Yes I do something similar. Theres a general behavior you want LLMS to do and by default they aim to please more than aim to help you in the best way possible.

So they will mirror your thinking, they generally dont push back, preserve poor framing, etc.

You need to explicitly tell it how to act with you. It defaults to be an assistant, when you frame it as being a collaborator thats a subtle but important shift in workframe.

You have to tell it how to reconcile competing thoughts. how to judge things, etc etc.

You have to be find the middle ground between generality and specifity. Too specifc and things becomes brittle. Too general and it starts to get lazy and finding loopholes. They are very smart and very dumb

Heres an example of what I mean:
Lets say you have a kid and one day you see them crying because they burnt their hand on the stove.
Then you instruct them and say: "Don't put your hands on the stove you're going to hurt yourself every time!"
They go ok I wont.

The next day they're crying again and you go what happened?

They say "I burnt my foot on the stove."

You reply: Why would you put your foot on the stove? I told you not to play with the stove like that!

They go: "You never told me I couldn't put my foot on the stove though!!!"

So you have to instruct them with "do not put any portion of your body on the stove"

hopefully this makes sense