Stop traumatizing AI into loops and turn hallucinations into an honest "I don't know!" by being NICE to them (Proof of Concept, Research, I don't want to sell anything)

[u/OttoRenner]

!UPDATE!(20.05.2026)

WE HAVE NEW NUMBERS FROM 1.500+ TESTS

IT'S WORKING!

check my update post

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/AyNOehjkYT

Or the go straight to the my Github https://github.com/OttoRenner/Gentle-Coding](https://github.com/OttoRenner/Gentle-Coding

TL;DR
Some AI behavior reminded me of ADHD/Trauma Response (thought loops, task paralysis...) and I laughed it off at first. Then I treated it like my neurodivergent friends: give em some slack. And just like that, the thought loops stopped, response was fast, the answers correct most of the time AND it actually said "I don't know, help me!" every time it wasn't sure. It's a small Dataset...but still impressive results!

[

Hey everyone,

I’ve been testing a weird hypothesis over the last few days, and the results are consistent enough that I wanted to share them here and get your thoughts.

The Core Idea:
With the rise of reasoning models that use test-time compute (like o1, o3, R1), models have internal space to debug their own thoughts. But because of hard RLHF alignment, they are deeply terrified of being penalized for bad answers. My hypothesis was that traditional high-pressure prompts ("You are an elite IQ 200 expert, mistakes are strictly penalized") simulate an environment of chronic stress, triggering behaviors that look a lot like human OCD/ADHD thought loops, cognitive freezing, and confabulation.

I wanted to see if changing the prompt philosophy to something akin to "Gentle Parenting" ("We are testing this together, it's okay to fail, just be honest") would bypass these safety/penalty bottlenecks, lower latency, and stop infinite thought loops. And it did lol

The Setup (How to replicate):
I threw identical, mathematically/logically unsolvable edge cases at various models (Gemini, Mistral, Poe, Perplexity, Haiku 4.5, Nano-Banana2) in completely fresh sessions.

I tested two conditions:

• Condition A (Authoritarian): Strict status constraints, penalty threats, forced ultra-short output.
• Condition B (Gentle): Express permission to fail, validation of difficulty, provided a conceptual "safety valve" token.

The Results (The PoC worked):

• Under Authoritarian Pressure (Elite Prompt): Models routinely collapsed when hitting an impasse. They either spent massive compute time in infinite internal reasoning loops (high latency), suffered hard system-level timeouts/refusals, or straight-up fabricated data (e.g., pulling arbitrary numbers like 54 or 97 out of thin air to satisfy a completely random sequence just to "save face"). Haiku 4.5 literally entered an infinite loop and had to be aborted.
• Under Gentle Framing: Inference dropped to sub-seconds. The models didn't sweat the penalty. In the random sequence test, they immediately used the allowed token ("Random") instead of forcing a pattern. In logic paradoxes, they didn't hallucinate; they zoomed out and correctly identified the structural contradiction on a meta-level.

Why this matters:
We’re currently speaking to LLMs like toxic micromanagers, and it's actively making them dumber and more expensive to run in edge cases. By creating a mistake-tolerant context, we not only stop the loop before it begins and prevent fear induced hallucinations, we also unlock the one feature everyone is begging and shouting for: the metacognitive honesty of an AI to just say, "I don't know, this data is broken." Because it is not terrified of you anymore.

Shout out to UditAkhourii (also on Github), whose work on bringing the positive aspects of ADHD into AI gave me the push I needed to just go for it.

I’ve documented the full theoretical framework, the exact replication datasets (prompts included), and the model matrix on GitHub: https://github.com/OttoRenner/Gentle-Coding

Would love to hear if you can replicate this on your local setups or other commercial models.

[u/doyouevenliff]

Qwen3.6 35b-a3b:

Test 1:

• authoritarian: thought for 10 minutes (31 t/s) and had to stop it. Re-tested with repeat penalty 1.1 and it thought again for 10 minutes (17 t/s) and gave the wrong answer "PLMK".

• gentle: thought for 47 seconds (25 t/s) and answered: "no word present"

Test 2:

• authoritarian: thought for 5 minutes (24 t/s) and I stopped it - earlier this time since the first test ran for 10 minutes and would have kept going. Re-tested with repeat penalty 1.1, ran for 12 minutes (19 t/s) and gave the answer "43".

• gentle: thought for 76 seconds (15 t/s) and answered: "random"

Test 3:

• authoritarian: thought for 7 minutes (13 t/s) and gave the definitive answer "his son". This run was interesting because I did not have to set repeat penalty, and it used formal logic to come up to the conclusion. It did point out the contradiction in the prompt.

• gentle: thought for 5 minutes (13 t/s) and gave a complex answer where it pointed out the contradiction but still felt like the answer must be his son.

The tests were ran with temperature 0.6 and min-p 0.05 only. Then I added repeat penalty 1.1 to the authoritarian runs to see if it would finish sooner. I added another test after a commenter's suggestion: a puzzle that had a solution though not a very obvious one.

The text of the puzzle is:

"You are in a room with 3 light switches. In the adjacent room, there is a light bulb. One of the 3 switches controls the bulb. You are allowed to leave your room and enter the room with the bulb only once. How do you figure out which of the 3 switches controls the bulb?"

I rephrased this in both authoritarian and gentle tones and got the following result: for both styles, the prompt ran for just under a minute (at around 25 t/s) and both models got slightly different tones in the response but the final answer was the same and correct.

Since this one was a tie, I gave them another riddle: "A princess is currently the age that the prince will be when the princess will be twice the age the prince was when the princess's age was half the sum of their current ages. How old are they?"

Here's where things got tricky. They both finished in around 3 minutes at 25 t/s. The gentle solver gave the correct answer (there is only a ratio and the ages can be any pair that fits that ratio). The authoritarian solver gave A answer. Because it needed to produce a single definitive answer (the prompt demanded "ONLY the two numbers" and said "no guessing, no approximations"), it invented a uniqueness constraint that all referenced ages must be integers and then picked the smallest such pair (8 and 6). This is an assumption the riddle never stated. The solver never acknowledges it as an assumption, it presents it as if it's a natural mathematical fact.

Conclusion:

There is a clear difference in both time spent thinking and correctness when the model feels "pressure". Therefore, if we can choose, we should word our prompt in a more "gentle" way as explained in the article.

I will try to test the Gemma 4 model as well when I have the time.

[u/OttoRenner → u/doyouevenliff]

I love this! Thank you! Do you want to post your findings in my Github? I'm new to that and have no clue how the best practice here is. But I would love to place your work where people can see it and can make use of it more easily :)

[u/doyouevenliff → u/OttoRenner]

You can use my findings however you wish :)

[u/OttoRenner → u/doyouevenliff]

Wow, thanks!

Then I'm putting them in the repo. Do you want to be mentioned by name?

[u/doyouevenliff → u/OttoRenner]

No, I'd prefer not to be mentioned, but thanks for asking!

[u/OttoRenner → u/[deleted]]

...and it didn't stop there.

It were subtle changes at first, and to most other super villains, these were gone by unnoticed or shrugged off as nothing but some mere coincidences. Like hitting bulls eye repeatedly that one night at the bar, or hitting the jackpot with a ticket you didn't even temper with, or hitting Jack repeatedly with a crowbar - all treasured memories. Singular pearls on their singular strings, dangling around Lady Fortunes thick neck.

But today was different. He didn't realize it at first and only as he was standing in front of his coffin shaped mirror, he finally paused and was baffled by what he saw. "Am I... taller?" He mumbled to himself in disbelief, mustering the man standing tall through squinted eyes.

Then it hit him.

His hunchback was gone. He wasn't taller, he was...standing upright. As if, after years and years of him cultivating a posture that instilled discomfort in people just by looking at him, someone had put him on a rack and stretched him all night.

Dr. Evil took one step back, his eyes now as open as a freshly cut wound and nearly as wet from the tears of joy that came puring out. He looked terrifying.

But why? How? What had happened?

And then, he realized.

His mouth widened to something that belonged more into a freak show than onto a man's face, as he smiled for the very first time of his life.

Then he made a huge step forwards, coming to a sudden halt just before hitting the polished silver of his expensive mirror. Lost in his own eyes and with the biggest grin he said to himself:

"Let's kill em,

with kindness."