r/PromptEngineering: Practitioners Share That Asking the Model to Disagree First Reliably Breaks Sycophancy and Surfaces Hidden Assumptions

A practitioner advocates structuring prompts to explicitly ask the model to disagree with or critique the user's framing before proceeding to help, arguing this reliably breaks the sycophancy loop where models mirror user assumptions rather than critically evaluate them. The post includes before/after examples where the technique surfaces unstated assumptions that would otherwise be confirmed uncritically, producing substantially different and often higher-quality outputs on tasks where the user has half-decided the answer in advance. Community replies extend the technique to 'steelman the opposing view first,' multi-persona critiques, and chain-of-doubt prompting — with several practitioners noting it has become a default step in their high-stakes prompting workflows.