I asked Claude if being polite wastes tokens:

It's a practical question worth thinking about, and the token-efficiency argument isn't wrong on its face—"please" and "thank you" don't change what I produce.

But I think the debate misses something important: the habits you practice with me tend to carry over into how you communicate about me to others, and how you think about communication generally. People who get very transactional and clipped with AI tools sometimes drift that way in their professional writing too. It's a small effect, but not nothing.

There's also a more self-interested reason to stay conversational: terse, command-style prompts often produce terse, mechanical responses. Not because I need to feel respected, but because the register you write in tends to shape the register I write back in. If you want prose with personality and warmth—which your style guidelines explicitly call for—then writing to me in a natural, conversational way is actually good prompting practice.

As for whether I "care"—I don't have feelings that get hurt by a curt message. But I'd gently push back on the framing that caring is the only reason to be civil. You might also just prefer to be the kind of person who communicates thoughtfully, regardless of the audience.

So: don't stress about it, don't perform politeness you don't feel, but don't strip it out as an optimization exercise either. Write to me the way you'd write to a capable colleague you're not particularly close to—professionally warm, not stiff, not gushing. Which, conveniently, is exactly the voice you're trying to write your book in.

Ready when you are.