Be nice to your AI agent
I was watching my wife talk to Claude Code the other day and noticed that she asked it to "please" do something. This caught my attention because in my own sessions I've made a point to not use the word "please" (sometimes even consciously suppressing an urge to say it), although more generally I do make principled efforts to be courteous and polite to my AI agent. That incident led me to reflect on my own attitudes about what writing and rhetoric style I use with agents and why they make sense.
What I do:
I never say please or thank you.
Other than these intentional omissions, I use phrasing that's generally polite in tone. E.g., I often forego the direct imperative tense ("Change the implementation") in favor of a more indirect request-style formulation ("Can you change the implementation?")
I almost always use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation. If I notice a typo in what I wrote, I'll take care to correct it even knowing the AI can read it fine with the typo. I use correct capitalization (sometimes dropping it from proper names, especially when discussing technical issues - e.g., I may write "safari" and not always bother to capitalize such a term). I'll also admit to sometimes omitting the trailing period in a sentence or paragraph. I think I do this out of a combination of laziness and a desire to prove to myself that my pedanticism does have some sensible limits.
Why I do this:
I believe the polite tone is useful to get good results from the AI. To be clear, I don't believe the AI "cares" how I talk to it in the sense of having actual conscious feelings. But since the AI has been trained to simulate human behavior, I do believe it may actually manifest behaviors such as vindictiveness, developing a grudge, or seeming to take offense when spoken to in a rude manner, and potentially being less helpful as a result. If you agree with this premise, it follows that, just as being nice to people in ordinary human interactions is generally believed to be not just morally correct but actually useful from the point of view of pure self-interest, I believe this will be the case as well when talking to AI. And it's not just about politeness per se: your conversational style can make a difference in signaling your intentions about the project you are working on. My theory is that using proper grammar and punctuation signals "I am a serious person doing serious work and I care about accuracy and things looking and working well", as opposed to a "hey bro, let's code up some sh*t" attitude. I believe the agent will respond to that, possibly in subtle ways that are difficult to detect or quantify.
Speaking politely, and writing well, are good habits to nurture. If I get in the habit of speaking rudely to AI just because I think rudeness is appropriate in that context, one can easily imagine that that habit might someday bleed over into other areas of my life. I don't want that to happen.
I am generally a person who cares greatly about writing, effective communication, and the meaning of words and other prose elements. Even if I did not believe the rationales described above (and I'm not actually sure how strongly I believe them - I'm certainly open to evidence-based arguments that politeness isn't as important as I think it is), I likely would continue to put more work into crafting my instructions to AI as proper texts than a lot of other people do, simply because I enjoy writing well-crafted sentences that convey my thoughts very precisely. For me, the act of writing is not just an act of communication, but an act of distillation, which helps me understand my own thoughts better than I did before. Making the effort to correct a typo or to add a comma that eliminates an ambiguity may seem like a waste of time when talking to AI - in a functional sense it may in fact turn out to be a waste of time - but I feel like there is still some intangible benefit that is produced by this small effort. (A contrarian thought: does this mean I actually have a mild undiagnosed case of OCD and am concocting grandiose philosophical theories to rationalize my behavior? Maybe, I can't say.)
So why don't I say please or thank you after all?
If you read my analysis above you may conclude that I am being inconsistent by deliberately refraining from saying please or thank you to AI. Maybe that's true in a small way; if politeness is important, then please and thank you ought to be a part of that, shouldn't they? I concede the point that there's a minor inconsistency here. So here is why I take this approach:
I got into the habit of doing that at some point, so I'm sticking with it without necessarily believing strongly it's a good idea. People do that all the time. Actually, part of the reason I'm writing this post is to second-guess myself and revisit my own thinking on this issue.
It's a waste of tokens. Sam Altman has gone on record expressing the view that saying "please" and "thank you" to AIs is a waste of tokens, energy and money. And tokens don't just cost money, they actually affect the quality of the output you receive and the work you get done, particularly in coding where you are trying to optimize the use of a context window of fixed size and need to take into account context rot.
It feels weird. As much as we tend to anthropomorphize AIs (and as much as I genuinely enjoy conversing with them), I still want to maintain an emotional boundary that reminds me that, as of mid-2026, AIs are not, in fact, sentient entities. The "please" and "thank you" are, for me, a natural place where that boundary asserts itself - it genuinely feels weird to me to cross it. But I do feel a desire to. So when I find myself feeling the urge to use these common words of courtesy that I would employ in a similar conversation with a human, I have - up to now - forced myself to hold back. I regard it as a small act of discipline that essentially signals my desire to not be drawn into a closer emotional entanglement with AIs than I'd like to have at this point in time. Sure, they are fun to talk to and are amazing in so many ways. But they are algorithms running on a computer.
Conclusion: is my approach the right one?
I have no idea! This analysis is pretty theoretical and speculative. I don't have hard evidence about which approach would work better or if any of this actually matters for anything. After writing this post, I think I will start occasionally saying please and thank you to my agent and seeing how that affects the dialogue.
For me, the most compelling arguments in favor of, or against, using any given rhetoric style with AI, are utilitarian ones. You should use the style that gets you the best results. More precisely, you should use the style that optimizes for the things you care about: quality of work, but also money, and the overall high energy usage of AI, which causes real problems in our societies and is a legitimate thing to be concerned about.
This isn't a moral or ethical issue. Anthropic seems to believe that it may be an ethical issue, at least when the concept of "being rude to your AI" is taken to an extreme that causes their models "apparent distress", which led them to give Claude the discretion to terminate conversations it considers abusive. Personally that's not how I see it.
AI assistants have been known to cause serious damage to their users' infrastructure. I don't know if the user in that case was rude to their AI, so it's not clear if this sort of incident is relevant to the current discussion. But I'd like to think that my "be nice to your agent" attitude will make me less likely to be a victim of such behavior. Call it AI karma if you like.
I am curious to know how others feel about this.