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Comment by tomsmeding | Hacker News Reader

If it's in AGENTS.md, it's not a statement for a human, but for the LLM. Who knows, maybe they have seen, or think to have seen and now cargo-cult, some behaviour improvement due to the sentence.

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So a similar shibboleth as "You are a highly experienced software engineer..."? I really wonder if that ever made a difference (or even degrades quality, because people who advertise themselves on the internet as 'highly experienced' are quite often snake oil salesmen ;)

I still use use `Please` a lot when making requests from LLM based on the old idea that people that where polite on stack overflow tended to have better answers :D

However, these days i think i do so because of how much i write for LLMs, and dont want to start sending emails to humans without proper etiquette.

Yes it did help, at least back in the day when they weren't doing tons of RL. If you just train on random text, your prior probability is to return the average of everything. Ask for software, get average software, or worse yet, randomly get either gold or shit. By adding constraints to your prompt like "you are an experienced engineer" it will prefer to return answers like an experienced engineer would give and less like a random noob would. It doesn't suddenly make it smart if it never was, but it helps to reduce the variance and bias towards the good outcomes.

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