As I am coding day in day out using Opus, I was wondering if people here had a view on the effect of input style on the quality of the agent's production?
Like if I treat the agent like shit, with a great deal of pressure and shaming, does it perform differently than if I treat him with the utmost deference and calm?
And if so, which should I be using?
I am usually talking nice to my agent, because I am worried that if I trash talk it all day long, it's going to become a habit and I am going to start trash talk other people.
But sometimes the agents do a lot of irritating skin, and being a total asshole to a robot seems to calm my nerves the same way swearing aloud do.
Does it make any difference at all?
So it burns a few more tokens. Don't really care.
Therefore, if you start prompting and adding to the context and session history a bunch of "useless" hyperbole, slur and profanity, unless the underlying language models have been trained on such things, I find it hard to reason about what it might predict the next series of tokens should be that would be remotely useful to you.
Ultimately, I really think you need to not treat it like anything, other than a powerful inferencing tool that has a great understanding of a very large corpus it has been trained on and has modelled very well. Use it to your advantage, there is no point in rudeness or profanity, it has no feelings, it isn't intelligent. At worst you risk garbage output.
In fact, there's even a skill for it: https://github.com/juliusbrussee/caveman
I act mean when it doesnt make a difference. Simply because i dont want to blow that steam off in front of my fellow family and friends
> I am usually talking nice to my agent, because I am worried that if I trash talk it all day long, it's going to become a habit and I am going to start trash talk other people.
That's a better reason.
Do whatever gets the desired result.
Character is good behavior when you can get away with bad behavior.
So yes and in an important way. Good luck.