alt Hacker NewsI feel like the audience of the file is more for me the reader rather than the LLM.
> Add this file to your AI assistant's system prompt or context to help it avoid common AI writing patterns.
So if I put this into my LLM's conversation it is like I am instructing it to put this into its AI assistant's system prompt, so the AI assistant's AI assistant.
The alternative is to say:
"Here is a list of common AI tropes for you to avoid"
All tropes are described for me to understand what that AIs do wrong:
> Overuse of "quietly" and similar adverbs to convey subtle importance or understated power.
But this in fact instructs the assistant to start overusing the word 'quietly' rather than stop overusing it.
This is then counteracted a bit with the 'avoid the following...' but this means the file is full of contradictions.
Instead you'd need to say:
"Don't overuse 'quietly', use ... instead"
So while this is a great idea and list, I feel the execution is muddled by the explanation of what it is. I'd separate the presentation to us the user of assistants and the intended consumer, the actual assistants.
I've had claude rewrite it and put it in this gist:
https://gist.github.com/abuisman/05c766310cae4725914cd414639...
Replies
I completely agree. This is a good list, but a poor prompt.
Also, I sometimes find a sort of Streisand effect: when you tell the LLM to avoid something is starts doing it more. Like, if you say "don't use delve" it contains the words "use delve" which, amongst a larger context, seems to get picked up.
I have more success telling the LLM to write in the style of a particular author I like. It seems to activate different linguistic patterns and feel less generic.
Then, I make an "editor agent" comb through, looking for tropes and rewording them. Their sole focus is eliminating the tropes, which seems to work better.
The source doc and the gist name dozens of specific bad patterns by label (“Negative Parallelism,” “Gerund Fragment Litany,” etc.) and repeat examples of them.
An LLM guide would do better to avoid every one of those labels and examples, since the whole point is not to prime the pattern.
Instead each instruction should describe the positive shape of good writing – what a well-constructed sentence, paragraph, or piece actually looks like.
Following this line, here is Claude rewriting OP:
https://gist.github.com/abuisman/05c766310cae4725914cd414639...
// This post’s typography and Oxford commas by human hands.