Comment by medwards666
1 day ago
This morning I asked Claude to provide a summary of the work it had done but to '... explain it as if you were talking to a moron' and it actually turned out a quite comprehensible summary.
So going to continue trying that as a command structure going forwards...
Ah, another delightful heuristic for my collection. Entry number 5,791: “tell LLM to treat me as moron when it’s excessively verbose”
<think>The user's lack of intelligence baffles me. I will have to dumb my explanation down to extremes. Sigh, there we go...</think>
Okay, let's try it one more time! [..]
After a huge wall-of-text response, I regularly ask Claude to "explain like I'm five, using succinct bullet points," and it works remarkably well.
but what if I really am a moron? how do I get that level of explanation now!
Turn on caveman mode first?
That’s just common parlance for “simplify this for me”.
Believe the big services wouldn’t reply as if you were mentally diminished, or a toddler, unless you specifically asked for that: The whole training stack tends to instruct the things to mimic politeness and eagerness to help.
"From neuralese to moron-code ..." :)