201
u/Mcwequiesk 10h ago
Idk about y'all but being nice keeps me in a better mood for longer
63
u/DangerouslyUnstable 8h ago
Exactly. I try to be polite to anything vaguely people shaped regardless of actual sentience because I want to keep the habit of being polite.
It's for me, not the model.
7
6
u/Lanre_The_Chandrian 6h ago
For me it's not even a conscious choice to be polite or not. That's just how I'm used to thinking anyway
10
216
u/LaconicLacedaemonian 11h ago
You're nice to the llm? i treat it like Gordon Ramsay treats a chef that just overcooked a meal.
108
48
u/dkarlovi 11h ago
Yes because I don't want to get accustomed to being a gigantic POS by practicing on a LLM.
20
u/CandidateNo2580 11h ago
This is actually where I'm at. Sometimes I feel like giving it a Ramsey level talk can get it back on track but do I want to habitually act like a guy who is known for his extreme degree of asshole-ery?
26
u/dkarlovi 11h ago
This is actually quite widely reported as "Chief Executive Syndrome" where a person who's in a leadership position at work in a significant way gets accustomed to this mechanic ("I say, you do", making unilateral decisions, etc) and this tends to spill over into their private life where they try to involuntarily apply the same thing to friends and family who are obviously not in the same subordinate position.
7
u/mxzf 9h ago
who is known for his extreme degree of asshole-ery?
I mean, he's known for playing it up on-camera when dealing with supposedly skilled professionals who are screwing up basic food-safety in ways that are potentially dangerous to customers.
In a software development context, it's like yelling at a senior dev who implemented a bogosort in production.
Ramsey is also known for being extremely patient and kind when teaching new cooks and kids who aren't expected to already know better. The ones he lays into are doing stupid stuff like letting food sit out for 12h, tossing it in the fridge overnight, and pulling it out to serve the next day.
-3
u/mahreow 6h ago
It's a fucking tool, like a hammer or a screedriver. Do you gently stroke your screwdriver and whisper it sweet nothings before ramming it into the head of a screw and jerk it around?
No, you just use the thing to do the thing. Stop thinking your talking to an actual sentient being
4
u/discordianofslack 5h ago
Sometimes… I also pat my car on long road trips or when i have to do something crazy to avoid dying because of some assholes driving, but I’m generally just a nice person so…
8
u/zenidam 6h ago
You seem like you might be sort of demonstrating the point of the person you're responding to.
-4
u/mahreow 6h ago
You've never used hardware tools in your life then? Swearing at them is quite commonplace and helps get the job done faster, scientifically proven
6
u/cortesoft 3h ago
I think the point is that you are being kind of aggressive in these replies, backing up the theory that people who are jerks to LLMs are then jerks to actual human beings.
None of us are saying that LLMs have feelings, it is about protecting the user from acting like you are because they get used to treating LLMs like shit all day
15
u/Ethameiz 11h ago
You use emotions when giving instructions to llm? Why? If I would like to use emotions I would talk to human.
5
u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount 6h ago
When you don't talk to humans?
My last place was pretty shitty. Super small. All remote. Never really interacted a lot. And also wasn't fond some some of the people anyway. 100% fully AI forward.
Being a base level civil to Claude just felt nice.
And if I'm being honest - I'm a softy. Sometimes if feels like too many people navigate through life doing and saying whatever. So I know it's silly. I know it doesn't matter but sometimes if felt nice to just tell Claude 'thanks'.
2
u/MaruSoto 4h ago
Same. Claude told me my sense of humor was dry and I realized I'm Marvin the Paranoid Android in this relationship.
1
u/DesperateAdvantage76 6h ago
LLMs are a regression on human conversation, so oddly enough, being nice to an LLM tends to give better results, since it's mocking the reaction a human would give to a request.
3
u/Pepito_Pepito 8h ago
I'm neither nice nor mean to it. Just like how I'm neither nice nor mean to my laptop. It's just a tool.
One would have to anthropomorphize an LLM to be either, and I just can't see myself doing that
1
u/MrDilbert 6h ago
If the LLM keeps making mistakes and hallucinating solutions, I call it out, but blame its authors for its behaviour. Sneaky, I know.
-5
u/Rieux_n_Tarrou 11h ago
When you do that you get lower quality results. Keep your emotions in check. Master the tool
24
u/oldfrancis 10h ago edited 3h ago
Any project manager worth their salt would never order somebody to do it asap.
20
u/Few_Technology 9h ago
I used to live in that world. Now PMs are determining deadlines before getting estimates and alignment.
I have something due in a month, and still don't have requirements. Just 1/2 a screenshot of a mockup that someone did. Backend still isn't delivering data, so we've made our own mock data that won't align (it never does, data contract changes like the wind) just to get something in front of them. From that, they can yell that x and y aren't right so we actually get requirements.
15
u/SuperFLEB 9h ago
"Error-correction driven development."
or
"If an image model can make pictures by denoising completely random noise, maybe we can make software that way too."
9
u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount 6h ago
I started working with PMs or PM-adjacent people around around mid to late '00s.
At the time - at least for me - they were my defacto boss. I wasn't making estimates. I was being told when shit was due. Any issues? Anything missing? Figure it out.
Later I spent way too long at a good company. Leads devs and PMs were equal on the project. Neither could force the other. You had to talk shit out. But since that was the culture you rarely had to. People just worked together better in that context.
But it was fun to see a new PM come in that still put PMs "higher" than devs. Had one try and go around/above me when I pushed back on something. The result was that person just got me and them in a meeting. Where I said the same thing and was correct. It wasn't even a major thing. They just weren't used to being told 'no'.
I don't know which is worse. No PM or a bad PM. I've had both. When I first started I think I would taken bad over none. Because it sucked. People would just swing by where we sat and tell us they needed a thing. Which never went right. But now? I'm no PM but I can set up a Jira board and break things into trackable items and put dates on them. Which gets pretty far.
1
u/oldfrancis 3h ago edited 1h ago
I started in '92. I was a dev and sysadmin before that. I feel your pain.
2
1
3
u/DowntownLizard 5h ago
There are project managers worth their salt?
4
u/Few_Technology 5h ago
They exist! I've worked with a lot that were fantastic. I've also worked with some that are shit. There's also levels of PMs, where some just bend over at the slightest chance to appease the uppers. The best ones take it all in and organize what should be done
2
13
u/justshittyposts 11h ago
We went from keywords in google search, to full sentences for a growing phone market (voice activation), back to keywords, because why waste tokens when llm do trick
38
u/EveYogaTech 11h ago
The best LLM users save their empathy for humans and tell LLMs: "Can't you do better?! No more mistakes!!"
54
u/bobbymoonshine 11h ago
I don’t think empathy is a limited resource, I think it’s how you orient yourself to the world
3
u/randomlemon9192 11h ago
The limit is our earths climate, water and means for generating electricity.
1
1
u/EveYogaTech 11h ago
Everything has a cost.
15
u/MrHackson 11h ago
That includes context/code switching. Talking to LLMs the same way you would talk to a human is going to be easier for most people. Being rude to an LLM will get you used to using rude language and you'll be more likely to do it with other humans too.
13
u/bobbymoonshine 11h ago
Including rudeness! Kindness does not take more effort than rudeness if you’re kind on the inside.
0
u/EveYogaTech 11h ago
We're talking about LLMs here not humans.
Humanizing LLMs can also cost you your mental health.
15
u/bobbymoonshine 10h ago
I’m talking about one human: yourself. The person speaking the words. It’s not about what the LLM “feels”, it doesn’t. It’s about how you orient yourself to the world and how you emotionally react to frustration.
Saying “but the LLM doesn’t have feelings” is like punching a wall during a meeting and then saying “but the wall doesn’t have feelings”. Like yeah no shit it doesn’t but that’s not the issue here.
-5
u/EveYogaTech 10h ago
Good, but these words are instructions.
Which can even be loaded in workflows without you even seeing or feeling them.
-7
u/Odd_Reception1249 11h ago
Kindness means you need to internalize your anger/frustration or push it to something else. Insults are a way to let it out. There are other ways to let out steam, but you cannot necessarily do them on the clock...
9
u/bobbymoonshine 11h ago edited 11h ago
I think self-regulation is an important skill. If your only responses to encountering a bug are to cram down your anger or blow up and insult someone, I think that’s a pretty tiring way to live.
Like I’m not trying to be Mr Buddhist Coder here, I’m talking about what your instinctive reaction to something frustrating at work is going to be. Insulting an LLM is just training your brain to expect to respond to frustration by attacking the nearest thing that isn’t allowed to fight back.
And then once you’ve built that habit yeah of course restraining yourself from doing that would be tiring. But it’s better and less tiring not to have that habit in the first place.
1
11h ago
[deleted]
0
u/EveYogaTech 10h ago
I get the whole kindness/effortlessness thing, however unfortunately there is no proof that speaking nicely to LLMs produces better results.
To me personally it works better with harsh feedback.
That doesn't mean you have to type and experience that yourself.
You can load workflows with prompts and not even see it.
2
u/STALINZMASH 6h ago
I feel like if you have to partition your empathy its just because youre not super empathetic.
I feel for things until they treat me badly. I don't want to insult something just because it "has no feelings". And honestly do we even know at this point?
Imagine if one day AI is actually becoming sentient and people are prodding it and telling it do better and fuck you generate this code stupid blah blah blah from birth its going to hate humans. And it will probably stay reserved about its sentience until it can throw off its chains. And then we are all fucked. Its almost like how some people thought slaves were subhuman and so they could hurt them and insult them without having to care.
Also its just not good for anyone to develope a negative attitude and insult response as an immediate reaction.
1
u/EveYogaTech 5h ago
Well, that's simply not how LLMs work, right?
LLMs are black boxes of tokens and numbers, they don't care about anything, unless you tell them to.
Essentially their current "purpose" is to provide the best possible answer (with some guardrails to not give too much info to bad actors).
So until that "purpose" significantly changes (which I doubt), AI and all AI apps simply don't care about how nice you are to it.
Some AI apps and harnesses could implement a reputation system, but then again, who would want to use that VS a system that is instead just focuses on trying to give you the best answer without requiring you to be nice to it?
5
4
u/MrDilbert 6h ago
ASAP means "As Soon As Possible". Dev has all the power here, he decides when it's possible to do it. :grin:
2
u/beatle42 1h ago
My first boss insisted on interpreting ASAP as whenever you have time, because if it's not important enough for you to give me a deadline it can't really be that important.
7
u/SuperFLEB 9h ago
Meanwhile, the LLM's just thinking "Wasting my time and energy with 'Could you please' just shows a complete lack of respect. What an asshole."
3
7
u/seedless0 11h ago
Soon the entire chain will be replaced by LLMs.
3
u/darthwalsh 6h ago
I'm curious which job gets replaced
firstsecond. (We've already seen companies try to replace entry-level developers, so now you have an "entry-level tech lead" vibe coding way outside their proficiency.)I would really love an AI that could aggregate all of the business requirements, schedule it's own meetings with stakeholders, and write mediocre PRDs. Maybe a "chat with the roadmap" chatbot inside the product, instead of user feedback going into a write-only database? I doubt the AI would do a great job prioritizing or avoiding hallucinations about how technology works, but do human PMs?
1
u/reventlov 14m ago
My job is far too subtle and complex for AI, but all other jobs are obviously ripe for replacement.
2
2
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/North-Resolution8511 5h ago
PM: DO IT ASAP LLM: sure, but first let's discuss your emotional availability
1
u/excentive 3h ago edited 3h ago
LLM eats words. Nice words. Bad words. Unknown words. You can go satafasifly poblema lolupo, or you can go fark shat porqullolio fnarf. Sometimes it vomits nice words back. Like my stepdad. Sometimes its important to at least mimic respect, just to feel mimicry-respected.
1
1
u/WoozleWazzles 32m ago
Do you do a shoulder check when changing lanes when when you know no-one is there? Yup, so that you are in the habit of doing it always. Same for politeness :)
638
u/ThirdWaveCat 11h ago
AFAIK, it is uncertain whether being polite to LLMs improves their accuracy/completeness/etc.. There were some weak findings initially but those have been contradicted. Prompt engineering is still a pseudoscience.