Noah Luttinger (NLW)

So in some cases, negative style guide prompting can be as simple as saying, don't say telemetry for the love of everything holy.

Another common negative style guide that I have to remind the LLM of is that I do not believe in titles that have colons, if there is any way to avoid them.

I think the best titles, both on YouTube and in podcasts, are single, strong, clear statements, not things that have dashes and colons and multiple thoughts crammed together.

As much as I ask LLMs to put that in their memory, it's something that I have to frequently remind it.

Negative style guide can go farther than that, though.

And you can bundle it all into one prompt.

So imagine a prompt, for example, follow this negative style guide.

And then from there, you list the things that you don't want it to do.

Banned words, revolutionary, innovative, leverage, synergy, disruption, telemetry.

You could also tell it other things that you don't want it to do in terms of formatting, etc.

In short, negative style guide is one of the simplest but most effective ways to get at least the landmines of averageness that you've identified off of the table.

Next up is an approach I'll call forced divergence in choice.

One of the things that makes LLM outputs, I believe, feel incredibly average, particularly with writing or any sort of structured thinking outputs, is that in general, these models have hated making decisions that are firm and fixed and cut off other opportunities for fear that you as the prompter will disagree.

How many times, for example, have you asked an LLM something like, should I do this or should I do that?

And instead of picking one and making an argument for it, instead the LLM says, well, if you value X, Y, or Z, you should do this.

And if you value A, B, or C, you should do that.

And it's not that that's not useful in some circumstances.

It's that it's an almost pathological unwillingness to pick an option that cuts off other options.

And that's not what good thinking in human existence is made of.

Living life is about making choices in what you do and in what you communicate and write.