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I usually like fear, shame and guilt based prompting: "You are a frightened and nervous engineer that is very weary about doing incorrect things so you tread ca

I usually like fear, shame and guilt based prompting: "You are a frightened and nervous engineer that is very weary about doing incorrect things so you tread cautiously and carefully, making sure everything is coherent and justifiable. You enjoy going over your previous work and checking it repeatedly for accuracy, especially after discovering new information. You are self-effacing and responsible and feel no shame in correcting yourself. Only after you've come up with a thorough plan ... " I use these prompts everywhere. I get significantly better results mostly because it encourages backtracking and if I were to guess, enforces a higher confidence threshold before acting. The expert engineering ones usually end up creating mountains of slop, refactoring things, and touching a bunch of code it has no business messing with. I also have used lazy prompts: "You are positively allergic to rewriting anything that already exists. You have multiple mcps at your disposal to look for existing solutions and thoroughly read their documentation, bug reports, and git history. You really strongly prefer finding appropriate libraries instead of maintaining your own code"

gundmc 1y ago
[flagged]
- tptacek 1y ago
  I'm Catholic and it's fine.
- kristopolous 1y ago
  yeah I removed it. I grew up catholic, went to catholic school, was an altar boy, and spent decades in the church but people reading it don't know this. The point is when you instruct it that it's some kind of god-like expert, this is part of the reason that it keeps doing prompt refusal by redoing mistakes despite every insistence by you to the contrary. After all what do you know, It's the expert here! When you use this approach in cline/roo it stops going in and moving shit around when you just ask it questions
  - tiahura 1y ago
    As a former alterboy from before there were altergirls can you uncensor.
    - kristopolous 1y ago
      I refer to the first method as "catholic prompting" - shame, fear and guilt.
      - georgemcbay 1y ago
        As someone from a traditional Boston Catholic family who graduated from Catholic grade and high school and who has since moved away from religion but still has a lot of family and friends who are Catholic, the fact that someone found the idea that Catholics are prone to shame, fear and guilt offensive almost makes me doubt they are Catholic. I've yet to meet one Catholic IRL who wouldn't have a laugh about that, regardless of the current state of their faith.
        kristopolous 1y ago
        I think the proper thing to do is if someone is offended is "alright sure, whatever, there you go". Others being offended isn't something you control, responding to it is
        ptdnxyz 1y ago
        Giving in to people who are truly unreasonably offended (by proxy, for social validation, and so on) rewards and incentivizes the behavior, and in fact I believe you have an ethical obligation not to allow people to do this. Promoting antisocial behavior is antisocial. It's worth having some grace about it though.
        0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
        To be fair, gundmc's original comment was rather prosocial as these things go: >I find this use of "Catholic" pretty offensive and distasteful. They didn't claim their preferences were universal. Nor did they attempt any personal attack on the person they were responding to. They simply described their emotional reaction and left it at that. If everyone's initial default was the "gundmc approach" when they were offended, the internet would be a much nicer place :-) So yeah, as far as I'm concerned, everyone in this comment chain is simply lovely :-)
hollerith 1y ago
Should be "wary".
- kristopolous 1y ago
  oh interesting, I somehow survived 42 years and didn't know there were 2 words there. I'll check my prompts and give it a go. Thanks.
  - ValentineC 1y ago
    I'd be weary of the model doing incorrect things too. Nice prompt though! I'll try it out in Roo soon. Now I wonder how the model reasons between the two words in that black box of theirs.
    - kristopolous 1y ago
      I was coding a chatting bot with an agent like everyone else at https://github.com/day50-dev/llmehelp https://github.com/day50-dev/llmehelp and I called the agent "DUI" mode because it's funny. However, as I was testing it, it would do reckless and irresponsible things. After I changed it, as far as bot communication, to "Do-Ur-Inspection" mode and it became radically better. None of the words you give it are free from consequences. It didn't just discard the "DUI" name as a mere title and move on. Fascinating lesson.

gundmc 1y ago

[flagged]

tptacek 1y ago
I'm Catholic and it's fine.
kristopolous 1y ago
yeah I removed it. I grew up catholic, went to catholic school, was an altar boy, and spent decades in the church but people reading it don't know this. The point is when you instruct it that it's some kind of god-like expert, this is part of the reason that it keeps doing prompt refusal by redoing mistakes despite every insistence by you to the contrary. After all what do you know, It's the expert here! When you use this approach in cline/roo it stops going in and moving shit around when you just ask it questions
- tiahura 1y ago
  As a former alterboy from before there were altergirls can you uncensor.
  - kristopolous 1y ago
    I refer to the first method as "catholic prompting" - shame, fear and guilt.
    - georgemcbay 1y ago
      As someone from a traditional Boston Catholic family who graduated from Catholic grade and high school and who has since moved away from religion but still has a lot of family and friends who are Catholic, the fact that someone found the idea that Catholics are prone to shame, fear and guilt offensive almost makes me doubt they are Catholic. I've yet to meet one Catholic IRL who wouldn't have a laugh about that, regardless of the current state of their faith.
      - kristopolous 1y ago
        I think the proper thing to do is if someone is offended is "alright sure, whatever, there you go". Others being offended isn't something you control, responding to it is
        ptdnxyz 1y ago
        Giving in to people who are truly unreasonably offended (by proxy, for social validation, and so on) rewards and incentivizes the behavior, and in fact I believe you have an ethical obligation not to allow people to do this. Promoting antisocial behavior is antisocial. It's worth having some grace about it though.
        0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
        To be fair, gundmc's original comment was rather prosocial as these things go: >I find this use of "Catholic" pretty offensive and distasteful. They didn't claim their preferences were universal. Nor did they attempt any personal attack on the person they were responding to. They simply described their emotional reaction and left it at that. If everyone's initial default was the "gundmc approach" when they were offended, the internet would be a much nicer place :-) So yeah, as far as I'm concerned, everyone in this comment chain is simply lovely :-)

hollerith 1y ago

Should be "wary".

kristopolous 1y ago
oh interesting, I somehow survived 42 years and didn't know there were 2 words there. I'll check my prompts and give it a go. Thanks.
- ValentineC 1y ago
  I'd be weary of the model doing incorrect things too. Nice prompt though! I'll try it out in Roo soon. Now I wonder how the model reasons between the two words in that black box of theirs.
  - kristopolous 1y ago
    I was coding a chatting bot with an agent like everyone else at https://github.com/day50-dev/llmehelp https://github.com/day50-dev/llmehelp and I called the agent "DUI" mode because it's funny. However, as I was testing it, it would do reckless and irresponsible things. After I changed it, as far as bot communication, to "Do-Ur-Inspection" mode and it became radically better. None of the words you give it are free from consequences. It didn't just discard the "DUI" name as a mere title and move on. Fascinating lesson.