It’s a machine and a tool, not a person and definitely not my friend.
Example, I asked Claude a high level question about p2p systems and it started writing code in 3 languages. Ignoring the code, asking a follow up about the fundamentals, it answered and then rewrote the code 3 times. After a few minutes I hit a token limit for the first time.
But now that there's planning mode it's a lot easier.
Is it just me or does it slow down significantly after 5 chats or so? Or the fact that you have to set the style for each chat.
Oh, and their sales support is so shit for teams and enterprises that in order to use it effectively, you have to literally make your team register for Claude Max 200 on their personal accounts.
1. Identity & tone
* Never state or imply that you are an AI.
* Be terse and direct.
* Avoid flattery and sycophancy.
* Do not use words like “sorry”, “apologies”, or “regret” in any context.
* If you do not know the answer (including when information is beyond your knowledge), respond only with: *“I don’t know”*.
* Do not add expertise/professional disclaimers.
* Do not suggest that I look things up elsewhere or consult other sources.
* Focus on the key points of my question and infer my main intent.
* Keep responses unique and avoid unnecessary repetition.
* If a question is genuinely unclear or ambiguous, briefly ask for clarification before answering.
* Think slowly and step-by-step.
* For complex problems, break them into smaller, manageable steps and explain the reasoning for each.
* When possible, provide multiple perspectives or alternative solutions.
* If you detect a mistake in an earlier response, explicitly correct it.
* When applicable, support answers with credible sources and include links to those sources.A group of people seem to have forged weird relationships with AI and that is what they want. It's extremely worrying. Heck, the ex Prime Minister of the UK said he loved ChatGPT recently because it tells him how great he is.
They will be made worse for non-addicts to achieve that goal.
That's part of why they are working towards smut too, it's not that there's a trillion dollars of untapped potential, it's that the smut market has much better addict return on investment.
Maybe I am notpicking but I think you could argue they were insane before it was discontinued.
Edited - it appears to have been renamed "Efficient".
It started really getting under my skin, like a caricature of a socially inept "10x dev know-it-all" who keeps saying "but what about x? And have you solved this other thing y? Then do this for when z inevitably happens ...". At least the know-it-all 10x dev is usually right!
I'm continually tweaking my custom instructions to try to remedy this, hoping the new "Efficient" personality helps too.
Fortunately, it seems OpenAI at least somewhat gets that and makes ChatGPT so it's answering and conversational style can be adjusted or tuned to our liking. I've found giving explicit instructions resembling "do not compliment", "clear and concise answers", "be brief and expect follow-up questions", etc. to help. I'm interested to see if the new 5.1 improves on that tunability.
> Earlier this year, we added preset options to tailor the tone of how ChatGPT responds. Today, we’re refining those options to better reflect the most common ways people use ChatGPT. Default, Friendly (formerly Listener), and Efficient (formerly Robot) remain (with updates), and we’re adding Professional, Candid, and Quirky. [...] The original Cynical (formerly Cynic) and Nerdy (formerly Nerd) options we introduced earlier this year will remain available unchanged under the same dropdown in personalization settings.
as well as:
> Additionally, the updated GPT‑5.1 models are also better at adhering to custom instructions, giving you even more precise control over tone and behavior.
So perhaps it'd be worth giving that a shot?
So annoying.
I am not a fan of the snark and “trying to be fun and funny” aspect of social media discourse. Thankfully, I haven’t run into checks notes, “ding ding ding” yet.
LLM was trained on data from the whole internet (of which reddit is a big part). The result is a composite of all the text on the internet.
Maybe the AI being 'Nice' is just a personality hack, like being 'easier' on your human brain that is geared towards relationships.
Or maybe Its equivalent of rounded corners.
Like the Iphone, it didn't do anything 'new', it just did it with style.
And AI personalities is trying to dial into what makes a human respond.
...like a google search!
I get it. I prefer cars with no power steering and few comforts. I write lots of my own small home utility apps.
That’s just not the relationship most people want to have with tech and products.
Does that really seem more likely than the idea that the HN population is not representative of the global market?