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Comment by Me1000 | Hacker News Reader

Claude has a sycophancy problem too. I actually ended up canceling my subscription because I got sick of being "absolutely right" about everything.

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I've had fun putting "always say X instead of 'You're absolutely right'" in my llm instructions file, it seems to listen most of the time. For a while I made it 'You're absolutely goddamn right' which was slightly more palatable for some reason.

I've found that it still can't really ground me when I've played with it. Like, if I tell it to be honest (or even brutally honest) it goes wayyyyyyyyy too far in the other direction and isn't even remotely objective.

Yeah I tried that once following some advice I saw on another hn thread and the results were hilarious, but not at all useful. It aggressively nitpicked every detail of everything I told it to do, and never made any progress. And it worded all of these nitpicks like a combination of the guy from the ackchyually meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ackchyually-actually-guy) and a badly written Sherlock Holmes.

My advice would be: It can't agree with you if you don't tell it what you think. So don't. Be careful about leading questions (clever hans effect) though.

So better than "I'm thinking of solving x by doing y" is "What do you think about solving x by doing y" but better still is "how can x be solved?" and only mention "y" if it's spinning its wheels.

Have it say 'you're absolutely fucked'! That would be very effective as a little reminder to be startled, stop, and think about what's being suggested.

Compared to GPT-5 on today's defaults? Claude is good.

No, it isn't "good", it's grating as fuck. But OpenAI's obnoxious personality tuning is so much worse. Makes Anthropic look good.

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