Quick fixes AG-T004
Don't do arithmetic in prose
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A language model predicts text, and sums are text it can get plausibly wrong. Make it compute — with a table, code, or an analysis tool — or check the number yourself.
It did the maths in prose and I believed it? Here's the quick fix ↓ — the why sits right below it.
Quick fix: Don't do arithmetic in prose
Instead of So with the discount that's about 1,847 total, right? → accept the confident "Yes, 1,847."
Try Lay out the calculation as a table: each line item, the discount step, the total. Show the arithmetic so I can check each row.
A number you will act on gets a visible calculation or an external check.
Why this works
Narrated arithmetic is pattern completion: the model produces a plausible-looking figure the way it produces a plausible sentence, and plausible is not the same as computed. Errors concentrate in carries, percentages, and multi-step totals, and they arrive with full confidence. Forcing the work into a visible structure changes the game twice over: the model gets more reliable when each step is explicit, and you get rows to verify instead of a bare total to trust. Where a code or analysis tool is available, "compute this, show the code" is the strong form: the arithmetic then actually runs instead of being predicted.
When this applies
Money, quantities, dates and durations, anything summed or converted, delivered as a single confident number inside flowing text.
Template
Compute [the thing]. Show it as a table with each intermediate step as its own row. Flag any input you had to assume.
Go deeper
Why confident wrongness is structural: what these systems are structurally bad at. For real datasets, describing numbers from memory compounds this — attach the file and let the model read the actual figures. The final safeguard is unchanged: a number that matters gets checked.
Improve next
- Check it before you act on it
Worth verifying before relying on this.
- Attach the file you are describing
Attach the file instead of describing it.
Something wrong with this page?
Say what you expected and what you got. That is usually the shortest route to a correction, and it goes on the public issue tracker so the fix is visible.