It pays to be nice

In today's [Superhuman post](https://www.superhuman.ai/p/claude-cowork-can-tackle-more-tasks), which is a [#mustread](/tags/mustread) for me every day, they point to a meme made by Albertooz in the [ChatGPT subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1r88i1p/hahahah/) that reminded me of this post I wrote called [Why AI Might Fear Us](/2016-03-13-why-ai-might-fear-us) _way_ back in 2016. I know it burns tokens, but I just got to think it is like what my Grandmother used to say, "it pays to be nice to everyone" - advice I didn't heed as often as I should have. [These researchers](https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14531#:~:text=This%20phenomenon%20suggests%20that%20LLMs,language%20processing%20and%20LLM%20usage.) have shown that nice [#prompting](/tags/prompting) produces better results, but I think "prompt politeness might also affect us over time if we spend significant parts of our day communicating in terse commands.

So maybe take a second to think about how you prompt not only for what goes into your `memory.md` file, but for how you hang on to your manners. Your grandmother would approve.

![https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1r88i1p/hahahah/](/media/hethankedus.jpeg)