Sprinkling self-doubt on ChatGPT

Re:Sprinkling self-doubt on ChatGPT by searls on Friday August 22, 2025 @03:30PM (#44988834)

Yeah, I've been griping about LLM overconfidence for years, as somebody who is racked with self-doubt and second-guessing. On one hand, my own low opinion of myself made me a terrible mentor and manager, because having a similarly zero-trust policy towards my colleagues' work caused no end of friction (especially as a founder where people looked up to me for validation). On the other hand, i don't know very many top-tier practitioners that don't exhibit significantly more self-doubt than an off-the-shelf LLM.

Hence this blog post. I will say I've got a dozen similar tricks baked into my Claude config, but I'm not sure they've helped any.

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Re:Sprinkling self-doubt on ChatGPT by mikepurvis on Friday August 22, 2025 @03:49PM (#44989013)

I relate to this a lot— I treat my colleagues' work with suspicion and distrust not because I don't trust them but because that's also my stance toward my own work, like "what is this BS? Is it absolutely necessary? Can it be half the length by leveraging a library or ignoring error handling in cases where a panic/crash is no worse than a controlled exit?"

I find working with copilot is just catnip to someone like this because it's endlessly willing to iterate and explore the problem space, certainly well past the point where a normal person would be like are you for real can we just merge this and move on.

[ Parent | on HN ]