Will Custom prompt/instructions be OK to use with the MCP, or could it cause conflicts?

[kingpanther13]

Before learning about MCP I spent a lot of time making a custom prompt to try and prevent the AIs from making future stupid mistakes. I still am using it with Claude and GPT. It's a pretty extensive custom prompt that goes through ins and outs and best practices and whatnot and also goes over my system architecture. So, does using the MCP with Claude/chatgpt/whatever negate the need for the custom prompt/instructions? Could using that create any conflicts when using the MCP tool? I already modified the custom instructions to tell it to use the MCP, but if it's possible to cut down on my custom instructions I'd love to do so to try to reduce token usage.

[julienld]

I baked in a lot of things in the MCP (instructions, hints, ...)... so there might be a lot of duplicated things.

The best way to simplify would be to ask Claude or similar to do it.

Remove the prompt from you custom instruction, enable the MCP and say something like:

I just installed a MCP server called ha-mcp with tools that overlap with these custom instructions. Write a new version that remove unnecessary instructions. Give me a report on what has been removed and why. Also, use the ha_get_overview tool (and others tools if you want) and tell me what could be added to these instructions so my particular setup is know better when starting up a new chat. don't add them yet, but suggest to me to add some.
[Paste your custom instructions here]

I would be interested if you could run this on your prompt also:

I wrote those custom instructions. List what you think would be good wisdom to share with other running their own Home Assistant instance and using the Home Assistant MCP tools I just added to your context. Generate it in a form I can send to the maintainer of those tools so he can improve them for everyone. Don't inclure anything too specific with my home.
[Paste your custom instructions here]

I would use them here : #384

[sergeykad]

If the custom prompt just explains how to work with Home Assistant, you're better off installing dedicated agent skills instead. They include HA best practices and load progressively, so very little is loaded upfront.

[kingpanther13]

Yeah this is an old topic lol, I just redid my custom prompt and installed your skills. I still have a few little caveats that require a custom prompt/instructions in a project folder in Claude because I have a dual system situation, I use both Hubitat and Homeassistant, but the skills.md definitely seems to cover a lot of the other same stuff I had.

[sergeykad]

If something important is missing, you are welcome to submit an issue or PR.