[minimaxir]

It's a meme. Telling it to "make no mistakes" doesn't do anything because LLMs don't have an inherent concept of a mistake and they are already RLHFed to code correctly.

However, if you tell it to not do particular behaviors explicitly—some of which would be considered mistakes—it will not do said behaviors and with enough checks and balances, you'll get output without "mistakes".

One example of this from the OpenAI Unit Distance prompt: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/04d1d1e4-bc75-476a-97cf-49055cd98...

> Do not return merely because current approaches fail or agents report theorem-strength gaps. Continue launching new rounds, reopening blocked approaches only when there is a genuinely new mechanism, and searching for fresh formulations. Return only when a complete affirmative proof has been found and survives adversarial audit.

> Do not return a reduction, partial result, isolated missing lemma, “best effort” summary, or explanation of why the problem is difficult.

[wren6991]

I like the explicit and imperative style of this prompt. Makes me feel like LLMs are just weird Turing machines and CoT is their tape.

[dcrazy]

There really was a time when “make no mistakes” was thought to increase response quality. Maybe it steered the content of the thought channel?