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Comment by precision1k | Hacker News Reader

I've developed a habit of adding into my prompts "please keep your response concise and succinct" or "I'm trying to cram, please only provide the minimum level of technical detail necessary to understand this topic"

I find it helps immensely but it'd be nice if I didn't have to do that.

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i tried using claude codes output style option to do something like this and it worked for like three prompts and then it was back to normal lol

I don't understand that complaint, although it seems to be a common one. The whole problem with the way models talk nowadays is that they are succinct to a fault, going to the extent of coining new buzzwords and misusing existing ones. What I want to see is a shift towards plain language.

I’ve had good results adding “also I’m a baby” to the end of all my requests for explanations

"I am a thickie thickie dum dum" works even better. Plus it is a good reminder.

Memento moroni!

Sounds like a good way to get even more refusals, LOL.

ELI5 always works

why so many people add 'please' when asking machine to do something? Was there actually research that when you SCREAM or curse it follows your instructions better?

P.S. Although my wife insists that I should stay polite in case AI overlords remember how I treat them ...

Probably because polite people are already in the habit of saying please when typing out requests in chat. We're not consciously thinking about it, regardless of whether a human or machine is on the other side.

Not to go all ying/yang about it, but just to give a parallel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war - you kinda need silence to draw a contrast with what's meant to be loud.

Separately, my boss confided in us that he's super abusive with his agent, wondering if we are too (no, lol). While I try not to read too much into this (which he doesn't make easy), I also can't help but not really notice a whole lot of amazing agentic delivery differences from his side. On the contrary, while the passion may improve his agent's performance, I'm not sure if it doesn't decrease his, upending the entire theatre.

I think about removing please/thanks, but then I accidentally add them back in during some edit/rewrite of the prompt... It's just how I'm used to asking for things

I'm polite to LLMs. It's not for the models it's for myself. If I start being rude to models then I might accidentally start being rude to other people as well.

Or "be brief and simple"

you could apply it on lifecycle hook level, probably the most appropriate place for it

add to your system prompt?

It only sticks to the instruction for maybe 3-4 turns. This is why when Anthropic released "concise output style" feature in claude code, it basically spams the model's context with "be concise" system reminders every other turn.

ya, but now i have this system that ive build that works with any ai agents, putting boundaries, gates every single time and it generate memories from the runs so it can inject them as needed.

just try kaplira, it will help u with that.

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