There are times when trying to use Claude for coding that I genuinely get annoyed at it, and I find it cathartic to include this emotion in my prompt to it, even though I know it doesn't have feelings; expressing emotions rather than bottling them up often can be an effective way to deal with them. Sometimes this does even influence how it handles things, noting my frustration in its "thinking" and then trying to more directly solve my immediate problem rather than trying to cleverly work around things in a way I didn't want.

  > Most technical people still will have some emotion in their prompts, say please or thank you, give qualitative feedback for no reason, express anger towards the model, etc.

(As a ml researcher) I think one of the biggest problems we have is that we're trying to make a duck by making an animatronic duck indistinguishable from a real duck. In some sense this makes a lot of sense but it also only allows us to build a thing that's indistinguishable from a real duck to us, not indistinguishable from a real duck to something/someone else. It seems like a fine point, but the duck test only allows us to conclude something is probably a duck, not that it is a duck.

Yes, I've experienced the sense that there's a person on the "other end" even when I have been perfectly aware that it's a bag of matrices. Brains just have people-detectors that operate below conscious awareness. We've been anthropomorphizing stuff as impersonal as the ocean for as long as there have been people, probably.

Maybe it is a dangerous habit to instruct entities in plain English without anthropomorphizing them to some extent, without at least being polite? It should feel unnatural do that.