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Dear LLM people: I get why "think" or "think harder" exist to control preparing vs actual response time. But why do people put in "you are an expert incredibly smart top 1% genius" into their prompts? It feels like a stupid ritual, of course everyone wants the best possible outcomes.

it is a stupid ritual. unfortunately, things close to it work; telling the llm "you are a staff-level qa engineer", "you are a qa engineer", and "[nothing]" have distinct results in my personal a/b testing (and directly impact thinking time/token burn, unpredictably)

Goddamnit.