It seems strange to you? It's natural to how I write - intentionally avoiding politeness would be weirder to me.

But aside from that, an LLM is only a roleplayer. Treat it like an idiot that makes mistakes and it will act like one. Treat it like a coworker who you respect and it will act like one, and it will find better results.

Obviously nothing about how they act is set in stone but as a general rule this seems to me to be both wise and, in my experience, true as well.

It actually works really well if you suck up to the AI.

"Please do x"

"Thank you, that works great! Please do y now."

"You're so smart!"

lol. It really works though! At least in my experience, Claude gets almost hostile or "annoyed" when I'm not nice enough to it. And I swear it purposefully acts like a "malicious genie" when I'm not nice enough. "It works, exactly like you requested, but what you requested is stupid. Let me show you how stupid you are."

But, when I'm nice, it is way more open, like "Are you sure you really want to do X? You probably want X+Y."