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Comment by hgoel | Hacker News Reader

I always appreciate when a model does that. It's amusing, but also having it be argumentatively wrong is a lot less annoying than being sycophantically wrong.

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I don't like tools that intentionally annoy me.

My reasoning is that if something is argumentatively incorrect, it is much easier to drill down to its misunderstanding and correct it. On the other hand, if it's sycophantically incorrect, it'll just change its "mind" while potentially maintaining the misunderstanding, leading to increasingly strange behavior.

I think I'm pretty used to my tools making me want to throw them out the window sometimes :) Even before AI that was a common occurrence from either a lack of knowledge on my end, or many software people having no regard for their users' time.

I'm sure tools don't like annoying people either.

It's a tool, I don't think tools like or dislike much of anything.

I agree, tools designed to be fawning sycophantics are annoying.

you think LLMs or agent harnesses have intention?

Yeah I don't know. I've had issues with Gemini where I would point to a bug and a probable cause for the bug, and it would not argue incorrectly that my understanding was wrong and the cause of the bug was elsewhere. It was really stubborn and it got to the point where it felt like gaslighting. Turned out I was right and the model was wrong. If the model argued incorrectly and was also a dick about it, I would go be really, really annoyed.

You can add a line to your system prompt to be like that. You can basically get it to roleplay whatever you want (but only if you can give it sys prompts).

System prompt changes help, but ultimately they don't do a great job of overcoming the model's learned tendencies in my experience.

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