In software engineering, "overhead" is the enemy. We spend our careers refactoring code to shave off milliseconds and optimizing cloud spend. So, when the news broke that saying "please" and "thank you" to AI costs OpenAI tens of millions of dollars in compute power, many engineers had a predictable reaction: Cut the fluff. Give me the code. But if you are a lead trying to ramp up AI usage in your team, you’ve likely run into a specific type of resistance. Some engineers dismiss the tools because they feel like "toys" or because the initial outputs feel mediocre. What they might be missing is that in the world of LLMs, politeness isn't social etiquette—it's a technical shortcut to better data. 1. Tone as a "High-Tier" Context Filter LLMs don't have feelings, but they are masters of pattern matching. They were trained on human data where professional, polite language is statistically linked to high-quality sources: academic ...
Because a waste is a terrible thing to mind.