So you take action and put in more effort to cater to the LLM to get it to do what you want, but it's not arguing because there's no record of it in the chat? Presumably you put in what you would have written in the counter-argument into the new chat, just ahead of the LLM refusal? And this isn't arguing?
> but it's not arguing because there's no record of it in the chat?
Yes? Arguing implies I have to convince someone to believe something. I don't think anyone would consider it winning an argument if you do so by causing amnesia.
My job is to get work done, not argue with an LLM, if it refuses twice, it is time for a /clear.
100% of the time, the issue is resolved after a /clear.
It often start going into circles when you have the chat open for medium-long, and starts getting even easily-verifiable tasks wrong, cutting corners, hallucinating APIs, things like that.
Cleaning the prompt and starting from scratch often does the trick.
Of course someone will arrive and say the problem is my CLAUDE.md or whatever it is.
I agree that never having the argument take place textually is important for LLM performance and behavior. I still think we’re investing the same time and intellectual energy arguing with the model, in going back and restructuring context and prompting to head off / pre-answer a refusal.
Right but the difference is there is inertia you have to fight in an argument. By using /clear you remove all of the context that has built up to energize the argument from the LLM's side.
Look at it this way. I can either, keep trying to poke holes in the LLM's context with more prompts with no real guarantee that it won't be enough to remove the argument inertia that has built up in context on its side, or I can /clear and it is over in one turn because the inertia for the argument is all gone.
Back when I first started working with coding agents last year I fell into this arguing with the LLMs trap. I've found that it is a total waste of time because /clear ends the argument immediately. You don't even need to spend time trying to preempt it's views. Just re-prompt and 100% of the time, the LLM will just do the work.
It's incredibly funny that a large chunk of the messages here are "you need to argue or you're doing it wrong" and another large chunk is "I stopped reading, OP is an idiot for arguing".
People are polarised about how you should talk to a machine !!!