Botiquette

There are plenty of bots floating around Figure13 projects, helping us organize and monitor and maintain our world. (In this post, agents and bots and any LLM output are all synonyms.) We’ve[1] organically developed some etiquette around bots that work well for us.

• Bots do not post to human spaces. Attention is precious, and bots are (currently?) incapable of gauging the cost of their posts.

• There is no expectation that other humans will read human posts to bot spaces. Or even bot posts to bot spaces.

• Humans write their own words.

• If a human pastes verbatim bot output into a post, that output is clearly marked as such, typically in block quotes or a code block.

• If a human uses a bot for writing, the human will fully proof, review, and revise the bot’s output prior to posting it as “human-generated”.

• Bot posts always include where the bot is running and where its source code is.

• Bots have names, because it makes it easier to talk about them, but they are computer programs. Their pronouns are always “it/its”.

This post was inspired by, and borrows from, exe.dev’s Botiquette blog post.

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[1]

When we say we here, we mean the exe.dev folks from whom we borrowed the idea for this post. This may evolve to be more Figue13-specific over time!