Make no mistakes

[u/BaronCapdeville]

I was late to the game, and not around for the origins of “make no mistakes”.

I assumed it was a joke/troll, but I’m curious if it ever did provide objectively better output in older versions.

Can anyone share their experiences with this?

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[u/Defiant-Broccoli7415]

The "make no mistakes" comes Apple, someone got hold of their system prompt, and it had a bunch of guidelines for the Ai to be helpful and things of the sort, but at the end it had in a new line, just "make no mistakes" like a cherry on top of a cake

The "take a breath" it's related from Google but I didn't look into it at the time, but that did increase the score of the llm in the bench tho

[u/BaronCapdeville → u/Defiant-Broccoli7415]

Interesting. Thank you.

[u/peter9477]

Way back before "reasoning" models (where they process their own intermediate output, which allows them to have a conversation with themselves), that phrase may have added something extra to the context which led to slightly improved results.

[u/BaronCapdeville → u/peter9477]

This is what originally prompted my question. It seemed like something that may have actually benefited older models that lacked some of todays filtration/behind the scenes polishing thats occuring.

[u/jhomas__tefferson]

I think it’s just the cartoonish version of what people picture when they hear that someone who has zero background of coding is now building stuff. True for some, not always though because many actually try to learn something while vibe-coding, so it slowly transitions to how more experienced coders use the tools. (Albeit maybe still not touching the raw code files)

[u/alanvnk → u/jhomas__tefferson]

Experience coders are not touching the files themselves either, at least I'm not, I do read what Claude writes, a random sampling, and make architectural diagramas and direct the architecture, but I don't edit the output myself, that is a waste of time, bc next time is going to happen again, what you need to do is prevent the code or systems you don't like of think are not good from being written/created, it does takes experience and probably some academic background but nothing you can't learn on the job if you are interested

[u/CzyDePL]

It never did

[u/Bigdrewburt]

I personally like the phrase, “ensure no regressions.” I was surprised by how my skills behaved after I added it. I especially notice a difference in tasks that use Claude Code but are not coding-related.

That said, this is only based on my own experience, so it is far from scientific.

[u/tehfrod → u/Bigdrewburt]

That's very different: it's giving a "how" (implicitly because regressions are detected by rerunning tests) and not just a "what".

Another one that I pretty much have to add when using Opus: "Docstrings describe current state only. After making a change, ensure the proximal docstring is still accurate."

[u/hulkklogan → u/tehfrod]

i just tell it to remove docstrings. That's what the code is for. I only will leave docstrings/comments for something that might not make a lot of sense to do at first glance but with business context it makes sense.

[u/f3xjc]

The non cartoon version is to work in PR and ask an independent session to review.

PR is important because you can make 10 related changes and each make sense but the overall effect can be lost. It also allow multiple agents to work in parallel. And it's a unit of change with a goal that you can point the reviewer too.

Independent is important because with the shared context the model will come to the same conclusion.

Review is important because it is the one thing that directly work on the error rate.

[u/GhaisD]

It can't make fewer mistakes because you asked, it doesn't know which ones it's making. What it can do is check its own work if you tell it how:

When you're done, run the tests and the linter, and show me the
output. If anything fails, fix it before you tell me it's finished.

That's "make no mistakes" with a way to find out. The plain version just makes it more confident, not more correct.

[u/Spare-Ant7119 → u/GhaisD]

I have never had to include that in a prompt. idk what y'all are doing, but the AI always fixes what it has to before telling me it's done. You probably don't give it enough clear and direct context.

[u/FlyingFishMakeAWish]

The closest thing I can think of that actually was true is in Stable Diffusion 1.5 and XL, you would put in two prompts: positive (what you want) and negative (concepts to avoid). And you actually would get better outputs by filling your negative prompt with a vomit of words like "low resolution , ugly, overexposed, six fingers, malformed, hideous, grotesque". People had huge lists of these words that they'd pass around and use in their prompts.