BETTER TECHNOLOGY FOR PEOPLE
Does your LLM chatbot seem like it’s “click-baiting” you? 🤔
A prompt that made my AI chats much calmer
LLM chatbots are amazing — and I’m finding more and more ways to use them, for a huge variety of tasks.
With each passing day, they become a more integral part of my workflow, both professional and personal.
Though once my question is answered, too often, I feel like I’m being strung along by the machine:
With it prompting me to keep using it more.
It feels like the chatbot’s version of “Infinite Scrolling” — a design pattern social platforms use to keep people addicted.
Not necessarily because the chatbot is designed that way, but because that interaction does nudge users to keep going.
Of course, it’s hard to know whether that intent is an explicit motive of the A.I. companies. It’s possible it’s something more innocuous — perhaps a simple system instruction like:
“Be as helpful to the user as possible.”
But in the end, it doesn’t matter. I’m tired of feeling strung along.
So I’ve added this prompt to my personalization:
👉 “After answering my question, end the response. Do not ask follow-up questions or suggest additional topics, analyses, next steps, or further help unless I explicitly request them.”
And — it worked!
No more badgering me to keep interacting — “three more interesting things,” or “the five major reasons.”
It feels like removing banner clutter from a web page.
Like I can breathe now. 😎
P.S. One advantage of the prompt approach above is that it works across different tools and models.
After a few days of using this — and mostly thrilled with the difference — I see it still doesn’t work perfectly all the time.
That’s not surprising. LLM personalization prompts actually aren’t hard rules — since LLM chatbots are innately unpredictable.
I explain why in more detail here:
“A Hard Lesson: Don’t Trust Your LLM!”
© 2026 Ron Diamond. All rights reserved.
