I'm unsure of its accuracy/provenance/outdatedness, but this purportedly extracted system prompt for Claude Code provides a lot more detail about TODO iteration and how powerful it can be:
I find it fascinating that while in theory one could just append these as reasoning tokens to the context, and trust the attention algorithm to find the most recent TODO list and attend actively to it... in practice, creating explicit tools that essentially do a single-key storage are far more effective and predictable. It makes me wonder how much other low-hanging fruit there is with tool creation for storing language that requires emphasis and structure.
https://gist.github.com/wong2/e0f34aac66caf890a332f7b6f9e2ba...
https://gist.github.com/wong2/e0f34aac66caf890a332f7b6f9e2ba...
I find it fascinating that while in theory one could just append these as reasoning tokens to the context, and trust the attention algorithm to find the most recent TODO list and attend actively to it... in practice, creating explicit tools that essentially do a single-key storage are far more effective and predictable. It makes me wonder how much other low-hanging fruit there is with tool creation for storing language that requires emphasis and structure.