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I've developed a habit of adding into my prompts "please keep your response concise and succinct" or "I'm trying to cram, please only provide the minimum level
by precision1k 16d ago
I've developed a habit of adding into my prompts "please keep your response concise and succinct" or "I'm trying to cram, please only provide the minimum level of technical detail necessary to understand this topic"
I find it helps immensely but it'd be nice if I didn't have to do that.
- gitaarik 14d agoOr "be brief and simple"
- aniceperson 16d agoadd to your system prompt?
- glub 16d agoIt only sticks to the instruction for maybe 3-4 turns. This is why when Anthropic released "concise output style" feature in claude code, it basically spams the model's context with "be concise" system reminders every other turn.
- vandopereira 15d agoya, but now i have this system that ive build that works with any ai agents, putting boundaries, gates every single time and it generate memories from the runs so it can inject them as needed.
- vandopereira 15d agojust try kaplira, it will help u with that.
- CamperBob2 16d agoI don't understand that complaint, although it seems to be a common one. The whole problem with the way models talk nowadays is that they are succinct to a fault, going to the extent of coining new buzzwords and misusing existing ones. What I want to see is a shift towards plain language.
- adamanonymous 16d agoI’ve had good results adding “also I’m a baby” to the end of all my requests for explanations
- pimeys 16d agoELI5 always works
- crisnoble 16d ago"I am a thickie thickie dum dum" works even better. Plus it is a good reminder.
- CamperBob2 16d agoMemento moroni!
- CamperBob2 16d agoSounds like a good way to get even more refusals, LOL.
- skolos 16d agowhy so many people add 'please' when asking machine to do something? Was there actually research that when you SCREAM or curse it follows your instructions better? P.S. Although my wife insists that I should stay polite in case AI overlords remember how I treat them ...
- zarzavat 16d agoI'm polite to LLMs. It's not for the models it's for myself. If I start being rude to models then I might accidentally start being rude to other people as well.
- dolebirchwood 16d agoProbably because polite people are already in the habit of saying please when typing out requests in chat. We're not consciously thinking about it, regardless of whether a human or machine is on the other side.
- deleted 16d ago[deleted]
- perching_aix 16d agoNot to go all ying/yang about it, but just to give a parallel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war - you kinda need silence to draw a contrast with what's meant to be loud. Separately, my boss confided in us that he's super abusive with his agent, wondering if we are too (no, lol). While I try not to read too much into this (which he doesn't make easy), I also can't help but not really notice a whole lot of amazing agentic delivery differences from his side. On the contrary, while the passion may improve his agent's performance, I'm not sure if it doesn't decrease his, upending the entire theatre.
- conradludgate 16d agoI think about removing please/thanks, but then I accidentally add them back in during some edit/rewrite of the prompt... It's just how I'm used to asking for things
- trueno 16d agoi tried using claude codes output style option to do something like this and it worked for like three prompts and then it was back to normal lol
- perching_aix 16d agoyou could apply it on lifecycle hook level, probably the most appropriate place for it