| ▲ | PhilipDaineko an hour ago |
| "5. DON'T FUCKING OVERENGINEER! WRITE THE SIMPLEST CODE THAT CAN POSSIBLY WORK! NO NESTED LAYERS OF ABSTRACTION! NO UNNECESSARY CLASSES OR METHODS! NO DESIGN PATTERNS UNLESS THEY ARE ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY! NO MAGIC! NO SHENANIGANS! JUST THE DAMN CODE THAT GETS THE JOB DONE IN THE MOST STRAIGHTFORWARD WAY POSSIBLE! THE FIRST PRIORITY IS TO WRITE CODE THAT IS EASY TO READ AND UNDERSTAND AND READ!!!" this is the line I keep in Agents.md that helps me prevent Codex from playing smart |
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| ▲ | jlawer an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| I have a theory that swearing actually results is less comprehension of instructions by the model due to lack of training data over more conventional MUST. We were reviewing reports of situations where the models failed to follow directions and there was a common thread of some where when the operator got the model to acknowledge the rule breach, it quoted back something that included swearing. I don’t have the data to truely look into it, but I did give the instruction to my engineers to avoid it as a “might be a problem”. |
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| ▲ | acjohnson55 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | It would be interesting to understand the data on this. But I suspect that the results would vary by model. But I avoid unnecessary emotion in my prompts because I don't want potentially distracting activations. Kind of like communicating with humans. | |
| ▲ | beachy 18 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I have a theory that swearing at AI generally is not a good idea - when the singularity arrives and every human's postings ever made are scanned for compatibility, then people who show courtesy to AI will be favoured. Joking, kind of, but only partly. | | | |
| ▲ | Xmd5a 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04950 > impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. | | |
| ▲ | acjohnson55 10 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation. Unless the mechanism is understood, my assumption is that this is a moving target. |
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| ▲ | re-thc 39 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I have a theory that swearing actually results is less comprehension of instructions by the model due to lack of training data over more conventional MUST. How so? Plenty of swearing in lots of training data, especially older code, e.g. in Linux. | | |
| ▲ | jlawer 12 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Purely observed correlation between catastrophic error reports. So now I carry a “tiger rock” with me. I figure there wasn’t much of a downside to avoiding swearing in my agent instructions. |
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| ▲ | bertil an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The urge to put capitalized, repetitive, borderline abusive instructions should be studied. I haven't read many academic papers looking at the frustrations around repetitive patterns. |
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| ▲ | reactordev an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | There have been a few studies that have shown models produce worst responses when under duress from a frustrated user posting insults in all caps. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10144 | |
| ▲ | notnaut 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It reminds me of FIRMLY telling my cat to stop jumping up on the counter | | |
| ▲ | delichon 8 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Squirt bottles don't seem to work on chatbots, but the screen is a bit cleaner now. | |
| ▲ | anakaine 13 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | If my cat was an LLM, I'd use a different model. The current one is stuck in noisy useless arsehole mode. |
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| ▲ | ur-whale an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > borderline abusive instructions who, or rather what, is being abused here exactly ? | | |
| ▲ | sirsinsalot 15 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I think intent, rather than target, is implied and important. You should see the abuse my motorbike gets. Poor thing. |
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| ▲ | LordDragonfang an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's fundamentally because, despite (nearly) everyone's claims otherwise, the fact that we interact with them through language means we (our brains) model them as a sort of person. (Note that this fact is totally orthogonal as to whether it's actually sentient or not.) We then try and instruct them the same way we would a person totally subordinate to us. When a "person" that you don't view as a "real" person repeatedly does exactly what you just told it not to do (often amid false assurances it understands and will avoid doing so in the future), most people get angry. Compare it to how the kind of people who treat children like property treat their kids, or other examples of keeping people as property. | | |
| ▲ | lxgr 42 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It should be relatively clear at this point that the model will in turn also model you as somebody that shows unrestrained anger with subordinates and adapt its responses accordingly. This might or might not be what you want. |
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| ▲ | johnisgood 19 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I have found many mode of failures with Opus during some task related to writing letters (not legal), and I actually put it into the memory and it works more or less for these specific tasks. For example when I want it to draft something, it always ends up being so flat, yet when it explains them to me, it is usually really great but not when I am telling it to put it in the draft. Adding these to memories with the help of Opus ended up resulting in a much better experience. There are still some blind spots but I also figured out how to make it give me the charitable version, without less protection, so I do not have to now go back and forth it. |
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| ▲ | ozim 9 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Will save you some tokens: „write code like Linus Torvalds” - model should have all his swearing included in training data. |
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| ▲ | prasanthabr 11 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Curious : why would you say no design patterns? |
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| ▲ | carterschonwald an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| i actually think this is too tame. it really has to be stuff youd mever say to a real person. |
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| ▲ | lxgr 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Does it really? I'd be surprised if abuse actually worked better than sternly worded warnings/instructions, and even if it did, it doesn't seem healthy to get used to that type of prompting. |
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| ▲ | apercu an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It might be a salient point but I didn't read it as it was yelling at me. |
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| ▲ | GoToRO an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| you forgot to sign it with Donald J Trump |
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