frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

GPT needs a truth-first toggle for technical workflows

1•PAdvisory•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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__•7mo 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.

Finance reporting is the hardest part of usage-based billing

https://flexpricecommunity.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-39uat51l0-n8JmSikHZP~bHJNXladeaQ?nojsm...
1•sudeepsd__•2m ago•0 comments

Making Sense of Next.js Caching for Developers and SEOs

https://www.willkennard.com/digital-blog/making-sense-nextjs-caching-for-developers-seos
1•eustoria•2m ago•0 comments

Old Web Network and Sysadmin Tools

https://oldweb.tech/
1•palthainon•2m ago•1 comments

Advent of Code vs. Weird Programming Languages

https://joshmoody.org/blog/advent-of-code-vs-weird-programming-languages/
1•surprisetalk•3m ago•0 comments

New Years Bingo

https://potch.me/2025/new-years-bingo.html
1•surprisetalk•3m ago•0 comments

Genius in the Bottle

https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/genius-in-the-bottle
1•surprisetalk•3m ago•0 comments

JavaScript Drag-and-Drop Ordered Lists (2004)

https://rogerkeays.com/javascript-drag-and-drop-ordered-lists
1•eustoria•3m ago•0 comments

Trump Orders USDA Employees to Investigate Foreign Researchers They Work With

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-usda-foreign-scientists
2•ceejayoz•3m ago•1 comments

Organic Pulse SEO

https://www.agencia-seomadrid.com/
1•josephgough•3m ago•0 comments

BashISE – local-first "ISE-style" GUI for Bash

https://github.com/TrishulaSoftware/BashISE
1•trishulasoftwre•4m ago•2 comments

Verizon starts issuing $20 credits after nationwide outage

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/mobile/verizon-starts-issuing-20-credits-after-nationwide-o...
1•speckx•4m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Create AI UGC Ads in 3 clicks

https://proom.ai
1•dubovetzky•4m ago•0 comments

SQLite Driver Benchmark: better-sqlite3 vs. node:SQLite

https://sqg.dev/blog/sqlite-driver-benchmark/
1•uwemaurer•5m ago•0 comments

Designated Initializers, the best feature of C++20

https://mropert.github.io/2026/01/15/designed_initializers/
1•todsacerdoti•5m ago•0 comments

Antigravity Has Skills

https://daywards.com/media/the-case-for-firebase/antigravity-has-skills
1•daywards•6m ago•0 comments

How to Fireproof a City

https://www.theverge.com/features/861950/fire-resilient-home-neighborhood
1•ianrahman•6m ago•0 comments

Google Search Engine

https://www.google.com
1•shahzaibmferoz•8m ago•0 comments

The Unravelling of Thinking Machines: When $2B Can't Keep the Founders

https://medium.com/@jpcaparas/the-unravelling-of-thinking-machines-when-2-billion-cant-keep-the-f...
2•zenoware•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built a free football prediction platform with live matches and stats

https://www.pronos-football.com/
1•toutoulliou•10m ago•1 comments

We Are Excited About Confessions

https://alignment.openai.com/confessions/
1•gwintrob•10m ago•0 comments

High screen time in kids + 2h/d linked to obesity, poor metabolic health

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/endocrinology/articles/10.3389/fendo.2025.1719372/full
1•giuliomagnifico•10m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Typestone – A TypeScript validation library with strong type safety

https://github.com/itskyedo/typestone
2•itskyedo•11m ago•0 comments

Vibe Marketing Tool

https://getpixel.ai/
1•nandorsky•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I'm building an open source platform for learning Arabic dialects

https://www.parallel-arabic.com/about
1•selmetwa•12m ago•0 comments

From Tokens to Burgers: A Water Footprint Face-Off (AI Water Use)

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/from-tokens-to-burgers-a-water-footprint
1•atlasunshrugged•13m ago•0 comments

Building Debian Packages on Arch Linux with Systemd-Nspawn

https://blog.jlcarveth.dev/post/systemd-nspawn.md
1•JLCarveth•13m ago•0 comments

Exiled crown prince urges world to help protesters topple Iran's government

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70lx085z85o
1•tartoran•14m ago•2 comments

Canada, China slash EV, canola tariffs in reset of ties

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/canada-china-set-make-historic-gains-new-partnership-says-car...
2•DustinEchoes•14m ago•0 comments

Google AI Studio's API key protection is as exposed as the key itself

https://github.com/qudent/qudent.github.io/blob/master/_posts/2026-01-16-aistudio-proxy.md
1•qudent•14m ago•1 comments

BitCraft Open Sourcing Announcement

https://bitcraftonline.com/news/bitcraft-open-sourcing-update
1•cloutiertyler•14m ago•0 comments