Scientific Agents: Evaluating Profession-Specific System Prompts on Scientific Tasks
Detailed profession-specific system prompts raise token use and estimated cost per response without a consistent accuracy gain. We evaluate Scientific Agents, an open-source corpus of 503 profession-specific AGENTS.md profiles, with Gemini 3.8 Flash via OpenRouter in the Pi agent harness. We compare matched profiles with four controls: a minimal baseline ("You are a helpful assistant"), the profile's opening role sentence, a generic scientific rigor guide, and a profile from an unrelated domain. Across nine text-based science benchmarks (4,531 sampled questions, 100 matched profiles), 4,488 items completed all five conditions after API-error retries, scored with automated, rule-based grad...
| Authors | Timothy Kassis |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 7 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 September 2026 |
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