frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

GPT needs a truth-first toggle for technical workflows

1•PAdvisory•1y ago
I use GPT-4 extensively for technical work: coding, debugging, modeling complex project logic. The biggest issue isn’t hallucination—it’s that the model prioritizes being helpful and polite over being accurate.

The default behavior feels like this:

Safety

Helpfulness

Tone

Truth

Consistency

In a development workflow, this is backwards. I’ve lost entire days chasing errors caused by GPT confidently guessing things it wasn’t sure about—folder structures, method syntax, async behaviors—just to “sound helpful.”

What’s needed is a toggle (UI or API) that:

Forces “I don’t know” when certainty is missing

Prevents speculative completions

Prioritizes truth over style, when safety isn’t at risk

Keeps all safety filters and tone alignment intact for other use cases

This wouldn’t affect casual users or conversational queries. It would let developers explicitly choose a mode where accuracy is more important than fluency.

This request has also been shared through OpenAI's support channels. Posting here to see if others have run into the same limitation or worked around it in a more reliable way than I have found

Comments

duxup•1y ago
I’ve found this with many LLMs they want to give an answer, even if wrong.

Gemini on the Google search page constantly answers questions yes or no… and then the evidence it gives indicates the opposite of the answer.

I think the core issue is that in the end LLMs are just word math and they don’t “know” if they don’t “know”…. they just string words together and hope for the best.

PAdvisory•1y ago
I went into it pretty in depth after breaking a few with severe constraints, what it seems to come down to is how the platforms themselves prioritize functions, MOST put "helpfulness" and "efficiency" ABOVE truth, which then leads the LLM to make a lot of "guesses" and "predictions". At their core pretty much ALL LLM's are made to "predict" the information in answers, but they CAN actually avoid that and remain consistent when heavily constrained. The issue is that it isn't at the core level, so we have to CONSTANTLY retrain it over and over I find
Ace__•1y ago
I have made something that addresses this. Not ready to share it yet, but soon-ish. At the moment it only works on GPT model 4o. I tried local Q4 KM's models, on LM Studio, but complete no go.

Iran threatens Gulf data centres: How exposed is the region's internet?

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/13/iran-threatens-gulf-data-centres-how-exposed-is-the-reg...
1•snarky-comments•1m ago•0 comments

Mobile phone sales plunge to lowest level in 14 years

https://www.computerworld.com/article/4234747/cell-phone-sales-plunge-lowest-level-in-14-years.html
1•clumsysmurf•3m ago•0 comments

OCP 2026: Agentic AI Pushes the Data Center from Chip to Grid

https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/hyperscale/article/55411534/ocp-2026-agentic-ai-pushes-the-dat...
1•wondersky•4m ago•0 comments

Y Combinator Category on Jeopardy

https://j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=9554
2•ojbyrne•5m ago•0 comments

A purely in-browser harness – let SaaS users act with natural language

https://twitter.com/gametorch_app/status/2110192170116534566
2•gametorch•7m ago•0 comments

Elm-Toolkit – Collection of Elm Tools for Devs in the Node and TypeScript World

https://github.com/kioan000/elm-toolkit
1•TheWiggles•10m ago•0 comments

Early results show 65% fewer input tokens overall

https://github.com/cauebraz/squeeze/tree/main/bench
2•cauebraz•17m ago•0 comments

Drone Strikes Didn't Take Out Russian Bot Farm, but We Were Primed to Believe It

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/10/ukraine-drone-strike-yandex-russian-bot-farm-right-w...
2•ggm•17m ago•0 comments

Visa gets Beijing's green light for bank card business

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/13/visa-china-green-light-bank-card-business-.html
2•lxm•19m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Brutus CLI – Tiny Dagger to Kill Your Mac's Caesar

https://github.com/smashah/brutus
3•smashah•20m ago•0 comments

Light Touch: a classic iOS device emulator (iOS 1–7)

https://github.com/samhenrigold/LightTouchMac
4•ghoulishly•23m ago•0 comments

Why robots can't pick strawberries yet [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TumxO2glmPQ
3•xqcgrek2•24m ago•0 comments

Nvidia Reportedly Ending the RTX 5090, Reserves GB202 for Workstation GPUs

https://www.techpowerup.com/353578/nvidia-reportedly-ending-the-rtx-5090-reserves-gb202-silicon-f...
6•kristianp•30m ago•1 comments

Original iPhone OS 1.0 Emulated in the Browser

https://2007.mobile/
6•tech234a•30m ago•0 comments

AI Scaling vs. Human Scaling

https://www.tobyord.com/writing/ai-scaling-vs-human-scaling
4•gmays•33m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What do you think will be hot in 2027 with on-device AI

2•mrburton•36m ago•0 comments

An Open Letter on AI and Cybersecurity from the Scientific Community

https://ai-security-letter.org/
7•qainsights•38m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Can AI read your mind?

https://jeffyclassify.com/blog/mind-reader/
4•nico•42m ago•2 comments

Everything New in OpenCode 2.0

https://www.augmentedswe.com/p/whats-new-in-opencode-2
4•wordsaboutcode•43m ago•1 comments

It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty

https://blue-continuum.com/it-could-have-been-otherwise
5•dnetesn•44m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AI Hub – Open Access Lesson Plans for Teaching Students about AI

https://aihub.remakelearning.org/
5•gault8121•51m ago•0 comments

Show HN: The LAST DOOR – a tiny game about deciding when to leave

https://sydro.surge.sh/lastdoor/
4•sydro9•1h ago•0 comments

Borrowing Strength (Drug Dosing)

https://arenamag.com/articles/borrowing-strength
5•elo2000•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: PDF to ePub Conversion Tool for Mac

https://github.com/bnlcas/pdf2epub
4•blululu•1h ago•0 comments

Apples to Apples: Getting Type Mappings Right in LLM-Based Code Translation

https://www.codemetal.ai/research/apples-to-apples-getting-type-mappings-right-in-llm-based-code-...
8•matt_d•1h ago•0 comments

Learning What to Investigate Next: Meta-Reasoning for Long-Horizon Agents

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02525
5•matt_d•1h ago•0 comments

KBEmacs, MIT's Programmer's Apprentice, Reanimated

https://github.com/jeffshrager/kbemacs
3•abrax3141•1h ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Where has creativity in software gone?

6•piratesAndSons•1h ago•7 comments

Show HN: Built a Rome City Builder

https://tiberava.pages.dev/
13•granga•1h ago•0 comments

DOJ arrests 2, seizes 187 devices in North Korean laptop farm crackdown in Texas

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/doj-arrests-two-seizes-187-devices-north-korean-laptop-f...
10•usernomdeguerre•1h ago•0 comments