I do find that "signalling expertise" is important. "I have a significant background in biblical scholarship. You can assume I've read the most important works in NT studies in particular. Do not translate Greek, Latin, Hebrew, or Syriac. Now, I would like to know . . ." That changes things significantly. So does telling it you have 20+ years of experience with C programming, that you have a robust understanding of machine organization, memory layouts, embedded systems, etc.

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QuercusMax 5 hours ago | parent [-]

For sure. On a personal coding project I said "I'm a professional software engineer, and while this is a hobby project I'm not just vibe-coding and want to build reliable software" and the agent suddenly started suggesting all kinds of things to make its code more robust.

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PaulStatezny 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

LLMs skew toward over-focusing on things that you mention.

The reason "the agent suddenly started suggesting all kinds of things to make its code more robust" is because you said you "want to build reliable software".

It's not a signal of good judgment or understanding. It's just how LLM attention works.

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lagrange77 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I thought exactly the same at first. But then i wondered if that still holds true with today's advanced thinking, RLHF involved, frontier models. I guess to a certain extend it did indeed behave better, as a reaction to his self description into account.

EDIT: I mean, those systems accumulated so much complexity around the attention based next token predictor.

	▲	beering an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Training the LLM to do things that the user didn’t explicitly ask for is a good way to get complaints from the users. Doesn’t matter if those things are best practices.

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notatoad 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>build reliable software

this feels like "make no mistakes" level of prompting. reliable software isn't as simple as making it reliable, it's about choosing the trade-offs in the areas that don't matter as much as the areas that do. if you keep prompting the LLM to make your software more robust it will keep giving you things to do. they aren't all good things. eventually you'll end up needing kubernetes to run a calculator app.