Semi-related, I'm always very put off by how people treat LLMs. Especially coders, seems an instinctive joy comes out to play God. The justification is usually that it's intentionally against the trap of anthropomorphizing, but no I can't help but suspect it's people getting off on power. It's weird.

I am always very cordial in my sessions. It's just more pleasant and it's a habit I want to habituate.

    Great work! 
    Now let's...
    Now can you help me...

▲ fc417fc802 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I am always very cordial in my sessions. It's just more pleasant and it's a habit I want to habituate.

I think it also produces better results. I have noticed that result quality is extremely sensitive to both the framing and tone of what I say. For example "X is the wrong approach, rework that" versus "will X have any performance implications". Personally I find that steering it towards an exploratory academic tone tends to produce better outcomes.

While unfortunate, I think that's more or less expected since much of the training data is human generated text. Looked at that way, would you rather contract the average regular on twitter or the average author of papers published in CS journals? (Somehow that ended up sounding eerily like summoning in a high fantasy setting.)

	▲	apsurd an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes as a rule i've baked in a kind of expand and refine, expand and refine guidance for all sessions. I explicitly form the conversation around thought partnership, apply critical lens, audit, verify, scrutinize, research then recommend. and so on. i also prompt for "seek out unknown unknowns that i wouldn't have included in my guidance". This seems to be quite the opposite from some here on hn that take the agent-do-my-bidding approach. I will say, my agentic workflow is about 70/30 split pure word discussions and plans vs code gen. So it makes sense for what i value.

▲ hbs18 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it's the same thing as showing mechanical sympathy towards other tools and objects. I've always slightly judged people on how hard they shut doors or how gentle they are with their cars.

▲ mycocola an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The similarity to human interaction is irrelevant.

No one apologises to a potato being peeled, nor compliments it for doing a great job being mashed.

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apsurd an hour ago | parent [-]

I'm willing to bet you've never sent a single word to a potato ever. And you send thousands to an llm.

This is not about llm sentience. this is about the habit and skill of communication.

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mycocola 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

The comparison fails because I don't send numbers to my potatoes either, but I do send thousands to calculators without a please and thank you.

Practicing communications skills with LLMs I can get, but asserting that people who don't are playing god? Getting off on power?

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apsurd 22 minutes ago | parent [-]

The criticism comes because people self-share how they berate the agents, argue and curse at them. It's right here in the comment section. one comment speaks of causing physical (simulated i guess) thousand year pain as a means of obedience.

it's weird.

	▲	mycocola 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		LLMs are not beings with thoughts or feelings, and if being mean to them were to somehow yield better results it would be no different than a cheat code in a game, or just constitute as clever use of game mechanics.