Your old prompts might be slowing your AI agents down. OpenAI dropped guidance this week saying that instructions written for older, weaker models can actually hurt GPT-4o agent performance. All that scaffolding you built to babysit a less capable model? It's now dead weight that wastes memory and triggers the wrong behaviors. Three things to fix right now: Skills — the prompt files that load for specific tasks — need narrow, precise trigger descriptions. If they're too broad, your agent grabs the wrong one. Your AGENTS.md file loads on every single task. Strip out anything that tells the agent to do things it already does on its own — check tests, follow conventions, run reviews. The smarter the model, the more redundant that instruction becomes. Task prompts should clearly define what "done" looks like, so the agent knows when to stop rather than pause and ask for clarification. The broader pattern worth internalizing: as models get smarter, the scaffolding we built around dumber ones becomes the bottleneck. Less hand-holding. Leaner prompts. More trust in the model's own judgment. OpenAI even suggests asking the agent itself to audit your existing skills and AGENTS.md for dead weight. That's the move. https://alphasignal.ai/newsletter/openai-gpt-4o-agent-tips #AIMarketing #B2BMarketing