> 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.)

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.