You know… I believe opus saved me with that prompt. I was working myself ragged on a project. Days, nights, weekends… all at the expense of my family.
One session while working it, I said a much more expressive form of “I’ve been working myself ragged on this stupid thing” and then went on asking something else. It picked up on that and it was like a record scratch. It committed the work in progress and basically said “dude, what you’ve got now is perfectly acceptable. Ship it! You are seeking perfection you don’t need”
Granted I’m horribly paraphrasing the prompt I used but it basically, snapped me out of myself and got me thinking if what I was doing “globally” actually made any sense at all. With some serious introspection I realized I was falling back to earlier trauma in my life and doing something stupid.
So weirdly… that little bit they add to the prompt (plus a bunch of model training we can’t see) saved my sanity, marriage and family.
From then on, if I’m feeling some stress about whatever I’m working on, I’ll mention it as context as a way to cross check myself and make sure I’m not letting myself spin.
(Meta: talking about this stuff is so weird. Not sure why)
Thanks for sharing. I do not keep a neutral tone with the AI.
If things are stressed and I’m up late, the AI gets less leeway. If we happen to be in the performance dip just prior to completion of a new major model, it can get salty.
Some of the time it can be helpful for the prose to shape around how I’m expressing myself. The frontiers are pretty good at it.
That said I’ve also had the latest Sonnet seemingly ~maliciously implement something because my prompting disagreeing with it was a bit callous. (It turned out to have been right also)
I don’t think you can build a good model that is supposed to interact semantically that does not carry some ability to express empathy.
Partly, because we need the model to have humility when it does mess up. So it can express the right amount of concern or remorse when mistakes are made and identified. (For example, reading a secret into context by mistake forcing the roll of a private key)
Design is how it works, which means the way it responds can be as important as what it responds with.
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