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by xianshou 395 days ago
Amusingly, about 90% of my rat's-nest problems with Sonnet 3.7 are solved by simply appending a few words to the end of the prompt:

"write minimum code required"

It's not even that sensitive to the wording - "be terse" or "make minimal changes" amount to the same thing - but the resulting code will often be at least 50% shorter than the un-guided version.

2 comments

Well, the article mentions that this reduces accuracy. Do you hit that problem often then?
The study the article cited is specifically about when asking the LLMs about misinformation. I think on coding tasks and such shorter answers are usually more accurate.
Gemini on the other hand has a tendency for super-defensive coding.

It'll check _EVERY_ edge case separately, even in situations where it will never ever happen and if it does, it's a NOP anyway.