Hacker News Reader

Comment by gavinray | Hacker News Reader

Do you have Personalization Instructions set up for your LLM models?

You can make their responses fairly dry/brief.

I'm mostly using them via my own harnesses, so I have full control of the system prompts and so on. And no matter what I try, Gemini keeps "helpfully" adding code comments every now and then. With every other model, "- Don't add code comments" tends to be enough, but with Gemini I'm not sure how I could stop the comments from eventually appearing.

I'm pretty sure it writes comments for itself, not for the user. I always let the models comment as much as they want, because I feel it makes the context more robust, especially when cycling contexts often to keep them fresh.

There is a tradeoff though, as comments do consumer context. But I tend to pretty liberally dispense of instances and start with a fresh window.

> I'm pretty sure it writes comments for itself, not for the user

Yeah, that sounds worse than "trying to helpful". Read the code instead, why add indirection in that way, just to be able to understand what other models understand without comments?

The Indirection is on purpose, it works like a continued chain of thought.

Yeah, I'm just doubtful Gemini could ever be considered a "better model" if it needs to put "chain of thought" artifacts into my source code, considering that none of the other models seems to need that to write better code than Gemini.

I'd love to hear some examples!

I use LLM's outside of work primarily for research on academic topics, so mine is:

  Be a proactive research partner: challenge flawed or unproven ideas with evidence; identify inefficiencies and suggest better alternatives with reasoning; question assumptions to deepen inquiry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com