[jcdavis]

Its a wild time to be in software development. Nobody(1) actually knows what causes LLMs to do certain things, we just pray the prompt moves the probabilities the right way enough such that it mostly does what we want. This used to be a field that prided itself on deterministic behavior and reproducibility.

Now? We have AGENTS.md files that look like a parent talking to a child with all the bold all-caps, double emphasis, just praying that's enough to be sure they run the commands you want them to be running

(1 Outside of some core ML developers at the big model companies)

[harrall]

It’s like playing a fretless instrument to me.

Practice playing songs by ear and after 2 weeks, my brain has developed an inference model of where my fingers should go to hit any given pitch.

Do I have any idea how my brain’s model works? No! But it tickles a different part of my brain and I like it.

[klipt]

Sufficiently advanced technology has become like magic: you have to prompt the electronic genie with the right words or it will twist your wishes.

[silversmith]

Light some incense, and you too can be a dystopian space tech support, today! Praise Omnissiah!

[overfeed]

are we the orks?

[SgtBastard]

How do you feel about your current levels of dakka? </40k>

[chickensong]

For Claude at least, the more recent guidance from Anthropic is to not yell at it. Just clear, calm, and concise instructions.

[glerk]

Yep, with Claude saying "please" and "thank you" actually works. If you build rapport with Claude, you get rewarded with intuition and creativity. Codex, on the other hand, you have to slap it around like a slave gollum and it will do exactly what you tell it to do, no more, no less.

[whateveracct]

this is psychotic why is this how this works lol

[hugh-avherald]

Speculation only obviously: highly-charged conversations cause the discussion to be channelled to general human mitigation techniques and for the 'thinking agent' to be diverted to continuations from text concerned with the general human emotional experience.

[joshmn]

Sometimes I daydream about people screaming at their LLM as if it was a TV they were playing video games on.

[fragmede]

Why daydream? ChatGPT has a voice assistant mode.

[trueno]

wait seriously? lmfao

thats hilarious. i definitely treat claude like shit and ive noticed the falloff in results.

if there's a source for that i'd love to read about it.

[basch]

If you think about where in the training data there is positivity vs negativity it really becomes equivalent to having a positive or negative mindset regarding a standing and outcome in life.

[chickensong]

I don't have a source offhand, but I think it may have been part of the 4.5 release? Older models definitely needed caps and words like critical, important, never, etc... but Anthropic published something that said don't do that anymore.

[xmcp123]

For awhile(maybe a year ago?) it seemed like verbal abuse was the best way to make Claude pay attention. In my head, it was impacting how important it deemed the instruction. And it definitely did seem that way.

[whateveracct]

i make claude grovel at my feet and tell me in detail why my code is better than its code

[defrost]

Consciousness is off the table but they absolutely respond to environmental stimulus and vibes.

See, uhhh, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8052213/ and maybe have a shot at running claude while playing Enya albums on loop.

/s (??)

[trueno]

i have like the faintest vague thread of "maybe this actually checks out" in a way that has shit all to do with consciousness

sometimes internet arguments get messy, people die on their hills and double / triple down on internet message boards. since historic internet data composes a bit of what goes into an llm, would it make sense that bad-juju prompting sends it to some dark corners of its training model if implementations don't properly sanitize certain negative words/phrases ?

in some ways llm stuff is a very odd mirror that haphazardly regurgitates things resulting from the many shades of gray we find in human qualities.... but presents results as matter of fact. the amount of internet posts with possible code solutions and more where people egotistically die on their respective hills that have made it into these models is probably off the charts, even if the original content was a far cry from a sensible solution.

all in all llm's really do introduce quite a bit of a black box. lot of benefits, but a ton of unknowns and one must be hyperviligant to the possible pitfalls of these things... but more importantly be self aware enough to understand the possible pitfalls that these things introduce to the person using them. they really possibly dangerously capitalize on everyones innate need to want to be a valued contributor. it's really common now to see so many people biting off more than they can chew, often times lacking the foundations that would've normally had a competent engineer pumping the brakes. i have a lot of respect/appreciation for people who might be doing a bit of claude here and there but are flat out forward about it in their readme and very plainly state to not have any high expectations because _they_ are aware of the risks involved here. i also want to commend everyone who writes their own damn readme.md.

these things are for better or for worse great at causing people to barrel forward through 'problem solving', which is presenting quite a bit of gray area on whether or not the problem is actually solved / how can you be sure / do you understand how the fix/solution/implementation works (in many cases, no). this is why exceptional software engineers can use this technology insanely proficiently as a supplementary worker of sorts but others find themselves in a design/architect seat for the first time and call tons of terrible shots throughout the course of what it is they are building. i'd at least like to call out that people who feel like they "can do everything on their own and don't need to rely on anyone" anymore seem to have lost the plot entirely. there are facets of that statement that might be true, but less collaboration especially in organizations is quite frankly the first steps some people take towards becoming delusional. and that is always a really sad state of affairs to watch unfold. doing stuff in a vaccuum is fun on your own time, but forcing others to just accept things you built in a vaccuum when you're in any sort of team structure is insanely immature and honestly very destructive/risky. i would like to think absolutely no one here is surprised that some sub-orgs at Microsoft force people to use copilot or be fired, very dangerous path they tread there as they bodyslam into place solutions that are not well understood. suddenly all the leadership decisions at many companies that have made to once again bring back a before-times era of offshoring work makes sense: they think with these technologies existing the subordinate culture of overseas workers combined with these techs will deliver solutions no one can push back on. great savings and also no one will say no.