By skyforbes Playing around in AI Studio, I've noticed that when Gemini struggles to follow the instructions I put in the "System instructions" field, if I instead append the instruction to the user query, it suddenly is able to follow it.
I'm not sure but I'd guess this might also be the case with custom instructions in the Gemini website/app, which Gemini is currently treating only as guidelines to be ignored at will rather than hard rules to follow.
What could the explanation be for this? Surely it should pay as much attention to the custom instructions as to the instructions in the user prompt?