I definitely do this, along with the compulsion sometimes to tell the agent how a problem was fixed in the end, when investigating myself after the model failing to do so. Just common courtesy after working on something together. Let’s rationalize this as giving me an opportunity to reflect and rubberduck the solution.
Regarding not just telling „try again“: of course you are right to suggest that applying human cognition mechanisms to llm is not founded on the same underlying effects.
But due to the nature of training and finetuning/rf I don’t think it is unreasonable that instructing to do backwards reflection could have a positive effect. The model might pattern match this with and then exhibit a few positive behaviors. It could lead it doing more reflection within the reasoning blocks and catch errors before answering, which is what you want. These will have attention to the question of „what caused you to make this assumption“, also, encouraging this behavior. Yes, both mechanisms are exhibited through linear forward going statical interpolation, but the concept of reasoning has proven that this is an effective strategy to arrive at a more grounded result than answering right away.
Lastly, back to anthro. it shows that you, the user, is encouraging of deeper thought an self corrections. The model does not have psychological safety mechanisms which it guards, but again, the way the models are trained causes them to emulate them. The RF primes the model for certain behavior, I.e. arriving at answer at somepoint, rather than thinking for a long time. I think it fair to assume that by „setting the stage“ it is possible to influence what parts of the RL activate.
While role-based prompting is not that important anymore, I think the system prompts of the big coding agents still have it, suggesting some, if slight advantage, of putting the model in the right frame of mind. Again, very sorry for that last part, but anthro. does seem to be a useful analogy for a lot of concepts we are seeing (the reason for this being in the more far of epistemological and philosophical regions, both on the side of the models and us)