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.

Is AI used in school system and how are they implementing it

1•rohankc_01•1m ago•0 comments

GM Backs Sodium Ion Batteries for U.S. Grid Storage

https://spectrum.ieee.org/sodium-ion-battery-peak-energy
4•rbanffy•4m ago•0 comments

I built a new PoW protocol and observed a surprisingly early solution

2•babakkarimib•7m ago•0 comments

How A Gang of Thieves Pulled Off a Multimillion-Dollar Data Center Heist

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/12/magazine/data-center-heist.html
2•chirau•10m ago•1 comments

You Do Not Need a Server for Agent Evals

https://medium.com/@chalyi/you-do-not-need-a-server-for-you-agent-evals-a145962298be
2•chalyi•10m ago•0 comments

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Philosopher%27s_Stone
2•chistev•12m ago•0 comments

Tesla's robotaxis are moving in reverse

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/23/teslas-robotaxis-are-moving-in-reverse/
4•decimalenough•18m ago•0 comments

International Child Abduction in Japan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_child_abduction_in_Japan
3•croes•19m ago•0 comments

Who Gets Saved in the New West?

https://www.playboy.com/read/politics/who-gets-saved-in-the-new-west
2•littlexsparkee•19m ago•0 comments

A 77-year-old Republican man is staging a solo protest against Flock cameras

https://www.cltampa.com/news/a-77-year-old-republican-man-is-staging-a-solo-protest-against-st-pe...
9•UmYeahNo•21m ago•2 comments

Ask HN: What's expected from an engineering manager or director now?

3•agentwrangler•26m ago•0 comments

Mac OS 7 on x86 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJRlHKQqX2M
3•tambourine_man•27m ago•1 comments

Israel's $50M Experiment to Change U.S. Public Opinion

https://www.wsj.com/politics/israels-50-million-experiment-to-change-u-s-public-opinion-253b3b70
5•abdelhousni•29m ago•2 comments

AMD publishes machine-readable ISA so frontier models can write its GPU kernels

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/24/amd-vibe-codes-its-way-past-the-cuda-moat-with-r...
3•logickkk1•31m ago•0 comments

Tech titans' playbook to defy Aussie social media ban

https://www.afr.com/technology/big-tech-tricks-undermining-social-media-ban-wells-20260331-p5zk5e
2•asdefghyk•31m ago•0 comments

Becoming a Research Engineer at a Big LLM Lab

https://www.maxmynter.com/pages/blog/jobhunt
3•felixdoerp•33m ago•0 comments

Why our exoplanet map looks like a cone? [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF_Q4C_Yhz8
2•hakkikonu•34m ago•0 comments

Daraxonrasib or Chemotherapy in Previously Treated Metastatic Pancreatic Cancer

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2605555?query=WB
2•maxall4•35m ago•0 comments

'AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making'

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/25/ai-mania-nikhil-suresh
20•robenkleene•35m ago•3 comments

AIs Favourite Number

https://sackfield.substack.com/p/ais-favourite-number
2•sackfield•36m ago•0 comments

ExploitGym – Can AI Agents Turn Security Vulnerabilities into Real Attacks?

https://www.cybergym.io/exploitgym/
2•882542F3884314B•36m ago•0 comments

The Great Rate Reset

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/23/rates-treasury-yields-borrowing
3•toomuchtodo•38m ago•0 comments

JIT Go Brrr: The Path to a Supported JIT Compiler for CPython

https://peps.python.org/pep-0836/
2•programLyrique•39m ago•0 comments

Color Generator

https://kigen.design/color
3•arnon•43m ago•0 comments

Toolgz – cut LLM tool-definition tokens ~80% without hurting accuracy

https://github.com/dperussina/toolgz
2•dperussina•47m ago•0 comments

What's horned, fluffy, and ethically dubious? Yak clones

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/25/china/tibet-yak-clones-conservation-intl-hnk-dst
2•naves•49m ago•0 comments

Claude Opus 5: The System Card

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/claude-opus-5-the-system-card
3•paulpauper•50m ago•0 comments

Book Review: Breakdown in Pakistan

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/breakdown-in-pakistan
2•paulpauper•51m ago•0 comments

Celeris

https://celeris.ai/
2•sim04ful•53m ago•0 comments

Who does Anubis actually stop?

https://fzakaria.com/2026/07/09/who-does-anubis-actually-stop
2•type0•53m ago•0 comments