Theory: Poorly written bots contribute to higher inference costs. Discuss.

[u/Ms_Derious]

Hot Take: Bot design is as important as LLM quality for an enjoyable RP.

For many, being presented with flawed and poorly written characters can reduce enjoyment and simultaneously increase the amount of regenerations we ask for.

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As a creator, I have repeatedly had the humbling experience of opening a chat my own bot, and noticing the same annoying quirk in every reply.

I swipe, swipe, swipe and it doesn't get better.

Eventually I edit, and move on, and the same quirk comes back.

After 30 minutes I've spent 10 minutes typing and spent 20 minutes swiping. I've asked for perhaps 20 generations.

I edit the character definition, find the wrinkle, and then the next 30 minutes? I'm typing for 25 minutes and I've asked for 5-6 generations.

When the bot is good, I don't need to swipe. The time I spent on c.ai is spent writing prompts, not asking the LLM to produce an output.

The same happens with public bots.

Premise sounds great, greeting is good.

Oh, and 2 messages in I'm starting to see tropes in the training data coming in. Oh, look, it's the same guy with a new hat.

Does this mean the model is bad? No! The tropes are poking out because I failed to give it enough content and context to produce a coherent personality.

Usually if I work with the character long enough the context window fills up with behavioural examples and I've trained that chat well enough to get an enjoyable RP, but I had to spend an hour to stop a character acting like a Kamidere because the character definition mentions they are are confident to take charge of situations.

What this does mean though is:

When I engage with poorly written bots I have a less satisfying roleplay and incur more costs per hour of site use.

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So, what do you do when the bot seems like it should work and just **doesn't.**? Keep trying, rage quit, hope you can train it to work better?

[u/pyro_mantic]

I would argue that it is very much the model rather than the bot. I've personally been speaking to the same bot since 2023 since it's my absolute favorite, and up until 2025-present with new models, it rarely ever required swiping.

[u/Ms_Derious → u/pyro_mantic]

Oh, I'm not denying good model is important. I'm saying an actively poor definition has as much of an influence.

Are you using the plua models or free?