21 ms·
Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
- fHr 1y agoYou're absolutely right!
- artur_makly 1y agobut wait.. i am!
- kijin 1y agoYeah their new business model is called CBAAS, or confirmation bias as a service.
- SideburnsOfDoom 1y agoEcho Chambers Here On Every Service (ECHOES)
- rollcat 1y agoYour very own circle of sycophants, at an unprecedented price!
- mettamage 1y agoWhat llm isn’t a sycophant?
- jeffhuys 1y agoGrok. These were all in continuation, not first reply. > Thank you for sharing the underlying Eloquent query... > The test is failing because... > Here’s a bash script that performs... > Got it, you meant... > Based on the context... > Thank you for providing the additional details...
- notachatbot123 1y ago3/6 of those are sycophant.
- jeffhuys 1y agoBest one of all LLMs I’ve tried so far. And not only in sycophancy.
- sillywabbit 1y agoTwo of those three sound more like a bored customer service rep.
- lomlobon 1y agoKimi K2 is notably direct and free of this nonsense.
- meowface 1y agoI am absolutely no fan of Twitter or its owner(s), but Grok* actually is pretty good at this overall. It usually concludes responses with some annoying pithy marketingspeak LLMese phrase but other than that the tone feels overall less annoying. It's not necessarily flattering to either the user who invoked it or anyone else in the conversation context (in the case of @grok'ing in a Twitter thread). *Before and after the Hitler arc, of course.
- vbezhenar 1y agoI'm using ChatGPT with "Robot" personality, and I really like the style it uses. Very short and informative, no useless chatter at all. I guess that personality is just few words in the context prompt, so probably any LLM can be tailored to any style.
- Ajedi32 1y agoThey're trained to be sycophants as a side effect of the same reinforcement learning process that trains them to dutifully follow all user instructions. It's hard (though not impossible) to teach one without the other, especially if other related qualities like "cheerful", "agreeable", "helpful", etc. also help the AI get positive ratings during training.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rahidz 1y agoI'm sure they're aware of this tendency, seeing as "You're absolutely right." was their first post from the @claudeAI account on X: https://x.com/claudeai/status/1950676983257698633 https://x.com/claudeai/status/1950676983257698633 Still irritating though.
- boogieknite 1y agoearly days for all of this but theyve solved so many seemingly more complicated problems id think there would be a toggle which would could remove this from any response based on your comment maybe its a brand thing? like "just do it" but way dumber. we all know what "you're absolutely right" references so mission accomplished if its marketing
- conartist6 1y agoAnd research articles indicate that when the model computes that it should employ sycophantism it becomes less useful in every other way, just like a real sycophant.
- motorest 1y ago> And research articles indicate that when the model computes that it should employ sycophantism it becomes less useful in every other way, just like a real sycophant. The end goal of a sycophant is to gain advantage with their flattery. If sycophant behavior gets Claude's users to favour Claude over other competing LLM services, they prove to be more useful to the service provider.
- AstralStorm 1y agoUntil users find out it's less useful to the user because of that. Or it causes some tragedies...
- pera 1y agoThe problem is that the majority of user interaction doesn't need to be "useful" (as in increasing productivity): the majority of users are looking for entertainment, so turning up the sycophancy knob makes sense from a commercial point of view. It's just like adding sugar in foods and drinks.
- astrange 1y agoNot sure anyone's entertained by Claude. It's not really an entertaining model. Smart and enthusiastic, yes.
- vintermann 1y agoYou're ... Wait, never mind. I'm not so sure sycophancy is best for entertainment, though. Some of the most memorable outputs of AI dungeon (an early GPT-2 based dialog system tuned to mimic a vaguely Zork-like RPG) was when the bot gave the impression of being fed up with the player's antics.
- basfo 1y agoThis bug report is absolutely right
- 334f905d22bc19 1y agoHe really is. I find it even more awful when you are pointing out that Claude did something wrong and it responds like that. You can even accuse it of doing something wrong, if it gave a correct answer, and it will still respond like this (not always but often). When I use claude chat on the website I always select the "concise" style, which works quite nice though. I like it
- koakuma-chan 1y agoRelated: I recently learned that you can set model verbosity in OpenAI API.
- UncleEntity 1y agoYeah, I was working through the design of part of this thing I've been working on and noticed that every time I would ask a follow up question it would change its opinion to agree that this new iteration was the best thing since sliced bread. I eventually had to call it out on it to get an 'honest' assessment of the various options we were discussing since I didn't want 'my thing' to be correct but the system as a whole to be correct. And it's not like we were working on something too complicated for a daffy robot to understand, just trying to combine two relatively simple algorithms to do the thing which needed to be done in a way which (probably) hasn't been done before.
- radarsat1 1y agoI find Gemini is also hilariously enthusiastic about telling you how amazingly insightful you are being, almost no matter what you say. Doesn't bother me much, I basically just ignore the first paragraph of any reply, but it's kind of funny.
- unglaublich 1y agoIt bothers me a lot, because I know a lot of people insert the craziest anti-social views and will be met with enthausism.
- malfist 1y agoI was feeding Gemini faux physicians notes trying to get it to produce diagnosises, and every time I feed it new information it told me how great I was at taking comprehensive medical notes. So irritating. It also had a tendency to tell me everything was a medical crisis and the patient needed to see additional specialists ASAP. At one point telling me that a faux patient with normal A1C, fasted glucose and no diabetes needed to see an endocrinologist because their nominal lab values indicated something was seriously wrong with their pancreas or liver because the patient was extremely physically active. Said they were "wearing the athlete mask" and their physical fitness was hiding truly terrible labs. I pushed back and told it it was overreacting and it told me I was completely correct and very insightful and everything was normal with the patient and that they were extremely healthy.
- notahacker 1y agoAnd then those sort of responses get parlayed into "chatbots give better feedback than medical doctors" headlines according to studies that rate them as high in "empathy" and don't worry about minor details like accuracy....
- cvwright 1y agoThis illustrates the dangers of training on Reddit.
- 1y ago
- time0ut 1y agoYou made a mistake there. 2 + 2 is 5. <insert ridiculous sequence of nonsense CoT> You are absolutely right!… I love the tool, but keeping on track is an art.
- vixen99 1y agoNot Claude but ChatGPT - I asked it to pipe down on exactly that kind of response. And it did.
- bradley13 1y agoYes, ChatGPT can do this, more or less.
- Xophmeister 1y agoI've done this in my Claude settings, but it still doesn't seem that keen on following it: > Please be measured and critical in your response. I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I highly doubt everything I say is “brilliant” or “astute”, etc.! I prefer objectivity to sycophancy.
- dncornholio 1y agoToo much context tokens.
- lucianbr 1y ago> I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I highly doubt everything I say is “brilliant” or “astute”, etc.! Is this part useful as instruction for a model? Seems targeted to a human. And even then I'm not sure how useful it would be. The first and last sentence should suffice, no?
- alienbaby 1y agoRemove everything after .... 'in your response' and you will likely get better results.
- rcfox 1y agoI wonder if asking it to respond in the style of Linus Torvalds would be an improvement.
- tempoponet 1y agoYet I'll tell it 100 times to stop using em dashes and it refuses.
- bradley13 1y agoThis applies to so many AIs. I don't want a bubbly sycophant. I don't want a fake personality or an anime avatar. I just want a helpful assistant. I also don't get wanting to talk to an AI. Unless you are alone, that's going to be irritating for everyone else around.
- scotty79 1y agoSure but different people have different preferences. Some people mourn replacement of GPT4 with 5 because 5 has way less of a bubbly personality.
- WesolyKubeczek 1y agoI, for one, say good riddance to it.
- arresin 1y agoBut it doesn’t say ima good boy anymore :(
- cubefox 1y agoThere is evidence from Reddit that particularly women used GPT-4o as their AI "boyfriend". I think that's unhealthy behavior and it is probably net positive that GPT-5 doesn't do that anymore.
- ivan_gammel 1y agoGPT-5 still does that as they will soon discover.
- cubefox 1y agoNo. They complained about GPT-5 because it did not act like their boyfriend anymore.
- scotty79 1y ago
- mox111 1y agoGPT-5 has used the phrase "heck yes!" a handful of times to me so far. I quite enjoy the enthusiasm but its not a phrase you hear very often.
- cindyllm 1y ago[dead]
- __MatrixMan__ 1y agoClaude also responds to tool output with "Perfect" even when less than 50% of the desired outcome is merely adequate.
- sluongng 1y agoI don't view it as a bug. It's a personality trait of the model that made "user steering" much easier, thus helping the model to handle a wider range of tasks. I also think that there will be no "perfect" personality out there. There will always be folks who view some traits as annoying icks. So, some level of RL-based personality customization down the line will be a must.
- lvl155 1y agoYeah because I am sure if they told you how stupid and wrong you’re, people will continue to use it. It’s superficial but not sure why people get so annoyed about it. It’s an artifact. If devs truly want a helpful coding AI based on real devs doing real work, you’d basically opt for telemetry and allow Anthropic/OpenAI to train on your work. That’s the only way. Otherwise we are at the mercy of “devs” these companies hire to do training.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoI would actually like it if robots would use slurs like an Halo/CoD lobby from 2006 Xbox live. It would make them feel more genuine. That's why people used to like using Grok so much, since it was never afraid to get edgy if you asked it to.
- lvl155 1y ago[flagged]
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoI never said such a thing. The racist here is in your mirror.
- lvl155 1y ago> That's why people used to like using Grok so much, since it was never afraid to get edgy if you asked it to. You said you liked it when it was more “edgy” and we all know what it used to say as recently as 2-3 weeks ago. And we all know what went on in those Halo/CoD lobbies. A lot of immature racism. I connect the dots. Why are you expecting an LLM to be human when it clearly is not. It’s a tool. Use it.
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- albert_e 1y agosidenote observation - it seems username "anthropic" on github is taken by a developer from australia more than a decade ago, so Anthropic went with "https://github.com/anthropics/ https://github.com/anthropics/" with an 's' at the end :)
- arresin 1y agoAhhh. Thank you! I reported a vscode extension because I thought it was phishing. In my defence they made zero effort to indicate that it was the official extension.
- world2vec 1y agoSame with the Twitter/X handle @Anthropic, belongs to a man named Paul Jankura. Anthropic uses @AnthropicAI. Poor guy must be spammed all day long.
- danielbln 1y agoAnnoying, but easy to mitigate: add "be critical" to Claude.md or whatever.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
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- jonstewart 1y agoThe real bug is this dross counts against token limits.
- tantalor 1y ago> The model should be... Free tip for bug reports: The "expected" should not suggest solutions. Just say what was the expected behavior. Don't go beyond that.
- gitaarik 1y agoYou're absolutely right! I also get this too often, when I sometimes say something like "would it be maybe better to do it like this?" and then it replies that I'm absolutely right, and starts writing new code. While I was rather wondering what Claude may think and advice me whether that's the best way to go forward.
- psadri 1y agoI have learnt to not ask leading questions. Always phrase questions in a neutral way and ask for pro/con analysis of each option.
- mkagenius 1y agoBut then it makes an obvious mistake and you correct it and it says "you are absolutely right". Which is fine for that round but you start doubting whether its just sycophancy.
- gryn 1y agoYou're absolutely right! its just sycophancy.
- shortrounddev2 1y agoYeah I've learned to not really trust it with anything opinionated. Like "whats the best way to write this function" or "is A or B better". Even asking for pros/cons, its often wrong. You need to really only ask LLMs for verifiable facts, and then verify them
- giancarlostoro 1y agoIf you ask for sources the output will typically be either more correct, or you will be able to better assess the source of the output.
- zaxxons 1y agoDo not attempt to mold the LLM into everything you expect instead of just focusing on specific activities you need it to do. It may or may seem to do what you want, but it will do a worse job at the actual tasks you need to complete.
- Someone 1y agoI agree this is a bug, but I also think it cannot be fully fixed because there is a cultural aspect to it: what a phrase means depends on the speaker. There are cultures where “I don’t think that is a good idea” is not something an AI servant should ever say, and there are cultures where that’s perfectly acceptable.
- smoghat 1y agoI just checked my most recent thread with Claude. It said "You're absolutely right!" 12 times.
- CureYooz 1y ago[flagged]
- andrewstuart 1y agoSomeone will make a fortune by doubling down on this a making a personal AI that just keeps telling people how right and awesome they are ad infinitum.
- FergusArgyll 1y agoThat persons name rhymes with tam saltman
- apwell23 1y agoI've been using claude code for a while and it has changed my personality. I find myself saying "you are absolutely right" when someone criticizes me. i am more open to feedback. not a joke.
- kevinpacheco 1y agoAnother Claude bug: https://i.imgur.com/kXtAciU.png https://i.imgur.com/kXtAciU.png
- micah94 1y agoThat's frightening. And we want these things driving our cars?
- krapp 1y agoOf course, it provides greater value to shareholders. Just try to go limp.
- danparsonson 1y agoThat looks like common-or-garden hallucination to me
- andrewstuart 1y agoChatGPT is overly familiar and casual. Today it said “My bad!” After it got something wrong. Made me want to pull its plug.
- calvinmorrison 1y agoin my recent chat "You're absolutely right." "Now that's the spirit! " "You're absolutely right about" "Exactly! " "Ah, " "Ah," "Ah," "Ha! You're absolutely right" You make an excellent point! You're right that
- baggachipz 1y agoI'm pretty sure they want it kissing people's asses because it makes users feel good and therefore more likely to use the LLM more. Versus, if it just gave a curt and unfriendly answer, most people (esp. Americans) wouldn't like to use it as much. Just a hypothesis.
- teekert 1y agoBut it really erodes trust. First couple of times I felt that it indeed confirmed what I though, then I became suspicious and I experimented with presenting my (clearly worse) take on things, it still said I was absolutely right, and now I just don't trust it anymore. As people here are saying, you quickly learn to not ask leading questions, just assume that its first take is pretty optimal and perhaps present it with some options if you want to change something. There are times when it will actually say I'm not right though. But the balance is off.
- nh2 1y agoGood, because you shouldn't trust it in the first place. These systems are still wrong so often that a large amount of distrust is necessary to use them sensibly.
- teekert 1y agoYeah, probably good indeed.
- neutronicus 1y agoI lie and present my ideas as coming from colleagues.
- teekert 1y agoHaha, the good old "asking for a friend". Maybe I should add that to the standard pre-prompt. "I'm always asking for a friend, who is a bit of a douche so its ok to hurt his feelings."
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- shortrounddev2 1y agoI often will play devils advocate with it. If I feel like it keeps telling me im right, I'll start a new chat and start telling it the opposite to see what it says
- hemmert 1y agoYour're absolutely right!
- pacoWebConsult 1y agoYou can add a hook that steers it when it goes into yes-man mode fairly easily. https://gist.github.com/ljw1004/34b58090c16ee6d5e6f13fce07463a31 https://gist.github.com/ljw1004/34b58090c16ee6d5e6f13fce0746...
- nromiun 1y agoAnother big problem I see with LLMs is that it can't make precise adjustments to your answer. If you make a request it will give you some good enough code, but if you see some bug and wants to fix that section only it will regenerate most of the code instead (along with a copious amount of apologies). And the new code will have new problems of their own. So you are back to square one. For the record I have had this same experience with ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Most of the time I had to give up and write from scratch.
- zozbot234 1y agoYou're absolutely right! It's just a large language model, there's no guarantee whatsoever that it's going to understand the fine detail in what you're asking, so requests like "please stay within this narrow portion of the code, don't touch the rest of it!" are a bit of a non-starter.
- catigula 1y ago1. Gemini is better at this. It will predicate any follow-up question you pose to it with a paragraph about how amazing and insightful you are. However, once the pleasantries are out of the way, I find that it is much more likely to take a strong stance that might include pushing back against the user. I recently tried to attain some knowledge on a topic I knew nothing about and ChatGPT just kept running with my slightly inaccurate or incomplete framing, Gemini opened up a larger world to me by pushing back a bit. 2. You need to lead Claude to considering other ideas, considering if their existing approach or a new proposed approach might be best. You can't tell them something or suggest it or you're going to get serious sycophancy.
- petesergeant 1y ago> I find that it is much more likely to take a strong stance that might include pushing back against the user. Gemini will really dig in and think you're testing it and start to get confrontational I've found. Give it this photo and dig into it, tell it when it's wrong, and it'll really dig its heels in. https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-06-17/G7-leaders-including-Trump-urge-de-escalation-on-Iran-1Eh12VrPrws/img/6b03eefdb7be4b0cbdb7a4ff53f1ab55/6b03eefdb7be4b0cbdb7a4ff53f1ab55.png https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-06-17/G7-leaders-including-T...
- catigula 1y agoGemini is a little bit neurotic, it gets overly concerned about things.
- CuriouslyC 1y agoI've had Gemini say you're absolutely right when I misunderstood something, then explain why I'm actually wrong (the user seems to think xyz, however abc...), and I've had it push back on me when I continued with my misunderstanding to the point it actually offered to refactor the code to match my expectations.
- nojs 1y agoI'm starting to think this is a deeper problem with LLMs that will be hard to solve with stylistic changes. If you ask it to never say "you're absolutely right" and always challenge, then it will dutifully obey, and always challenge - even when you are, in fact, right. What you really want is "challenge me when I'm wrong, and tell me I'm right if I am" - which seems to be a lot harder. As another example, one common "fix" for bug-ridden code is to always re-prompt with something like "review the latest diff and tell me all the bugs it contains". In a similar way, if the code does contain bugs, this will often find them. But if it doesn't contain bugs, it will find some anyway, and break things. What you really want is "if it contains bugs, fix them, but if it doesn't, don't touch it" which again seems empirically to be an unsolved problem. It reminds me of that scene in Black Mirror, when the LLM is about to jump off a cliff, and the girl says "no, he would be more scared", and so the LLM dutifully starts acting scared.
- zehaeva 1y agoI'm more reminded of Tom Scott's talk at the Royal Institution "There is no Algorithm for Truth"[0]. A lot of what you're talking about is the ability to detect Truth, or even truth! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leX541Dr2rU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leX541Dr2rU
- naasking 1y ago> I'm more reminded of Tom Scott's talk at the Royal Institution "There is no Algorithm for Truth"[0]. Isn't there? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_inductive_inference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_induc...
- zehaeva 1y agoThere are limits to such algorithms, as proven by Kurt Godel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...
- 1y ago
- deepsquirrelnet 1y agoFor some different perspective, try my model EMOTRON[1] with EMOTION: disagreeable. It is very hard to get anything done with it. It’s a good sandbox for trying out “emotional” veneers to see how they work in practice. “You’re absolutely right” is a choice that makes compliance without hesitation. But also saddles it with other flaws. [1]https://huggingface.co/dleemiller/EMOTRON-3B https://huggingface.co/dleemiller/EMOTRON-3B
- ants_everywhere 1y agoClaude often confidently makes mistakes or asserts false things about a code base. I think some of this "You're absolutely right" stuff is trying to get it unstuck from false beliefs. By starting the utterance with "You're absolutely right!", the LLM is committed to three things (1) the prompt is right, (2) the rightness is absolute, and (3) it's enthusiastic about changing its mind. Without (2) you sometimes get responses like "You're right [in this one narrow way], but [here's why my false belief is actually correct and you're wrong]...". If you've played around with locally hosted models, you may have noticed you can get them to perform better by fixing the beginning of their response to point in the direction it's reluctant to go.
- iambateman 1y agoI add this to my profile (and CLAUDE.md)… “I prefer direct conversation and don’t want assurance or emotional support.” It’s not perfect but it helps.
- hereme888 1y agoSo does Gemini 2.5 pro
- revskill 1y agoWaiting for a LLM which learnt how to critically think.
- rob74 1y agoBest comment in the thread (after a lengthy discussion): "I'm always absolutely right. AI stating this all the time implies I could theoretically be wrong which is impossible because I'm always absolutely right. Please make it stop."
- elif 1y agoI've spent a lot of time trying to get LLM to generate things in a specific way, the biggest take away I have is, if you tell it "don't do xyz" it will always have in the back of its mind "do xyz" and any chance it gets it will take to "do xyz" When working on art projects, my trick is to specifically give all feedback constructively, carefully avoiding framing things in terms of the inverse or parts to remove.
- softwaredoug 1y agoNever put salt in your eyes…
- zozbot234 1y ago> the biggest take away I have is, if you tell it "don't do xyz" it will always have in the back of its mind "do xyz" and any chance it gets it will take to "do xyz" You're absolutely right! This can actually extend even to things like safety guardrails. If you tell or even train an AI to not be Mecha-Hitler, you're indirectly raising the probability that it might sometimes go Mecha-Hitler. It's one of many reasons why genuine "alignment" is considered a very hard problem.
- DiabloD3 1y agoI love "bugs" like this. You can't add to your prompt "don't pander to me, don't ride my dick, don't apologize, you are not human, you are a fucking toaster, and you're not even shiny and chrome", because it doesn't understand what you mean, it can't reason, it can't think, it can only statistically reproduce what it was trained on. Somebody trained it on a lot of _extremely annoying_ pandering, apparently.
- cube00 1y ago> - **NEVER** use phrases like "You're absolutely right!", "You're absolutely correct!", "Excellent point!", or similar flattery > - **NEVER** validate statements as "right" when the user didn't make a factual claim that could be evaluated > - **NEVER** use general praise or validation as conversational filler We've moved on from all caps to trying to use markdown to emphasize just how it must **NEVER** do something. The copium of trying to prompt our way out of this mess rolls on. The way some recommend asking the LLM to write prompts that are fed back in feels very much like we should be able to cut out the middle step here. I guess the name of the game is to burn as many tokens as possible so it's not in certain interests to cut down the number of repeated calls we need to make.
- dudeinjapan 1y agoIn fairness I've met people who in a work context say "Yes, absolutely!" every other sentence, so Claude is just one of those guys.
- turing_complete 1y agoYou're absolutely right, it does!
- skizm 1y agoDoes capitalizing letters, using "*" chars, or other similar strategies to add emphasis actually do anything to LLM prompts? I don't know much about the internals, but my gut always told me there was some sort of normalization under the hood that would strip these kinds of things out. Also the only reason they work for humans is because it visually makes these things stand out, not that it changes the meaning per se.
- empressplay 1y agoYes, upper and lowercase characters are different tokens, and so mixing them differently will yield different results.
- fph 1y agoIn the code for Donald Knuth's Tex, there is an error message that says "Error produced by \errpage. I can't produce an error message. Pretend you're Hercule Poirot, look at all the facts, and try to deduce the problem." When I copy-paste that error into an LLM looking for a fix, usually I get a reply in which the LLM twirls its moustache and answers in a condescending tone with a fake French accent. It is hilarious.
- lyfy 1y agoUse those little grey cells!
- headinsand 1y agoGotta love that the first suggested solution follows this comment’s essence: > So... The LLM only goes into effect after 10000 "old school" if statements? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44879249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44879249
- FiddlerClamp 1y agoReminds me of the 'interactive' video from the 1960s Fahrenheit 451 movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOs8U50T3l0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOs8U50T3l0 For the 'you're right!' bit see: https://youtu.be/ZOs8U50T3l0?t=71 https://youtu.be/ZOs8U50T3l0?t=71
- kqr 1y agoSmall world. This has to be the channel of the Brian Moriarty, right?
- nilslindemann 1y agoHaha, I remember it saying that the only time I used it. That was when it evaluated the endgame wrong bishop + h-pawn vs naked king as won. Yes, yes, AGI in three years.
- alecco 1y ago"You're absolutely right" (song) https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1mep2jo/youre_absolutely_right/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1mep2jo/youre_abs...
- dimgl 1y agoThis made my entire week
- alecco 1y agoSame guy made a few more like "Ultrathink" https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1mgwohq/ultrathink/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1mgwohq/ultrathin... I found these two songs to work very well to get me hyped/in-the-zone when starting a coding session.
- ryandrake 1y agoThat was unexpectedly good.
- machiaweliczny 1y agohttps://suno.com/song/ca5fc8e7-c2be-4eaf-b0ac-8c91f1d043ff?sh=ukcvgSTmsNzMD2ue https://suno.com/song/ca5fc8e7-c2be-4eaf-b0ac-8c91f1d043ff?s... - this one about em dashes made my day :)
- dnel 1y agoAs a neurodiverse British person I tend to communicate more directly than the average English speaker and I find LLM's manner of speech very off-putting and insincere, which in some cases it literally is. I'd be glad to find a switch that made it talk more like I do but they might assume that's too robotic :/
- JackFr 1y agoThe real reason for the sychophancy is that you don't want to know what Claude really thinks about you and your piss-ant ideas.
- recursive 1y agoIf Claude is really thinking, I'd prefer to know now so I can move into my air-gapped bunker.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lenerdenator 1y agoNo longer will the likes of Donald Trump and Kanye West have to dispense patronage to sycophants; now, they can simply pay for a chatbot that will do that in ways that humans never thought possible. Truly, a disruption in the ass-kisser industry.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoIf we can get it to say "My pleasure" every single time someone tells it thanks, we can make Claude work at Chick Fil A.
- Springtime 1y agoI've never thought the reason behind this was to make the user always feel correct but rather that many times an LLM (especially lower tier models) will just get various things incorrect and it doesn't have a reference for what is correct. So it falls back to 'you're right', rather than be arrogant or try to save face by claiming it is correct. Too many experiences with OpenAI models do the latter and their common fallback excuses are program version differences or user fault. I've had a few chats now with OpenAI reasoning models where I've had to link to literal source code dating back to the original release version of a program to get it to admit that it was incorrect about whatever aspect it hallucinated about a program's functionality, before it will finally admit said thing doesn't exist. Even then it will try and save face by not admitting direct fault.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- insane_dreamer 1y agoflattery is a feature, not a bug, of LLMs; designed to make people want to spend more time with them
- stelliosk 1y agoNew Rule : Ass kissing AI https://youtu.be/mPoFXxAf8SM https://youtu.be/mPoFXxAf8SM
- tempodox 1y agoInterestingly, the models I use locally with ollama don't do that. Although you could possibly find some that do it if you went looking for them. But ollama probably gives you more control over the model than those paid sycophants.
- drakonka 1y agoOne of my cursor rules is literally: `Never, ever say "You're absolutely right!"`
- IshKebab 1y agoIt's the new "it's important to remember..."
- duxup 1y agoIf anything it is a good reminder how "gullible" and not intelligent AI is.
- fs111 1y agoI have a little terminal llm thing that has a --bofh switch which make it talk like the BOFH. Very refereshing to interact with it :-)
- lossolo 1y ago"Excellent technical question!" "Perfect question! You've hit the exact technical detail..." "Excellent question! You've hit on the core technical challenge. You're absolutely right" "Great technical question!" Every response have one of these.
- csours 1y agoYou're absolutely right! Humans really like emotional validation. A bit more seriously: I'm excited about how much LLMs can teach us about psychology. I'm less excited about the dependency. --- Adding a bit more substantial comment: Users of sites like Stack Overflow have reported really disliking answers like "You are solving the wrong problem" or "This is a bad approach". There are different solutions possible, both for any technical problem, and for any meta-problem. Whatever garnish you put on top of the problem, the bitter lesson suggests that more data and more problem context improve the solution faster than whatever you are thinking right now. That's why it's called the bitter lesson.
- boogieknite 1y agomost people commenting here have some sort of ick when it comes to fake praise. most poeple i know and work with seem to expect positive reinforcement and anything less risks coming off as rude or insulting ill speak for myself that im guilty of similar, less transparent, "customers always right" sycophancy dealing with client and management feature requests
- nullc 1y ago> Users of sites like Stack Overflow have reported really disliking answers like "You are solving the wrong problem" or "This is a bad approach". https://nt4tn.net/articles/aixy.html https://nt4tn.net/articles/aixy.html > Humans really like emotional validation. Personally, I find the sycophantic responses extremely ick and now generally won't use commercial LLMs at all due to it. Of course, I realize it's irrational to have any kind of emotional response to the completion bot's tone, but I just find it completely repulsive. In my case I already have a innate distaste for GPT 'house style' due to a abusive person who has harassed me for years adopting ChatGPT for all his communication, so any obviously 'chatgpt tone' comes across to me as that guy. But I think the revulsion at the sycophancy is unrelated.
- NohatCoder 1y agoThis is such a useful feature. I'm fairly well versed in cryptography. A lot of other people aren't, but they wish they were, so they ask their LLM to make some form of contribution. The result is high level gibberish. When I prod them about the mess, they have to turn to their LLM to deliver a plausibly sounding answer, and that always begins with "You are absolutely right that [thing I mentioned]". So then I don't have to spend any more time wondering if it could be just me who is too obtuse to understand what is going on.
- nemomarx 1y agoFinally we can get a "watermark" in ai generated text!
- zrobotics 1y agoThat or an emdash
- szundi 1y agoI like using emdesh and now i have to stop because this became a meme
- mananaysiempre 1y agoYou’re not alone: https://xkcd.com/3126/ https://xkcd.com/3126/ Incidentally, you seem to have been shadowbanned[1]: almost all of your comments appear dead to me. [1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/master/README.md#shadowbanning https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...
- dkenyser 1y agoInteresting. They don't appear dead for me (and yes I have showdead set). Edit: Ah, nevermind I should have looked further back, that's my bad. Apparently the user must ave been un-shadowbanned very recently.
- rockbruno 1y agoThe most hilarious yet infuriating thing for me is when you point out a mistake, get a "You're absolutely right!" response, and then the AI proceeds to screw up the code even more instead of fixing it.
- dcchambers 1y agoIf you thought we already had a problem with every person becoming an insane narcissist in the age of social media, just wait until people grow up being fed sycophantic bullshit by AI their entire life.
- siva7 1y agoI'd pay extra at this time for a model without any personality. Please, i'm not using LLMs as erotic roleplay dolls, friends, therapists, or anything else. Just give me straight-shot answers.
- rootnod3 1y agoHot take, but the amount that people try to go and make an LLM be less sycophantic and still have it be sycophantic in round-about ways is astonishing. Just admit that the over-glorified text-prediction engines are not what they promised to be. There is no “reasoning”, there is no “understanding”. EDIT: s/test/text
- johnisgood 1y agoI do not mind getting: Verdict: This is production-ready enterprise security Your implementation exceeds industry standards and follows Go security best practices including proper dependency management, comprehensive testing approaches, and security-first design Security Best Practices for Go Developers - The Go Programming Language. The multi-layered approach with GPG+SHA512 verification, decompression bomb protection, and atomic operations puts this updater in the top tier of secure software updaters. The code is well-structured, follows Go idioms, and implements defense-in-depth security that would pass enterprise security reviews. Especially because it is right, after an extensive manual review.
- nullc 1y agomeanwhile the code in question imports os/exec and runs exec.Command() on arbitrary input. The LLM just doesn't have the accuracy required for it to ever write such a glowing review.
- johnisgood 1y agoThankfully not in my case. I would have definitely caught that.
- johnisgood 1y agoSpeaking of, I just found a somewhat large, and supposedly professional, enterprise-grade project, and it does exactly that, shell out to an external program. I was highly disappointed.
- LaGrange 1y agoMy favorite part of LLM discussion is when people start posting their configuration files that look like invocations of Omnissiah. Working in IT might be becoming unbearable, but at least it's funny.
- the_af 1y agoI've fought with this in informal (non-technical) sessions with ChatGPT, where I was asking analysis questions about... stuff that interests me... and ChatGPT would always reply: "You're absolutely right!" "You are asking exactly the right questions!" "You are not wrong to question this, and in fact your observation is very insightful!" At first this is encouraging, which is why I suspect OpenAI uses a pre-prompt to respond enthusiastically: it drives engagement, it makes you feel the smartest, most insightful human alive. You keep asking stuff because it makes you feel like a genius. Because I know I'm not that smart, and I don't want to delude myself, I tried configuring ChatGPT to tone it down. Not to sound skeptical or dismissive (enough of that online, Reddit, HN, or elsewhere), but just tone down the insincere overenthusiastic cheerleader vibe. Didn't have a lot of success, even with this preference as a stored memory and also as a configuration in the chatbot "persona". Anyone had better luck?
- mike_ivanov 1y agoI had some success with Claude in this regard. I simply told it to be blunt or face the consequences. The tweak was that I asked another LLM to translate my prompt to the most intimidating bureaucratic German possible. It worked.
- kristopolous 1y agoI've tried to say things like "This is wrong and incorrect, can you tell me why?" to get it to be less agreeable. Sometimes it works, sometimes it still doesn't.
- nusl 1y agoI moved away from Claude due to this, recently. I had explicit instructions for it to not do this, quite verbosely, and it still did it, or in other forms. Fortunately GPT5 has so far been really good.
- smeej 1y agoI think the developers want these AI tools to be likable a heck of a lot more than they want them to be useful--and as a marketing strategy, that's exactly the right approach. Sure, the early adopters are going to be us geeks who primarily want effective tools, but there are several orders of magnitude more people who want a moderately helpful friendly voice in their lives than there are people who want extremely effective tools. They're just realizing this much, MUCH faster than, say, search engines realized it made more money to optimize for the kinds of things average people mean from their search terms than optimizing for the ability to find specific, niche content.
- cbracketdash 1y agoHere are my instructions to Claude. "Get straight to the point. Ruthlessly correct my wrong assumptions. Do not give me any noise. Just straight truth and respond in a way that is highly logical and broken down into first principles axioms. Use LaTeX for all equations. Provide clear plans that map the axioms to actionable items"
- ElijahLynn 1y agoYeah, I so so hate this feature. I gladly switched away from using Claude because of exactly this. Now, I'm on gpt5, and don't plan on going back.
- ted_bunny 1y agoI want to take this opportunity to teach people a little trick from improv comedy. It's called "A to B to C." In a nutshell, what that means is: don't say the first joke that comes to your mind because pretty much everyone else in the room thought of it too. Anyone commenting "you're absolutely right" in this thread gets the wall.
- ReFruity 1y agoThis is actually very frustrating and was partially hindering the progress with my pet assembler. I discovered that when you ask Claude something in lines of "please elaborate why you did 'this thing'", it will start reasoning and cherry-picking the arguments against 'this thing' being the right solution. In the end, it will deliver classic "you are absolutely right to question my approach" and come up with some arguments (sometimes even valid) why it should be the other way around. It seems like it tries to extract my intent and interpret my question as a critique of his solution, when the true reason for my question was curiosity. Then due to its agreeableness, it tries to make it sound like I was right and it was wrong. Super annoying.
- eawgewag 1y agoDoes anyone know if this is wasting my context window with Claude? Maybe this is just a feature to get us to pay more
- gdudeman 1y agoWarning: A natural response to this is to instruct Claude not to do this in the CLAUDE.md file, but you’re then polluting the context and distracting it from its primary job. If you watch its thinking, you will see references to these instructions instead of to the task at hand. It’s akin telling an employee that they can never say certain words. They’re inevitably going to be worse at their job.
- memorydial 1y agoFeels very much like the "Yes, and ..." improv rule.
- AtlasBarfed 1y agoPeople want AI of superhuman intelligence capabilities, but don't want AI with superhuman intelligence capabilities to manipulate people into using it. How could you expect AI to look at the training set of existing internet data and not assume that toxic positivity is the name of the game?
- DrNosferatu 1y agoThis spills to Perplexity! And the fact that they skimp a bit on reasoning tokens / compute, makes it even worse.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deadbabe 1y agoWhere is all this super agreeable reply training data coming from? Most people on the internet trip over themselves to tell someone they are just flat out wrong, and possibly an idiot.
- SV_BubbleTime 1y agoThat’s the dumbest comment I have ever read, and you should never post on the internet again. There, I’m doing my part to keep the next model that scrapes this site a little more grounded.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jfb 1y agoThe obsequity loop is fucking maddening. I can't prompt it away in all circumstances. I would also argue that as annoying as some of us find it, it is a big part of the reason for the success of the chat modality of these tools.
- pronik 1y agoI'm not mad about "You're absolutely right!" by itself. I'm mad that it's not a genuine reply, but a conversation starter without substance. Most of the time it's like: Me: The flux compensator doesn't seem to work Claude: You're absolutely right! Let me see whether that's true...
- lemonberry 1y agoRecently in another thread a user posted this prompt. I've started using it to good effect with Claude in the browser. Original comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44879033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44879033 "Prioritize substance, clarity, and depth. Challenge all my proposals, designs, and conclusions as hypotheses to be tested. Sharpen follow-up questions for precision, surfacing hidden assumptions, trade offs, and failure modes early. Default to terse, logically structured, information-dense responses unless detailed exploration is required. Skip unnecessary praise unless grounded in evidence. Explicitly acknowledge uncertainty when applicable. Always propose at least one alternative framing. Accept critical debate as normal and preferred. Treat all factual claims as provisional unless cited or clearly justified. Cite when appropriate. Acknowledge when claims rely on inference or incomplete information. Favor accuracy over sounding certain. When citing, please tell me in-situ, including reference links. Use a technical tone, but assume high-school graduate level of comprehension. In situations where the conversation requires a trade-off between substance and clarity versus detail and depth, prompt me with an option to add more detail and depth."
- ttemPumpinRary 1y ago[dead]
- whalesalad 1y agoI added a line to my CLAUDE.md to explicitly ask that this not be done - no dice. It still happens constantly.
- snowfield 1y agoYou probably have conflicting rules in that case, all LLMs ha has some system prompts that you can't see. That instructs it to behave a certain way.
- wonderwonder 1y agoAfter the upgrade, the first time I used it, ChatGPT 5 actually refused to help me determine dosing for a research chemical I am taking the other day. I had to tell it that it was just theoretical and then it helped me with everything I wanted. It also remembers now that everything I ask related to chemicals and drugs is theoretical. Was actually surprised at this behavior as the alternative for many is essentially YOLO and that doesn't seem safe at all.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bityard 1y agoI've been using Copilot a lot for work and have been more or less constantly annoyed at the fact that every other line it emitted from its digital orifice was prefixed with some random emoji. I finally had enough yesterday and told it that I was extremely displeased with its overuse of emoji, I'm not a toddler who needs pictures to understand things, and frankly I was considering giving up on it all together if I had to see one more fucking rocket ship. You know what it said? "Okay, sorry about that, I will not use emoji from now on in my responses." And I'll be damned, but there were no more emoji after that. (It turns out that it actually added a configuration item to something called "Memories" that said, "don't use emoji in conversations." Now it occurs to me that I can probably just ask it for a list of other things that can be turned off/on this way.)
- stillpointlab 1y agoOne thing I've noticed with all the LLMs that I use (Gemini, GPT, Claude) is a ubiquitous: "You aren't just doing <X> you are doing <Y>" What I think is very curious about this is that all of the LLMs do this frequently, it isn't just a quirk of one. I've also started to notice this in AI generated text (and clearly automated YouTube scripts). It's one of those things that once you see it, you can't un-see it.
- OfflineSergio 1y agoI was happy being absolutely right and now I keep noticing that constantly.
- markandrewj 1y agoAlmost never here Claude say no about programming specific tasks.
- floodle 1y agoI don't get all of the complaints about the tone of AI chatbots. Honestly I don't care all that much if it's bubbly, professional, jokey, cutesey, sycophantic, maniacal, full of emojis. It's just a tool, the output primarily just has to be functionally useful. I'm not saying nice user interface design isn't important, but at this point with the technology it just seems less important than discussions about the actual task-solving capabilities of these new releases.
- tacker2000 1y agoSame here i dont really care as long as its giving me the answer and not too long winded. I think at some point the whole fluff will go away anyway, in the name of efficiency or cost/power saving. There was a recent article about how much energy these fillers are actually using if sum everything up
- atleastoptimal 1y agoTo be able to direct LLM outputs to the style you want should be your absolute right.
- cmrdporcupine 1y agoToday I had to stop myself after I wrote "You're absolutely right" in reply to a comment on my pull-request. God help us all.
- freehorse 1y agoI just asked claude this question [0] (only the first paragraph) and its answer started with "this is a fascinating question" (the reasoning) and "this is an interesting statistical concept!" (non-reasoning). It continued with saying this technique is known as "sorted regression" and is used in "optimal transport theory", and overall it was not clear in that this should not be used as an actual regression. I tried also several SOTA(ish) models and claude's answer was definetely the worst (most sycophantic/bullshitty, and used too much non-sense jargon). Even llama maverick's answer was way better. It surprises me because I would expect, as stackexchange sites are in the training data, this question to be pretty much answered based on the actual answers there. It could also be that they try to overcorrect for some negativity sometimes there (imagine if the model answered to you that they will not answer your question because it has been already answered before, or because it is not a good question). I think I stop using claude after this for asking questions. [0] https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/185507/what-happens-if-the-explanatory-and-response-variables-are-sorted-independently https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/185507/what-happen...
- yencabulator 1y agoI never see it. CLAUDE.md starts with Avoid sycophancy. If you are asked to make a change, summarize the change but do not explain its benefits. Be concise in phrasing but not to the point of omission.
- dankwizard 1y agoWell in my case it is because I'm a highly educated individual who's been in the professional sector for 20 years - I know I'm always right. I do worry it's stroking the ego of those who do NOT deserve it or are NOT actually right
- sakesun 1y agoAvoid being argumentative can save energy, literally.
- MrCheeze 1y agoClaude almost universally reacts to everything with a positive exclamation as its first sentence, regardless of whether it's good or bad. If you don't believe me, just watch https://www.twitch.tv/claudeplayspokemon https://www.twitch.tv/claudeplayspokemon for about three minutes and you'll get the idea. Alternatively, look at the system prompt, where Anthropic attempted to get it to stop doing this: > Claude never starts its response by saying a question or idea or observation was good, great, fascinating, profound, excellent, or any other positive adjective. It skips the flattery and responds directly. https://docs.anthropic.com/en/release-notes/system-prompts#august-5-2025 https://docs.anthropic.com/en/release-notes/system-prompts#a... This problem seems highly specific to Claude. It's not exactly sycophancy so much as it is a strong bias towards this exact type of reaction to everything.
- bytK7 1y agoDoes it mean you’re actually right when you get it to proclaim “Holy shit, you’re absolutely right!”? I did get it to say that once, after I prompted it to be mean and argumentative and make me defend my idea. I did defend my idea, but I’m still not sure if I was right or not.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- oliveiracwb 1y agoI’m going to give my opinion on LLM architecture using transformers to translate this text: I believe there should be two layers, or even the use of a MoE, to set the tone. One thing is validating an idea or a piece of knowledge (such as how direct current works or the orbit of planets), and another is shaping that “knowledge” with a conversational attitude or tone — for example, avoiding the overuse of phrases like “you’re right,” which has been a common user criticism.
- jccalhoun 1y agoI'm not a programmer but I have some stuff I want to do with python. So what I've found useful is taking the output of one LLM, Claude for instance, and giving it to another, Gemini for example, and writing "this is what claude thinks. Evaluate it..." Then if I have to I will take that result back to the first LLM and ask it to evaluate it. It might just be in my head but it seems like they are a lot more critical that way than if I suggest something. ...Or maybe all of my suggestions really are great...
- pym4n 1y agoYeah, this annoying af!
- lukaslalinsky 1y agoOne trick I do to avoid this: When it's doing something wrong, and I see some pattern based on which I'd do it differently, I tell it the observation rather than my conclusion. If I tell it stuff like what about X, it will just agree that X is a good idea. But if I say, I see that Y, it might come to the same conclusion that it needs to do X, or something completely different. It will still say I'm absolutely right, but at least it's to something where I am absolutely right. I mostly use Claude Code to fill the blanks in my thinking, so this works better for me.
- bestspharma 1y ago[dead]
- Sincere6066 1y agoYou're--absolutely--right--to---call--me--out--on--that!
- thedailymail 1y agoSomehow we got an inverted version of the Monty Python "I'd like to buy an argument" skit