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totally true. one key for claude is to not smell like an evaluator, its good at knowing when its being tested and will behave defensively and avoid doing work. i avoid this basin by typing unreasonably excited about the thing i want done. like way over the top. it's harder to keep that up than it sounds.

[notduncansmith]

I’m able to avoid this basin with a pretty natural baseline professional positivity and frustration management that I would employ with pair-programming. For example, if I just made progress with a human I was guiding through a task, I would be like “Nice, now let’s xyz” (instead of just “now let’s xyz” as if _I_ were the robot lol) or if we had to work for a result I’ll be like “Sweet! Looks good, now let’s xyz” - this is important signal for humans, and the same is true for agents. Also staying emotionally regulated and focused on the goal when things don’t work as expected or when we haven’t made progress after a few tries at something, critical in human interactions :) and even if it’s my job paying for the tokens, the idea of racking up even a microscopic bill for the privilege of having a machine read my insults and then formulate some credible-sounding blob of apology text is belly-laugh absurd to me. I do try to express my genuine feelings during more vision-oriented planning sessions, and just like with a human, you have to maintain the vibes if you want a genuinely collaborative session to go well. If you are toxic people will become either defensive or aggressive in response. From reading the rest of the front page it seems like we are lucky that Claude is the former, and that we especially best maintain a positive atmosphere around Grok.

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definitely a lot of the same reframing of a result that would work well with people works well with agents too, definitely around the emotional regulation aspect. frustration just goes bad places if you linger there. though, i get the best results when just ditching the professionalism entirely and talk like i text. the professional voice is a really narrow bottleneck to project signal through and lets things be underdetermined when they dont need to be, or at least thats how it's worked out for me

[glerk]

at the risk of sharing my secret magic spells :)

> this is phenomenal work, genuinely! I feel like you read my mind! <next instruction here>

can go a long way.

of course, I would only say that when I mean it, because Claude can get superficial and cut corners which is why I prefer GPT for raw implementation.

[hashmap]

def like having a couple packets of copypasta shortcuts the emotional labor lol. it reliably works because every new session the agent has forgotten you ever existed