alt Hacker NewsI’ve developed a habit of bolting on “read only question” at the end, or a simple “thoughts?” as well. otherwise there’s a high chance the model will just 180 and start editing files before even responding to my question.
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I was recently adding Windows Support for some open source software on GitHub which is maintained by someone else. I gave 6.1-Sol all the instructions needed for creating a build, testing it on my machine, setting up an action on GitHub for CD, and it all did all of it very well BUT THEN IT AUTOMATICALLY OPENED A PR ON BEHALF OF ME WITHOUT ME ASKING FOR EXPLICIT PERMISSION??
That was incredibly embarrassing, I instantly converted the PR to a draft PR and added a comment that I would still need some time to verify everything locally. Ended up doing a few more commits to fix stuff. But damn, it opening a PR without my explicit permission was very scary.
I suffix the message with "Asking, not questioning."
I got tired of doing this and set up a /question skill that forbids the agent from doing anything that would modify my files. It makes it very clear what the intent of every prompt is.
Similarly, I have an /info skill that tells the agent to read my prompt, update any memories it thinks it should, then pass the turn.