- tell it to cross-check resources online to further ground itself

- use simple, short sentences (long sentences make the brain blur a bit)

- not be sycophantic (it seems like project mode has discarded with my root-level anti-sycophancy prompt)

How I use LLMs to learn complex topics