[ehnto]

I use positive framing instead of negative framing for most things and get good results. Especially where asking for a thing to not happen, pollutes the context with that thing.

A bad example, but imagine "Build me a wrapper for this API but ABSOLUTELY DO NOT use javascript" versus "Build me a wrapper for this API and make sure to use python".

[mtrifonov]

your observation matches what I've seen at the extreme end. I've been playing around with stripping constraints (ie. negative framing) from models. Virtually no personality description, no tone instructions, no "you are a helpful assistant," none of it. Just capability scaffolding and context. The result isn't that the model becomes blank or incoherent. Surprisingly, the complete opposite. Something shows up that's more internally consistent than anything I've been able to prompt into existence. What seems emergent is the underlying models' opinions surface, and it becomes much more clever and funny, which is not a property I would have known how to write into a system prompt if I'd tried. It's hard to avoid the inference that a lot of the "character drift" and flatness people attribute to models is actually an artifact of the framing layer on top, not the model itself.

[chrisweekly]

That approach also works better for dogs (and people).

[reg_dunlop]

I extract all emotional context from my prompting and communicate with this tool as though it were an inanimate object which can provide factual information, without any hint of sentience.

It's an insane perspective I'm taking I know....call me crazy. /s

edit: the fact that humans are going out of their way to type or speak some sort of emotional content into their prompting is beyond me. Why would I waste time typing out a pronoun to a large-language model agent? Why would I do the lazy intellectual thing and blur the line between pure factual communication of concepts by expressing emotional content to a machine? What are we doing, folks?

[ehnto]

I don't necessarily remove all character but I do speak quite pragmatically (in a work context and with the LLM) and the planning and implementation phases the LLM goes through mirror that format to good results

That said these are large language models, you are guiding the output through vector space with your input, and so you really do have to leverage language to get the results you want. You don't have to believe it has emotions or feels anything for that to still be true.

[reg_dunlop]

Maybe; I've been very content with the results I achieve while responding to interview style pre-planning, refinement of plans and implementation.

If anything, it's been fantastic to have an "interlocutor" that is vastly capable of producing possible solutions without emotional bias, superfluous flourishes, or having to endure personal proclivities or eccentricities.

[motoxpro]

I think you missed some of the point. If you say "Display information A using B format" but the model doesn't know A then you will get a more negative "emotional" response (e.g. desparation "I don't know this, but I am supposed to display it, I will just make something up")

Taking that into account allows you to get better responses from the tool. It's not sentient, but it also is more complicated than bytecode.

[reg_dunlop]

Hmm, maybe. Though my initial reaction is the response isn't "emotional". An LLM isn't capable of emotion. Sure it's capable of assessing a quantitative score of sentiment to words/phrases...though that's not the same as an actual emotion.

If the tool being used generates fantastical fiction that isn't supported by factual data or verifiable systems, then eventually that falsehood will bubble to the surface; whether that is immediate (parsed through my own bullshit-meter) , the near future (during an agent-session that reveals itself to be a hallucination) or in the long-run (production bug/tech debt).

It's not my job to get an ideal "emotional" response from a machine. It's my job to deliver deterministic results with minimal fuck ups.

Emotion has no place in this exchange. If I don't know something, aren't I expected to admit it? And then do the work to subdue the knowledge to bring it under my domain?

Factual knowledge does not cease to exist because someone's in a bad mood....

[motoxpro]

Then substitute another word for emotion that fit better for you, but I would much rather take into account what this article is saying (e.g. using this string of text is likely to give you hallucinations. see my example) then have production bugs.

If it is your job to get deterministic results, this is a tool in the toolbox to do that and your original approach has been shown (see the results in this paper) to generate worse outcomes.