Hacker News Reader

Claude routinely stops and asks me clarifying questions before continuing, especially when the given extended thinking or doing research.

View on HN

Indeed, the ability to do so seems to depend more on how well your system prompt is laying out that workflow, than how "intelligent" the model is.

Haven’t we all met a smart person who never learned to think critically or in structured ways?

Hi, it’s me.

Prompting it to ask clarifying questions will make it ask questions it has seen before, not ask questions it needs you to clarify. So that doesn't solve the problem, it just causes other problems.

If it actually did solve the problem then they would train the models to act that way by default, so anything that you need to make smart prompts for has to be dumb.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com