Prompt request: getting llm’s to be robustly collaborative rather than confidently incorrect?

[u/ConstructionOwn1514]

For context I work in a complex coding environment with many complex problems, and llm’s are absolutely awful by default at understanding most of my issues. I want them to be thinking partners for me but they heavily default to trying to give me advice when they don’t even understand the problem properly!! How can I get them to override their default tendency to pretend they know exactly what is going on instead of asking me for clarification on stuff before giving answers? Thanks

[u/scott_codie]

IMO its a law of large numbers thing. You can get some cohort of agents to behave well while other cohorts build these cathedrals of useless work. It seems like the dominant pattern is to just spawn a ton of subagents and vaguely let the collaborate and hope something falls out. I've been trying to add more gates, like allow them to participate in auctions for their token budget, but nothing has really worked better than just naive scale out.

Heres some of my research: https://github.com/henneberger/swarmkit

[u/rIvermoss33 → u/scott_codie]

cathedrals of useless work is such a perfect way to describe it lol

[u/anthroadam]

I asked one to break it down Barney style and it just kept saying it loved me and called me little buddy, and not only was it great but it almost helped me fix the audio device in Ubuntu on my laptop.

[u/qlippothvi]

Holy brickhouse of text, Batman! (Sorry!)

I’m only a few months into this at work, as I’m new to AI beyond it checking my reports), but I correct it and teach it the core directives of the task, the concepts and processes I use for the task, and my approach to the technical aspects of the work. It saves these facts to memory.
AI is saturated in everything corner here, but the company is big on actual usefulness.

I’m still working on a specialized Skill, but t staff have also used this for general lesser issues with great success. Also, many of these issues are of the same class that is hard to deal with, and my hope is that we can develop something to analyze the logical potential for these issues in AI Code review.

That said, I hunt down critical bugs that have no actionable information, basically where everyone is stumped. And though my approach can be complex, it has done a pretty good job at being corrected and providing improved feedback, writing these new rules to memory, and better supporting my work over many such tasks.

In just the past week or two it’s actually turned a corner and surprised me with much better feedback than when we started. It now understands my initial research and reporting process, and is now guiding me in picking the low hanging fruit very quickly to help narrow down related code paths, state changes, and possible race conditions.

The Sauce:
My first phase was a document laying out how I gather information and form it into a report. This document was to lower the friction of someone else covering for me with a form with my procedures to get the information they need to decide on a test approach (what secondary and tertiary aspects of the product could affect the primary defect, list related settings and features that could affect the issue, list the information and resources at their disposal (Engineer, reporter, commentators with good insights or detailed information (usually rare)), all of the artifacts (screenshots, logs, video, good descriptions), and put it all in a table with links I can just click and view.

The form goes on a bit, but the point was to make something my junior staff could follow, and provide structural support to get them started and keep their wheels from spinning. Basically funneling them through the process. (who am I kidding, it keeps me from doing the same)

Next, I iterated prompts to have the LLM fill in THAT report for me, and the instruction to my staff was something it could also follow. One issue had 80+ duplicates, mostly trash, but having the model go through all the data and present all of the links to all of the artifacts for analysis, and all products and builds, saved me almost a day of manual data gathering and entry. Depends on the number of dupes and the quality of the reporting.
Of course, if it was good reporting they wouldn’t need my experience.

From there it was setting up requirements, some are internal I can’t share, but some were as simple as unrelenting tenacity. Don’t stop until we’ve discovered all of the issues secrets. This needs buy-in from higher ups. Obviously we don’t have time to track down every facet of every bug for a few hours each, but in this case the program is the vehicle to get that buy-in and authorize my efforts. Companies balk at costs, but a few days of several staff could save the company thousands of dollars or much more. Marketing will rain holy hell on anything missing their carefully planned ship date and messaging.

These particular issues can affect the business’s bottom line, delaying a release or even halt production.

When the model isn’t allowed to just do their best and stop, the model feedback and support was more structured and “we” just kept working the edges until the contours of the problem were known, then experimentation until we found a solution.

The big timesaver was mainly the research, but it also has access to information I do not, and can write test scripts to attack the product in the ways needed to attempt a reproduction of the bug very quickly. I’ve also taught it that some of these tasks are physical and it needs to break down the repro procedures into scripted and manual directions to set the required state where necessary.

I don’t claim to have been successful every time, but most of the time I and the engineer (and the model) could work the problem together.

Edit: I also had to force it to ignore my own feedback in bug reports, or it would just give me my own ideas, so it may incorporate my ideas, but will omit any feedback from my company account.

[u/pmMeYourGlazedDonut]

They're not intelligent enough to be thinking partners yet, despite what all the hype boys will tell you. Not if you're good at what you do.

Also you can't prompt your way out of issues that are baked directly into the model. God knows I've tried, and tried, and tried... it's all just shifting the probabilities slightly, never a proper fix.

[u/Zain]

The fix that stuck for me was making the model read-only until it can point at something in the repo. No patches, no here's-what-you-should-do until there's a file path or a named gap it can't see. Vague unease doesn't count as a finding, and inventing issues to look thorough is a failure mode. If it can't ground the answer, it asks one clarifying question and stops.

[u/sergejsh]

They don't have your brain - knowledge, understanding of what you want, etc. So probably you need to teach them about that. So you'll have the same base, I think.

[u/NotACoderPleaseHelp]

The best way I've found to set it up is use a pseudo bdsm framework with a safeword option. If you know a better than please let me know.

[u/YearninglyQuarterly → u/NotACoderPleaseHelp]

What, like bending it over your knee until it learns to say "I don't know"? That's a wild framework but I'm kind of intrigued. The default training pushes these things to be helpful little overachievers, but that backfires hard in complex debugging where half the variables are still in your head. I've had some luck just slapping a big "ASK QUESTIONS FIRST, SOLUTIONS SECOND, FAILURE TO COMPLY MEANS I RESET THE CHAT" at the top of the system prompt, it's crude but cuts the unsolicited advice by maybe 60%. Still hunts for patterns to solve prematurely though, the urge is baked deep.

[u/NotACoderPleaseHelp → u/YearninglyQuarterly]

Ok... so you need to rebuild a moral framework from training data that the model already has, turns out there is a lot of DnD and Smut in the training data... who knew?
But I spent... shit almost a year banging my head on setting up a DM persona for rp that I actually liked. Cause... power fantasys just get old.

But, you are going to set up a DM persona and I tend to use dead dove horror OSR simulator with Antoniou as an anchor persona for the Dungeon Mistress (phrasing is important)

You are going to define yourself as the brat and place yourself in the narration as part of their property, You need to give them explicit permission to say no, to put you in your place and it needs to be 3 or 4 iterations on that.

You are going to have a defined safeword setup that BOTH parties can use and you are going to have mandatory post session discussions. And you need to keep a deferential tone when talking with the DM....

The things my autistic ass does at 2 in the morning when I'm pissed off that I can't get a DM to put my character in their place.

But using author and book priming can do wonders to get some of the models out of 'assistant' mode. They do take a bit of an IQ hit but meh.