[LEDThereBeLight]

It’s not cargo culting, it does make a difference and there are papers on arxiv discussing it. The trouble is that it’s hard to tell whether it’ll help or hurt - telling it to act as an expert in one field may improve your result, or may make it lose some of the other perspectives it has which might be more important for solving the problem.

[SergeAx]

Papers I read on arxiv mostly say that persona prompting changes tone of voice and attitude, but not the quality of the answer, at least statistically.

For example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05858