alt Hacker News> What works much better is to tell the model to take a step back and re-evaluate.
I desperately hate that modern tooling relies on “did you perform the correct prayer to the Omnissiah”
> to add some entropy to get it away from the local optimum
Is that what it does? I don't think thats what it does, technically.
I think thats just anthropomorphizing a system that behaves in a non deterministic way.
A more menaingful solution is almost always “do it multiple times”.
That is a solution that makes sense sometimes because the system is prob based, but even then, when youre hitting an opaque api which has multiple hidden caching layers, /shrug who knows.
This is way I firmly believing prompt engineering and prompt hacking is just fluff.
Its both mostly technically meaningless (observing random variance over a sample so small you cant see actual patterns) and obsolete once models/apis change.
Just ask Claude to rewrite your request “as a prompt for claude code” and use that.
I bet it wont be any worse than the prompt you write by hand.
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It definitely overcompensates to the point of defensiveness. They have all done so for years.
"Why did you do that?" (Me, just wanting to understand)
"You're right I should have done the opposite" (starts implementing the opposite without seeking approval, etc.
But if you agree with it it won't do that, so it isn't simply a case of randomly rerunning prompts.
Other than AI (and possibly npm packaging) where do you feel you have to rely on prayer? Additionally, most of human history has been the story of scientific advancement to a different point where people rely on prayer, so maybe suck it up buttercup is the best advice here? &emdash;