Configuration, Not Conscience: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of LLM System Prompts

arXiv:2609.31575 · cs.CR · Submitted 2026-09-25 · Read on arXiv

cs.CR

Submitted: 2026-09-25

Updated: 2026-09-25

Code: https://github.com/guy915/System-Prompts

Terminology

Perplexity — 20× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Archetype — 13× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Fidelity — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Semantic Similarity — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Clustering — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Embeddings — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Accuracy — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Analyzer — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Core — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Cosine Similarity — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Hallucination — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Prompt Engineering — 2× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
Provenance — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Transformer — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Accountability — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Affordance — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Benchmark — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Benchmarking — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Distillation — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

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