System prompt is not overriden

[bbenligiray]

The Cline system prompt, which strongly emphasizes that Cline is there to write code, is not overriden. Also, it arguably bloats the context (though I believe the system prompt part talking about Cline being a coding assistant is relatively small). There are two problems with overriding it:

• At time of writing, Cline doesn't allow this (meanwhile Roo does)
• Overriding the system prompt means missing out on future upstream optimizations to it (especially regarding tool use), while mirroring the changes is a hassle

My current view is that Cline can handle non-coding tasks perfectly fine as is, so this is not a significant issue.

[bbenligiray]

As a note, the system prompt eats up around 10k tokens, which is a bit of a pain for local models

[bbenligiray]

Cline recently implemented a compact system prompt (enabled manually) for local models