Comment by awad
9 months ago
Highly recommend adding some kind of canary like this in all LLM project instructions. I prefer my instructions to say 'always start output with an (uniquely decided by you) emoji' as it's easier to visually scan for one when reading a wall of LLM output, and use a different emoji per project because what's life without a little whim?
This stuff also becomes context poison however
Does it actually? One sentence telling the agent to call me “Chris the human serviette” plus the times it calls me that is not going to add that much to the context. What kills the context IME is verbose logs with timestamps.
Sure, but its an instruction that applies and the model will consider fairly relevant in every single token. As an extremely example imagine instructing the llm to not use the letter E or to output only in French. Not as extreme but it probably does affect.
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Sorry, what do you mean?
https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/06/22/how-contexts-fail-and-ho...
This guy has a good write up on the topic
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A single emoji though?
It is not a single emoji, it's an instruction to interleave conversation with some nonsense. It can only do harm. It won't help produce a better result and is questionable at preventing a bad one.
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