Comment by falcor84
6 hours ago
I remember reading an essay comparing one's personality to a polyhedral die, which rolls somewhat during our childhood and adolescence, and then mostly settles, but which can be re-rolled in some cases by using psychedelics. I don't have any direct experience with that, and definitely am not in a position to give advice, but just wondering whether we have a potential for plasticity that should be researched further, and that possibly AI can help us gain insights into how things might be.
Would be nice if there was an escape hatch here. Definitely better than the depressing thought I had, which is - to put in AI/tech terminology - that I'm already past my pre-training window (childhood / period of high neuroplasticity) and it's too late for me to fix my low prompt adherence (ability to set up rules for myself and stick to them, not necessarily via a Markdown file).
You can change your personality at any point in time, you don't even need psychedelics for it, just some good old fashioned habits
As long as you are still drawing breath it's never too late bud
But that's what I mean. I'm pretty much clinically incapable of intentionally forming and maintaining habits. And I have a sinking feeling that it's something you either win or lose at in the genetic lottery at time of conception, or at best something you can develop in early life. That's what I meant by "being past my pre-training phase and being stuck with poor prompt adherence".
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The agents are also not able to set up their own rules. Humans can mutate their souls back to whatever at will.
They can if given write access to "SOUL.md" (or "AGENT.md" or ".cursor" or whatever).
It's actually one of the "secret tricks" from last year, that seems to have been forgotten now that people can "afford"[0] running dozens of agents in parallel. Before everyone's focus shifted from single-agent performance to orchestration, one power move was to allow and encourage the agent to edit its own prompt/guidelines file during the agentic session, so over time and many sessions, the prompt will become tuned to both LLM's idiosyncrasies and your own expectations. This was in addition to having the agent maintain a TODO list and a "memory" file, both of which eventually became standard parts of agentic runtimes.
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[0] - Thanks to heavy subsidizing, at least.