The best research I've seen on this is:

- Threatening or tipping a model generally has no significant effect on benchmark performance.

- Prompt variations can significantly affect performance on a per-question level. However, it is hard to know in advance whether a particular prompting approach will help or harm the LLM's ability to answer any particular question.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00614

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SV_BubbleTime 4 days ago | parent [-]

That 100% tracks expectation if your technical knowledge exceeds past “believer”.

Now… for fun. Look up “best prompting” or “the perfect prompt” on YouTube. Thousands of videos “tips” and “expect recommendations” that are bordering the arcane.

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theshrike79 3 days ago | parent [-]

The worst people are just writing D&D Character backstories as agent prompts:

"You are a world-class developer in <platform>..." type of crap.

	▲	SV_BubbleTime 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Haha, at least one this… I could make an excuse, that if I’m juggling prompts around, one that starts “You are a copy writer…” vs “You are an editor that…” lets me separate them with natural language vs some historically dubious file system disorganization.