"Be concise" is the same underspecified trap as "act as a senior developer," just smaller
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The instruction "be concise" is often underspecified, leading to outputs that are short but lack essential details or retain filler. A user found that initial attempts to instruct a model to "be concise" or "keep it under 100 words" resulted in dense text or the omission of crucial information. The effective solution was to provide a specific rule: "state the conclusion first, then only include reasoning that would change the conclusion if removed." This approach highlights that vague instructions like "be concise" or "act as a senior developer" require clear, actionable rules to achieve desired outcomes.
Kept telling a model to "be concise" and kept getting output that was short but still somehow missed the point, cutting detail that mattered while keeping filler that didn't. Took three rounds of adjusting the instruction to actually get what I wanted.
First attempt: "be concise." Model's idea of concise turned out to mean shorter sentences, not less information, so the output was dense and harder to parse, not actually more useful. Second attempt: "keep it under 100 words." Better, but now it was cutting the wrong things to hit the number, sometimes losing the one detail that mattered to stay under the limit. Third attempt: "state the conclusion first, then only include reasoning that would change the conclusion if removed." That one actually worked, because it stopped being a length instruction and became a rule for what qualifies as necessary.
"Concise" is a persona-shaped word the same way "senior developer" is. It names an outcome without specifying the actual decision rule that produces it, so the model has to guess what "concise" means for this specific case, and it'll guess differently depending on the request. The fix in both cases ends up being the same move: stop describing the vibe you want and start describing the rule that would actually produce it.