Comment by tosh

maybe a bit counter-intuitive but:

I found that removing

  - system prompt
  - skills
  - agents.md
  - mcps

+ reducing tools to just 1 (sh)

gives better results than having 'more' of them

(e.g. look at these traces to see more vs less in action:)

https://smolenv.com/t/nested-template-includes-60636/

not saying the right context does not help

(it definitely does!, but it's not trivial to provide the right context)