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LLMs absolutely do respond differently based on where your prompt lands in latent space. lists of explicit rules to follow spelled out in exacting detail push into "sr engineer berating a jr engineer that just fucked up". co-workers trusting each other and working through a problem works better.

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Yeah, this is a noticeably strong effect, they seem to be better at math overall if you get them to write it out in LaTeX instead of unicode or plaintext approximations

The why / framing matters more then the telling. They respond well of you give a reasonable reason, like we are pre-release, with no users, you don't need compatibility, versioning right now

i have a boilerplate README that i started using which says "this project is brand new, has no users, does not need backwards compatibility layers" etc etc to get claude to actually start cutting into load-bearing walls without hedging

My bile refactoring skill is the only thing that has ever gotten claude to really think big about reshaping my code bases in a substantial way - I love to run it after I have gotten a project roughly in the direction I want to really improve the underlying design and architecture of the code