alt Hacker NewsIf you were Meta designing this chatbot, would you plant hidden instructions for it in public pages, increasing the size of the page, and leaking what is internal info for everyone to see? Is this the natural design choice? Or would you give the chatbot its own API with the same text + the relevant instructions? Does not seem to me to be a sensible design choice. We are not in the days of using hidden HTML to communicate with internal subsystems.
Replies
SoftTalker • today at 4:33 PM
An LLM coded it that way in a vibe session, nobody reviewed it critically, and so that's what it is.
neronuser • today at 8:23 AM
that is exactly what they would do, otherwise it wouldn't pass any review. Unless this was generated and reviewed by AI during their experimentation phase, but I doubt it very much.
Honestly, this is a clever way of doing this. It means the additional instructions are stored alongside the text they reference, which makes it easier for doc writers to keep in sync and it probably also makes it more effective since the bot is guaranteed to read it at the right time in the right context.
I doubt they actually send it with every request and hide it in CSS, it probably does some other kind of check (IP, user agent, token...). This also tracks with the fact it is now entirely gone - presumably they just fixed that if statement and it's again chatbot-only.