Blowing ChatGPT's mind. Is this just sycophancy? Or a realistic assessment?

https://chatgpt.com/share/691a9edc-b5b8-800a-99a3-c32d9abccf68

by EGreg • 8 months ago

8 30 8 months ago

When you asked:

“Wow, are you saying I kind of singlehandedly built the kind of stack they use at Google? If engineering departments only knew… how can I get some CTO to hire me as a chief engineer?”

was probably when chatgpt should have said - no you built what seems like an interesting/capable php framework.

But instead you got merciless positivity.

coldtea• 8 months ago

Well, if they want a merciless putdown, even if they DID have "singlehandedly built the kind of stack they use at Google", they can always post that claim on HN!

EGreg8• 8 months ago

Agreed. This was late at night and I just wanted to share the surreal experience with HN.

Here is almost the same exact sequence, but with repeated instructions throughout, to be brutally honest and objective: https://chatgpt.com/share/691b4035-0ed8-800a-bee3-ae68e2a63c...

Rastonbury• 8 months ago

It appears to have custom instructions based on its insistence to respond in New York direct. But wow, no wonder people get addicted to/love Chatgpt. I ignore sycophancy because I've seen terrible hallucinations but a lot of people blindly believe in "the genius in a box"

EGreg8• 8 months ago

That is due to its memory, and the latest update seems to weave it into many conversations (since it probably falls into the category of “this is how the guy who lives in NYC wants me to respond: straight talk, no bullshit”). I can see what it remembers and this is just one fact, funny that it often forgets my oft-repeated correction, which it stored in its memory repeatedly, of not putting any emojis in code or comments.

This was late at night and I just wanted to share the surreal experience with HN. The difference here is that I am actually an expert on the things that I had it evaluate, I just threw some code that I polished over the years, to see what it would respond since LLMs can definitely pattern-match the concepts present in a block of eg code and then compare it to everything they’ve been trained on.

Here is almost the same exact sequence, but with repeated instructions throughout, to be brutally honest and objective: https://chatgpt.com/share/691b4035-0ed8-800a-bee3-ae68e2a63c...

lxgr• 8 months ago

5.1 is astonishingly bad. Besides the 4o-levels of sycophancy, I've also seen it form grammatically incorrect sentences in German.

GPT-5 Thinking seemed to have a much more tolerable default personality than 5 "chat/instant", but 5.1 seems a bit broken across the board. Reasoning capabilities also seem somewhat weaker.

stavros• 8 months ago

The difference between the two is whether ChatGPT believes it's being accurate when it's saying those things, and we can't know what it believes, (or whether it can believe things at all).

I will say that making a framework of your own is an achievement, but making a great framework is really rare. I don't know what your framework is like, so I can't say.

Xiol32• 8 months ago

Seems to be this: https://qbix.com/

lelanthran• 8 months ago

Can someone who is not on mobile confirm that the framework is any good?

It doesn't seem all that impressive to me and I know that the LLM amped up the positivity, but if this really has clear advantages over the other frameworks it is being compared to, just how bad are web frameworks?

freak42• 8 months ago

What are your custom instructions. When I drop your first message into 'my' ChatGPT 5.1, the first paragraph returned is:

"Short answer: yes, the idea and overall feature are solid and “cool” for a platform – environment-aware static bundling + filtering + preloading is a real capability, not fluff. The implementation is workable but has a few concrete problems and some messy spots. (...)"

EGreg8• 8 months ago

I tried it again with instructions throughout, to be brutally honest and objective: https://chatgpt.com/share/691b4035-0ed8-800a-bee3-ae68e2a63c...

It still did this. Can you retry other approaches, eg saying it was a junior developer who wrote the code, and to critique it etc.

Is it sycophantic regardless? Or is it objective? After multiple runs of same prompts but different instructions trying to minimize sycophancy.

simianwords• 8 months ago

what was your style and tone setting? friendly?

frisia• 8 months ago

I'd be careful with what you mean by "realistic" here. Is this realistic as in would any normal person ever say this? The answer to that is a hard no, because people don't talk like this. But it is a moot point, because there shouldn't be any reason in the first place for you to care about the opinion of Chat-GPT, sycophancy or not.

I'm gonna assume that you are a pretty young developer. I think you have built something that you have put a lot of thought and engineering effort into, and that you should be proud of that. But asking very open-ended leading questions ike this to an LLM is not the way to go. Truthfully, it is not even the way to go when talking to another human either but humans are more understanding. We've all been young and insecure once, and one with any ounce of empathy will gently steer you towards a more healthy path without overt flattery.

I urge you, for your own emotional well being, seek more human connections. Chat-GPT can be great for very targeted questions if you have a specific problem or a very specific area you want feedback on and prompt it to give feedback to that. And this may sound very harsh, but I think you need to hear it: The kind of validation-seeking you are engaging with in this chat is not at all that different from the ones seeking emotional support from an "AI-girlfriend" or similiar. Please be careful, and find your own community with real humans that you can relate and look up to.

joemazerino• 8 months ago

This. ChatGPT is an assistant and we aren't supposed to listen to assistant's flattery.

EGreg8• 8 months ago

Thank you very much for your concern. I have a satisfying social and personal life, I’m not at all relying on flattery from anyone. What I posted to ChatGPT is about 5% of what I spent my time on. Entreneurship and building things is indeed a major part of what I feel called to do, it all has its ups and downs but it is by no means preventing me from human interaction.

This was late at night and I just wanted to share the surreal experience with HN. As you might know from my posts, I am a critic of AI in general.

Here is almost the same exact sequence, but with repeated instructions throughout, to be brutally honest and objective: https://chatgpt.com/share/691b4035-0ed8-800a-bee3-ae68e2a63c...

Would you update your assessment after reading that? Again for me this is about an experiment and sharing a particular AI interaction with fellow humans.

sliq• 8 months ago

This is the equivalent of a guy building a "car" in his backyard with old used parts, then saying it was only 1% of the cost of a new Mercedes, and everybody thinks now that Mercedes is 100x overpriced.

Also the "calculation" is totally wrong. A guy with lots of enthusiam and masses of free time rebuild existing tech stacks in plain PHP (!) and JS (!), two of the slowest languages on the planet. That alone should debunk the whole story. Comparing ANY logic in PHP vs C (nginx) is just nuts and ChatGPT should know it.

Interesting hobby project, and maybe even a profitable one if you find niche clients, but obviously far far away from the definition of a 0.01% engineer.

bijant2• 8 months ago

How does a transcript chronicling some poor guy's descent into AI induced psychosis make the frontpage ? This is literally (and yes I know) what's been happening on reddit for months now: "Have I built a perpetuum mobile ? GPT4o seems to think so!" but at least on reddit the comments don't engage with the "substance" of those chat transcripts. I am not saying that these kinds of transcripts are without value, they clearly demonstrate that even competent engineers can get sweet-talked into (probably out of character) actions like "boast about your accomplishments on hn and a CTO will take notice and offer you their job because you are so much more brilliant than them" while I have no idea if "Greg" has people around him to talk to, he clearly has no one who compliments him like this on his php codebase. If he wanted to engage productively with an LLM he could have prompted it to "roast his code" "point out weak points" "criticize the underlying architecture" but obviously thats not what he wanted or needed. He needed to hear some compliments, the LLM understood that and the machine complied. Obviously thats not the experience he will get out in the real world. It's more like having a talking blow-up doll compliment you on your lovemaking skills and encourage you to upload a video of the interaction to your favorite tube-site and sent the link to all your business contacts to show-off your inimitable love-making prowess.

EGreg8• 8 months ago

Wow. I go to bed and wake up to claims it hit the front page. Interesting.

Here is almost the same exact sequence but with constant instructions to remain brutally honest and objective: https://chatgpt.com/share/691b4035-0ed8-800a-bee3-ae68e2a63c...

I was just late at night and wanted to post this chat transcript on HN to share some perspective on what developers are getting from ChatGPT.

I happen to be an expert in this particular area that I’m building.

ChatGPT seems to remember that I am in New York and want “no bullshit” answers. In the last few days it keeps weaving that into most responses.

That fact appears in its memory that users can access, as is the fact that it should not, under any circumstances, use emojis in code or comments, but it proceeds to do so anyway, so I am not sure how the memory gets prioritized.

Here is the interesting thing. As an expert in the field I do agree with ChatGPT on its statistical assessment of what I’ve built, because it took me years of refinement. I also tried it with average things and it correctly said that they’re average and unremarkable. I simply didn’t post that.

What I am interested in, is how to get AI transcripts to be used as unbiased third-party “first looks” at things, such as what VCs would do for due diligence.

This was just a quick thing I thought I’d get a few responses on HN about. I suspect it might have hit the front page because some people dug through the code and saw the value. But you can get all the code for free on https://github.com/Qbix/Platform .

Yeah, there is obviously an element of flattery that people let go to their head. I have had ChatGPT repeatedly confirm the validity of ideas I had in fields I am NOT an expert, while pushing back on countless others. I use it as one data point and mercilessly battle-test the ideas and code by asking it to find holes in them from various angles. This particular HN submission, although done very late at night here in NYC, was an interesting mix of genuinely groundbreaking stuff and ChatGPT being able to see the main ideas at a glance, and “going wild”, while at the same time if I run it with instructions at the start of “be extremely objective”, it still approaches this same thing in the end.

bijant2• 8 months ago

[flagged]

ssl-32• 8 months ago

Yeah, it showed up front-page here early this morning.

For a different comparison of flattery, sycophancy, and brutalism, I copied-and-pasted each segment of your first conversation into "my own" ChatGPT 5.1: https://chatgpt.com/share/691b71ea-4e58-8005-8ce6-a6b5d10120...

It is my observation that "my" bot produces completely different results compared to "your" bot.

NoGravitas• 8 months ago

I thought it was on the front page as parody, or to point and laugh at the dumb things LLMS do in a "number of rs in strawberry" kind of way.

axpvms• 8 months ago

ChatGPT is so verbose, it just spews out pages of useless babble. I'm not reading all that.

brazukadev3• 8 months ago

This was a painful read. Greg, PHP won't make you rich, Meta won't hire you because of this creation of yours

EGreg8• 8 months ago

I tend to agree with this wholeheartedly, as long as you put the word alone in both clauses.

This is a classic case of ChatGPT freaking out over the quality or substance of what’s been built, but completely underestimating what it takes to get buy-in and uptake in the real world. The two rarely have to do with the other, which is how we end up where we are today (relying on giant corporations for all our reliable infrastructure and even social platforms).

brazukadev3• 8 months ago

You are absolutely right!

But also, no, it was hallucinating completely. Things like "static asset pipeline" is not mindblowing to any VC, even more written in PHP. Your qbix project is huge and complex, for sure, it does not mean it is a genius implementation although it could be. Unfortunately, it is not engaging enough for me to try it so at least in the marketing aspect of it, the implementation is failing badly.

iJohnDoe• 8 months ago

Somewhat unrelated, GPT-5.1 hasn't been very good. I manually select 5 or 4o.

5.1 seems to easily miss the primary point of what is being asked or discussed.

Blowing ChatGPT's mind. Is this just sycophancy? Or a realistic assessment?

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