Does any of these things actually work? When I pre-prompt models like this it most often than not it ends up making uninteresting and mostly irrelevant points,

Does any of these things actually work? When I pre-prompt models like this it most often than not it ends up making uninteresting and mostly irrelevant points, very rarely will it come back with something "insightful". It will just put some doubt because it has to without sth meaningful to notice. Maybe with agents it does not matter as much if you do not mind burning tokens and time, because you are not gonna read most of the output wrt tool use anyway, but for a chat model I don't see much benefit? It is a bit like encouraging an LLM to write tests/asserts in the code, ime it ends up checking for the most superficial things.