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I'm not sure to what degree you can influence how a model thinks, but you can definitely hide the thinking tokens and tell the model how you want it to talk to you.

For example, the Claude web UI has an Instructions field where I have told it never to congratulate or praise me for asking questions. Earlier Copilot models used a ridiculous number of emoji and bullet lists when answering literally every prompt, I told it to knock that off and prefer detailed paragraphs in prose.

Local agents/frameworks/whatever all have their equivalents for overall user preferences.

by epistasis1 hours ago|

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Thanks for the reminder! For others looking for this setting, it is currently under User Menu (click your account name in the lower left), then "Settings", then the "General" tab there's an "Instructions for Claude" box.

Asking Claude for this provides incorrect instructions for me, so I'm guessing it moves around a lot.

by illegalsmile2 hours ago|

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That's why you have to give claude and others directives/.md at the beginning so it doesn't go off the deep end with suggestions.

by epistasis2 hours ago|

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Yeah, I've tried, and I'm sure somebody is going to say "skill issue" but it's not so easy to get the model to do that. Maybe it should be a SKILLS.md issue.

Edit: also, how can I stop the LLM from all this fake glazing, as if every question I have is some sort of unique genius insight, it's so damn annoying. I just got the third straight round of this while merely trying to get summarization of a PDF:

> Good question — it gets right at a real tension in the paper. Let me check the current state of actual SV-imputation efforts, since this has moved since 2020.

by bornfreddy1 hours ago|

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I didn't try telling to be concise and stop pampering me yet (but good idea, tomorrow), however I found that instead of me writing agent instructions, it works much better if I tell claude to write instructions for itself. I do check if they make sense of course, but its wording works much better than mine.