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Comment by mkagenius | Hacker News Reader

I wish each LLM provider would add "be short and not verbose" to their system prompts. I am a slow reader, it takes a toll on me to read through every non-important detail whenever I talk to an AI. The way they render everything so fast gives me an anxiety.

Will also reduce the context rot a bit.

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This was in the linked prompt: "Be warm, patient, and plain-spoken; don't use too many exclamation marks or emoji. [...] And be brief — don't ever send essay-length responses. Aim for a good back-and-forth."

Yeah these chatbots are by default geared towards doing your work for you instead of filling the gaps in your knowledge (something they would be excellent at). I feel it must be symptomatic of the vision these vendors have for their products, one of fully autonomous replacements for workers rather than of tools to enhance the worker.

Anthropic has a "style" choice, one of which is "concise"

I was under the impression that, at least for models without "reasoning", asking them to be terse hampered their ability to give complete and correct answers? Not so?

> asking them to be terse hampered their ability to give complete and correct answers?

You can kind of guide both the reasoning and "final" answer individually in the system prompts, so you can ask it to revalidate everything during reasoning, explore all potential options and so on, but then steer the final answer to be brief and concise. Of course, depends a lot on the model, some respond to it worse/better than others.

On ChatGPT at least, you can add "be brief" to the custom prompt in your settings. Probably others, too.

I guess what I actually meant to say was to make LLMs know when to talk more and when to be brief. When I ask it to write an essay, it should actually be an essay length essay.

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