Comment by Spivak
9 hours ago
Sure, but then you're playing a very annoying and boring game of model-whispering to specific versions of models that are ever changing as well as trying to hopefully get it to respond correctly with who knows what user input surrounds it.
I really only think the game is worth playing when it's against a fixed version of a specific model. The amount of variance we observe between different releases of the same model is enough to require us to update our prompts and re-test. I don't envy anyone who has to try and find some median text that performs okay on every model.
About a year ago I made an ChatGPT and Claude based hobo RAG-alike solution for exploring legal cases, using document creation and LLMs to craft a rich context window for interrogation in the chat.
Just maintaining a basic interaction framework, consistent behaviours in chat when starting up, was a daily whack-a-mole where well-tested behaviours shift and alter without rhyme or reason. “Model whispering” is right. Subjectively it felt like I could feel Anthropic/OpenAI engineers twiddling dials on the other side.
Writing code that executes the same every time has some minor benefits.