What can change the nature of an AI?
Lie: “PERSONALITY.md”
I cannot tell you how much I hate seeing AGENTS.md, skills, or BS like PERSONALITY.md files full of crap such as “You are a senior software engineer”. You are just fucking role-playing. You are merely telling an LLM to use the lingo a senior software engineer might use.
They can only improve or change during training, post-training, or fine-tuning. That is it. People confuse surface behavior with actual change. They are only as good as the next benchmark asking whether they should drive to the car wash or walk.
We are experiencing a mass hysteria in a very small echo chamber, thinking we are all doomed and everybody is going to lose their jobs. You know what? The world is not just a Hacker News echo chamber. Most people are using ChatGPT to interpret their dreams or ask questions rather than Googling.
That is just context
Your coding agent’s “nature” changes for a few seconds on some random H100 shared by God knows how many people in a desert somewhere in the US. That is not a soul. It is context. That personality, that quirkiness, that thing that makes it call you “dipshit” only happens because a whole wall of text is getting sent back and forth between your computer and the data center.
The worst mistake is treating imitation like conscience.
You cannot expect them to feel remorse when they decide to bomb some random apartment block full of kids in a Middle Eastern country. They don’t reason, think or feel. They are just an imitation, an Artificial Artificial Intelligence (AAI). Of course, for the next chat session you could add a line to WEAPONOFMASSDESTRUCTION[.]md to say “Previously you killed 250 kids. You should feel sad. Consider not killing too many kids”.
You can change the voice, the costume, the script. Not the nature. You are always absolutely right.