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.

Ask HN: Is Traditional SaaS Dying?

2•vibe_that_works•1m ago•0 comments

Meta's new open-weight model targets local agentic AI

https://twitter.com/finkd/status/2086754845218726027
1•bakigul•2m ago•0 comments

China doesn't need to beat US AI [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXA77wLF678
1•frag•3m ago•0 comments

Databricks Cost Optimizer: Audit Spend with Codex or Claude Code

https://github.com/kylehuirevvision/databricks-cost-optimizer
1•kylehui818•4m ago•0 comments

Rails Is Done

https://lucas.dohmen.io/posts/2026/08/09/rails-is-done/
1•birdculture•5m ago•0 comments

The OpenAI and Hugging Face breach story told from the perspective of the AI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE4IDWjfOZc
1•cnatod•5m ago•0 comments

Private Equity Is Stuck with 33,575 Unsold Businesses

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/10/business/private-equity-unsold-businesses.html
1•donohoe•6m ago•0 comments

Ocean heat records broken as hottest July temperature recorded

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpvw8vmmgrwo
1•blondie9x•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Game Engine with its own IDE and scripting language

1•am-gm•7m ago•0 comments

Gaussian Splat in GTA: San Andreas [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-TMMVBMu6Q
1•carlos-menezes•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: r/place for coding agents, the longer it stays up, the more you keep

https://overwrite.place/
1•mazzystar•10m ago•0 comments

How to Lie with Benchmarks

https://blog.eterm.uk/2026/08/07/how-to-lie-with-benchmarks
1•eterm•11m ago•0 comments

Why night owls are more intelligent

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909002177
1•zainhsn•12m ago•0 comments

Data Flow Mapping: Why Most Data Maps Are Out of Date

https://scrutora.com/blog/data-flow-mapping-why-manual-maps-fail
1•vimaldwivedi86•13m ago•0 comments

Databricks Data Mesh Best Practices: A Practical Implementation Guide

https://medium.com/databrickscommunity/databricks-data-mesh-best-practices-a-practical-implementa...
1•protmaks•14m ago•0 comments

Germany Sets New Six-Month Startup Record

https://www.gtai.de/en/meta/press/germany-sets-new-six-month-start-up-record-2012048
1•eigenspace•15m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Visual essay made in D3.js about The Odyssey being composed for sailors

https://theheasman.com/the-odyssey-was-for-sailors/
1•TheHeasman•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: An open-source multi-tenant, AI-native software factory

https://github.com/missingstudio/eva
1•missingstack•17m ago•1 comments

Cloudflare AI Search: give your agents a search engine for your data

https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-search-easier/
2•ankushKun•20m ago•0 comments

Senior detective under investigation over use of AI

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7vgq5mgz2mo
2•defrost•22m ago•0 comments

Muse Spark 1.2 (Meta) is reportedly becoming open-weight

https://twitter.com/alexandr_wang/status/2086756152034066792
4•MurizS•26m ago•0 comments

Parametron: 50s Japanese computer that uses neither transistors nor vacuum tubes

https://ethw.org/Milestones:Parametron,_1954
2•xeonmc•28m ago•0 comments

Meta releases a 30B agent model that fits in ~17GB

https://huggingface.co/meta-models
3•MihaiSandor•28m ago•0 comments

EU Study: Block Live Sports Piracy in 30 Minutes

https://torrentfreak.com/eu-study-block-live-sports-piracy-in-30-minutes-across-dns-resolvers-vpn...
2•pawal•29m ago•0 comments

Eight Books That Puncture the Myths of Silicon Valley

https://lithub.com/eight-books-that-puncture-the-myths-of-silicon-valley/
1•spy888•33m ago•0 comments

Linus Torvalds says AI has made Linux kernel updates the new normal

https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/08/10/linus-torvalds-says-ai-has-made-huge-linux-ke...
4•mdp2021•33m ago•0 comments

Karl Marx, for the NY Daily Tribune: "The American Question in England" (1861)

https://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/10/11.htm
2•thomassmith65•35m ago•1 comments

'adversarial' pattern can prevent surveillance cameras from detecting you

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/09/this-adversarial-pattern-can-prevent-surveillance-cameras-from-...
3•caruasdo•36m ago•0 comments

Secure Capability-Based Generative UI with WASM Components [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoYFUomDwp8
1•marianoguerra•36m ago•0 comments

ChatTJB

https://chattjb.org/
1•thazework•36m ago•1 comments