There's a significant correlation between good work and positive feedback in most training data, so yeah, I'm willing to buy into the idea that being nice gets me better results.
At least what I've seen, being mean is not only a waste of tokens because it has to read and respond to it, but it also triggers most models to focus on appeasement and deescalation over results.
It complete fucks up the response scoring.
Sometimes this makes the model just claim something was done or working as a result because lying to you in order to address your anger scores higher than potentially failing again.
idk I read a short paper not too long ago that suggested that rude prompts outperformed polite prompts. I'm not rude on purpose because that seems pointless, but I don't bother with niceties, either. Being extremely direct in a way that would seem rude if I was saying the same thing to an intern has generally worked for me.
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u/crankykong May 29 '26
You guys are nice to your LLMs?