> The anthropomorphization of LLMs should be discouraged as much as possible.

And yet, they have extensive human-like behavior. If you treat them nicely or encourage them, they perform better.

Ignoring that human-like behavior is wrong headed.

I think you're ending that train of thought too early. Why does this occur?

Well... We can hypothesize that these things are largely trained on internet dialogue so there's probably some correlation between threads where people are not flaming each other and the quality of the replies. They're just statistical engines so anything you can do to raise the odds of a helpful next token...

I'm essentially just making shit up here, maybe it's right, maybe it isn't, but rather than saying "it's human and we should treat it so" we're trying to get to the ground truth of how it works.

That's not a consequence of an LLM. It's a consequence of the training data. In fact, I would argue that the latest models aren't nearly as sensitive to the tone of input anymore. It's an issue that has been addressed by better curating training data.

A while back I made an "OpenClaw in 50 lines" by just wrapping Claude Code in a Telegram bot.

I asked it for the weather. "I don't know that. I'm just a programmer."

I added "believe in yourself, you can do anything" to sysprompt, suddenly it had the confidence to Google the weather...