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Give the EMPTY sentinel a concrete example in the cleanup prompt - #288

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melnikaite:fix/empty-sentinel-example
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Give the EMPTY sentinel a concrete example in the cleanup prompt#288
melnikaite wants to merge 1 commit into
zachlatta:mainfrom
melnikaite:fix/empty-sentinel-example

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@melnikaite

@melnikaite melnikaite commented Aug 5, 2026

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Filler-only dictation is supposed to produce nothing, but several supported models return the filler verbatim instead of the EMPTY sentinel, so FreeFlow types "ähm also ja" into the focused app. On the current default prompt, openai/gpt-oss-20b — the default cleanup model — returned EMPTY 0/8 times for German filler while getting English and Russian right 8/8, and openai/gpt-oss-safeguard-20b returned it 0/8 for German, 7/8 for English and 6/8 for Russian.

Add one concrete example to the existing rule instead of restating it. This mirrors the reasoning already recorded for "Instruction preservation is strict": models follow concrete examples far more reliably than abstract rules. The rule keeps its "in any language" wording, so the example does not narrow it to English.

With the example, gpt-oss-20b returns EMPTY 8/8 in German, English and Russian, and safeguard-20b goes to 6/8 German, 8/8 English, 8/8 Russian. A control set of ordinary sentences that merely start with a discourse particle ("so lets move the call to tomorrow", "also lass uns den termin verschieben") was never swallowed into EMPTY in any run.

Bump defaultSystemPromptDate so users with customized prompts see the "default has changed" indicator.

Measured through OpenRouter rather than against Groq directly, at temperature 0, using this prompt verbatim and the same request envelope PostProcessingService builds.

Summary by CodeRabbit

  • Bug Fixes
    • Improved transcript cleanup guidance to better handle filler-only content, helping produce cleaner results.
    • Updated the default system prompt date to the latest version.

Filler-only dictation is supposed to produce nothing, but several supported
models return the filler verbatim instead of the EMPTY sentinel, so FreeFlow
types "ähm also ja" into the focused app. On the current default prompt,
openai/gpt-oss-20b — the default cleanup model — returned EMPTY 0/8 times for
German filler while getting English and Russian right 8/8, and
openai/gpt-oss-safeguard-20b returned it 0/8 for German, 7/8 for English and
6/8 for Russian.

Add one concrete example to the existing rule instead of restating it. This
mirrors the reasoning already recorded for "Instruction preservation is
strict": models follow concrete examples far more reliably than abstract
rules. The rule keeps its "in any language" wording, so the example does not
narrow it to English.

With the example, gpt-oss-20b returns EMPTY 8/8 in German, English and
Russian, and safeguard-20b goes to 6/8 German, 8/8 English, 8/8 Russian. A
control set of ordinary sentences that merely start with a discourse particle
("so lets move the call to tomorrow", "also lass uns den termin verschieben")
was never swallowed into EMPTY in any run.

Bump defaultSystemPromptDate so users with customized prompts see the
"default has changed" indicator.

Measured through OpenRouter rather than against Groq directly, at
temperature 0, using this prompt verbatim and the same request envelope
PostProcessingService builds.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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coderabbitai Bot commented Aug 5, 2026

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Review Change Stack

No actionable comments were generated in the recent review. 🎉

ℹ️ Recent review info
⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: defaults

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Pro Plus

Run ID: c7e033a4-09a7-4dde-af41-eb5a5064efde

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between e63a232 and 08ad6d4.

📒 Files selected for processing (1)
  • Sources/PostProcessingService.swift

📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The default cleanup prompt now documents filler-only transcripts with an EMPTY example. The prompt version date is updated to 2026-08-05.

Changes

Cleanup prompt

Layer / File(s) Summary
Update cleanup prompt definition
Sources/PostProcessingService.swift
The default cleanup prompt defines filler-only input with an EMPTY example. The prompt version date changes to 2026-08-05.

Estimated code review effort: 1 (Trivial) | ~2 minutes

Possibly related PRs

  • zachlatta/freeflow#195: Both PRs update PostProcessingService.defaultSystemPrompt and defaultSystemPromptDate.

Suggested reviewers: marcbodea

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5
✅ Passed checks (5 passed)
Check name Status Explanation
Description Check ✅ Passed Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check ✅ Passed The title clearly describes the main change: adding a concrete EMPTY sentinel example to the cleanup prompt.
Docstring Coverage ✅ Passed No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check.
Linked Issues check ✅ Passed Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check ✅ Passed Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
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