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siestetoday at 3:34 PM1 replyview on HN

I have a different approach. Just treat all LLM queries as what they are, instructions to a computer program to generate a desired output. Neither niceties nor insults make a qualitative difference, so you might as well just skip them altogether.

It's a bit as if shell commands added im/politeness arguments that do nothing other than making you feel better about the interaction, like

    git pull --please
or

    ls --forthemillionthtime
I wouldn't use those either.

Replies

recursivetoday at 4:33 PM

See INTERCAL[0]

> If "PLEASE" does not appear often enough, the program is considered insufficiently polite, and the error message says this; if it appears too often, the program could be rejected as excessively polite.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL#Details