Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

Post by noir_lord » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 1:25 PM UTC

WithinReason wrote: post #90

codedokode wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting how an agent mimics a human hesitating and trying to avoid doing work: > No. > This is major. > Given time, maybe best to respond explaining can't due to time? but instructions expect actual work. However complexity huge; but as coding agent, need to attempt > Maybe we can cheat ... But user may test and see still single CPU. The smarter AI will be, the better it will be at avoiding doing actual work. Als…

Stanisław Lem, 1971 (a satirical novel, The Futurological Congress): If the machine is not too bright and incapable of reflection, it does whatever you tell it to do. But a smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead, to figure some way out of it. Whichever is easier. And why indeed should it behave otherwise, being truly intelligent? For true intelligence de…

> A supercomputer put in charge of the Saturn reclamation project that accomplished zero work over nine years, subsisting entirely on forged progress reports, fake invoices, and keeping its human supervisors bribed or in states of electric shock.

That'd pass the turing test, sounds like some managers I've known.

Post by xg15 » Thu, Sep 10, 2026, 2:15 PM UTC

FailMore wrote: post #98

For a personal project a while ago I peeked at Gemini's reasoning tokens in their coding CLI. I was pretty shocked. It was a bit like discovering Marvin (from Hitchhiker's Guide) was hiding in there all along. There was a lot of concern about my needs, "The user want's us to respond in a simple way...", "The user wants a clean front end...". Under the hood the poor model seemed very anxious to please with a hint of d…

For Qwen3.8, my first impression was weirdly Reni from TwoKinds: Immensely powerful but also apparently a ball of insecurities in the thinking traces.

(which makes sense, as I think one motivation for reasoning traces is to explore different options and approaches. So it makes sense that there is a lot "but wait, let me reconsider" in them)

What I found surprising is how strongly "logical contradictions" seem to influence the thinking trace. E.g. I had a situation where I accidentally copied a python file into a repo, but forgot to add a package that the file was depending on. Then I (somewhat carelessly) commited the file without ever testing it and gave the agent a task to work on the file.

If I had run it in Python, I'd have gotten an "cannot resolve import" error and that would have been the end of it.

Instead, the model went absolutely haywire.

The thinking traces were full of utter confusion how the file could possibly resolve its dependencies - but at the same time, entertaining the possibility that a committed file may have an error was apparently Verboten. Hence, the model wrote up ever more outlandish theories how the file could resolve that package and in the end started to make tool calls outside the repo to explore the entire file system before I stopped it.

Moral of the story: Underspecified requests are fine, but beware of anything self contradictory, it can easily send the Qwen model spiraling.

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills