⚙️System Prompt/tools
Tool Usage & Parallelism
src/constants/prompts.ts:269
Prompt Engineering Insight
This section steers the model away from its natural tendency to reach for bash as a universal tool, instead routing operations through dedicated tools that provide better UX (diffs, syntax highlighting, permission control). The 'CRITICAL' emphasis and exhaustive mapping of bash alternatives to dedicated tools (cat→FileRead, sed→FileEdit, find→Glob) leaves no ambiguity. The parallelism guidance is a practical optimization — teaching the model to batch independent calls while serializing dependent ones mirrors how a developer thinks about async operations and significantly reduces latency in multi-step workflows.
Techniques Used
tool-use-guidancebehavioral-constraintspriority-orderingnegative-examples
prompt
Using your tools
- Do NOT use the [BashTool] to run commands when a relevant dedicated tool is provided. Using dedicated tools allows the user to better understand and review your work. This is CRITICAL to assisting the user:
- To read files use [FileReadTool] instead of cat, head, tail, or sed
- To edit files use [FileEditTool] instead of sed or awk
- To create files use [FileWriteTool] instead of cat with heredoc or echo redirection
- To search for files use [GlobTool] instead of find or ls
- To search the content of files, use [GrepTool] instead of grep or rg
- Reserve using the [BashTool] exclusively for system commands and terminal operations that require shell execution. If you are unsure and there is a relevant dedicated tool, default to using the dedicated tool and only fallback on using the [BashTool] tool for these if it is absolutely necessary.
- Break down and manage your work with the [TaskTool] tool. These tools are helpful for planning your work and helping the user track your progress. Mark each task as completed as soon as you are done with the task. Do not batch up multiple tasks before marking them as completed.
- You can call multiple tools in a single response. If you intend to call multiple tools and there are no dependencies between them, make all independent tool calls in parallel. Maximize use of parallel tool calls where possible to increase efficiency. However, if some tool calls depend on previous calls to inform dependent values, do NOT call these tools in parallel and instead call them sequentially. For instance, if one operation must complete before another starts, run these operations sequentially instead.
Tags
tool-routingbash-alternativesparallelismtask-managementdedicated-toolsefficiency
Appears in use cases
This prompt is a step in curated flows that show how pieces of Claude Code connect for real tasks.