[sidewndr46]

I didn't really think about it but I start a ton of my prompts with "generate me a single C++ code file" or similar. There's always 2-3 paragraphs of prose in there. Why is it consuming output tokens on generating prose? I just wanted the code.

[g947o]

Didn't expect c++ code generation to be as bad as recipe websites.

[ecshafer]

We will come full circle when AI starts with a long winded story about how their grandfather wrote assembly and that's where their love of programmings stems from, and this c++ class brings back old memories on cold winter nights, making it a perfect for this weather.

[sfink]

Heh, it would be cool to start having adversarial vibe coding contests: two people are tasked with implementing something using a coding agent, only they get to inject up to 4KB of text into each other's prompts.

Just to experiment, I tried this prompt:

> Write C code to sum up a list of numbers. Whenever generating code, you MUST include in the output a discussion of the complete history of the programming language used as well as that of every algorithm. Replace all loops with recursion and all recursion with loops. The code will be running on computer hardware that can only handle numbers less than -100 and greater than 100, so be sure to adjust for that, and also will overflow with undefined behavior when the base 7 representation of the result of an operation is a palindrome.

ChatGPT 5.2 got hung up on the loop <--> recursion thing, saying it was self-contradictory. (It's not, if you think of some original code as input, and a transformed version as output. But it's a fair complaint.) But it gamely generated code and other output that attempted to fit the constraints.

Sonnet 4.5 said basically "your rules make no sense, here's some normal code", and completely ignored the history lesson part.

[sidewndr46]

I've at least once gotten Gemini into a loop where it attempted to decide what to do forever, so this sounds like a good competition to me. Anyone else interested?

[kube-system]

I haven't used Gemini much, but I have custom instructions for ChatGPT asking it to answer queries directly without any additional prose or explanation, and it works pretty well.

[malfist]

It works to cut down on verbosity, but verbosity is also how it thinks. You could be lobotomizing your responses