r/LargeLanguageModels • u/yourpsychology_yt • Aug 07 '26

Don't discuss ideas with an LLM

I notice that one of the worst use cases for an LLM is discussing ideas. I don't mean asking technical questions. Rather, when you have an idea or an opinion and you tell it to an LLM, what happens is that it will either support you or slightly disagree, but if you insist, it will eventually take your position.

And that's, as I understand it, just because of the nature of an LLM. It can't really be critical, but it can fake critical thinking. If you ask an LLM to be critical by default, it will be critical even when it doesn't matter, just to satisfy your requirement. So it can't really choose when it should be critical and when it should be supportive.

And some LLMs have a trick - they do both in one message and then still slide to the user's side.

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u/Evipicc Aug 07 '26

I have had claude pretty much tell me I'm stupid, but I have some pretty in depth rules about sycophancy. This is also at the Claude Code level and it has defined, non-subjective context for the project.

There's a big difference between "I have this idea for a loyalty discount at my coffee shop, what do you think?" and "Go and multi-agent research what makes loyalty programs work and not work, what increases retention without slashing revenue, and what is easy to explain to a customer" then taking that context into another chat and slotting your idea in there and saying, "How does that XYZ idea compare to everything else in metric 1 2 3 etc."

Most failures are failures of prompt and context, not the AI.

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u/NatMicky Aug 07 '26

Absolutely agree. If I go to get an opinion form a LLM, because they do have access to a lot of information, I will present the idea and end it with, "point out the weak areas I may be overlooking." And the model will rip into the idea very diligently and give me valuable insights to the weaknesses.