Comment by joshstrange

> “I have a colleague who is arguing X, I’m sure is Y. Who is right?!”

This is why I've turned off Claude/ChatGPT's ability to use other conversations as context. I allow memories (which I have to check/prune regularly) but not reading other conversations, there is just too high of a chance of poisoning or biasing the context.

Once I switched to a new chat to confirm an assumption and the LLM said "Yes, and your error confirms that..." but I hadn't sent the error to that chat. At that point I had to turn it off, I open a new chat specifically to get "clean" context. I wish these platforms would give more tools to turn on/off that and have "private" chats (no memories, no system prompt edits) as well (some do, I know).

Obviously, context poisoning from other chats is not what happened in your case, but it's in the same "class" of issue, "leading the witness". I think about "leading the witness" _constantly_ while using LLMs. I often will not give it all the context or all of what I'm thinking, I want to see if it independently gets to the same place. I _never_ say "I'm considering X" when presenting a problem because I've seen it latch onto my suggestion too hard, too often.