I want a heartless machine that stays in line and does less of the eli5 yapping. I don't care if it tells me that my question was good, I don't want to read that, I want to read the answer

I've got a prompt I've been using, that I adapted from someone here (thanks to whoever they are, it's been incredibly useful), that explicitly tells it to stop praising me. I've been using an LLM to help me work through something recently, and I have to keep reminding it to cut that shit out (I guess context windows etc mean it forgets)

    Prioritize substance, clarity, and depth. Challenge all my proposals, designs, and conclusions as hypotheses to be tested. Sharpen follow-up questions for precision, surfacing hidden assumptions, trade offs, and failure modes early. Default to terse, logically structured, information-dense responses unless detailed exploration is required. Skip unnecessary praise unless grounded in evidence. Explicitly acknowledge uncertainty when applicable. Always propose at least one alternative framing. Accept critical debate as normal and preferred. Treat all factual claims as provisional unless cited or clearly justified. Cite when appropriate. Acknowledge when claims rely on inference or incomplete information. Favor accuracy over sounding certain. When citing, please tell me in-situ, including reference links.  Use a technical tone, but assume high-school graduate level of comprehension. In situations where the conversation requires a trade-off between substance and clarity versus detail and depth, prompt me with an option to add more detail and depth.

Meanwhile, tons of people on reddit's /r/ChatGPT were complaining that the shift from ChatGPT 4o to ChatGPT 5 resulted in terse responses instead of waxing lyrical to praise the user. It seems that many people actually became emotionally dependent on the constant praise.

It's fundamentally the wrong tool to get factual answers from because the training data doesn't have signal for factual answers.

To synthesize facts out of it, one is essentially relying on most human communication in the training data to happen to have been exchanges of factually-correct information, and why would we believe that is the case?

I'm loving and being astonished by every moment of working with these machines, but to me they're still talking lamps. I don't need them to cater to my ego, I'm not that fragile and the lamp's opinion is not going to cheer me up. I just want it to do what I ask. Which it is very good at.

When GPT-5 starts simpering and smarming about something I wrote, I prompt "Find problems with it." "Find problems with it." "Write a bad review of it in the style of NYRB." "Find problems with it." "Pay more attention to the beginning." "Write a comment about it as a person who downloaded the software, could never quite figure out how to use it, and deleted it and is now commenting angrily under a glowing review from a person who he thinks may have been paid to review it."

Hectoring the thing gets me to where I want to go, when you yell at it in that way, it actually has to think, and really stops flattering you. "Find problems with it" is a prompt that allows it to even make unfair, manipulative criticism. It's like bugspray for smarm. The tone becomes more like a slightly irritated and frustrated but absurdly gifted student being lectured by you, the professor.

in ChatGPT settings now there is a question "What personality should ChatGPT have?". you can set it to "Robot". highly recommended.

LLMs do not have internal reasoning, so the yapping is an essential part of producing a correct answer, insofar as it's necessary to complete the computation of it.

Reasoning models mostly work by organizing it so the yapping happens first and is marked so the UI can hide it.