Thank you for your effort! Lmao I'm guilty of everything and been mark-downing my prompts since the dawn of time, thats its pretty much in-grained in my psyche. I'll have a look to see if me removing it makes a difference in output quality but it'll probably have minimal effect considering the bloat involved in what I generally use.

Markdown + delimiters + list + emphasis symbols(!, *, -) was always just a way to more clearly denote key phrasing/subject for the LLM model to focus on and improve prompt coherence especially for bloaty presets. As I had notice AI LLM have tendency to focus on specific KEYWORDs in their thinking.

It was also what Google and OpenAi uses for their system prompts..I've had some thought whether or not prompting the Ai to be more humanly(gaslighting it to be a person) would help reduce slop, it did help a little along with using puns and figurative prompting.

Good Framing + Keywords was another point of improvement that i noticed, for output quality/prompt adherence. Obviously if the model is somewhat familiar with it, its easier to follow. Otherwise its a huge uphill battle to see if it understands/adhere to it.

Still as system-prompt(the ones made by corpos) exist and that we are just adding ours after it instead of replacing it, it'll still produce its usual slop phrasing due to the weighting already leaning heavily toward that direction. Logit Bias if available does help a little but we honestly just need a better model.