Claude is a Contrarian

Other models can also be guilty of this.

One of my most vivid memories of a poor experience with an LLM was trying to get the web version of GPT 5.3 or 5.2 to help me figure out why I was unable to register for a tournament on start.gg

After trying several things it became apparent that the behavior could only be explained as the result of a bug with the start.gg site, chatgpt refused to consider that it could be anything other than user error on my part, despite the failure I was seeing making no logical sense.

Eventually I opened the firefox dev tools and noticed that the post request parameters to complete the registration were being incorrectly filled out and realized it was because of the metadata in the url that came from clicking the complete registration link I was emailed. Removing the url paramater added by the email link fixed the issue.

There was roughly a 0% chance that the LLM was going to trust me enough to consider it was a real bug.

Again, I will posit the hypothesis that it's a learned behavior from training.

Distinctions, you generally "only pay for" in computational cost, by needing to search twice over an axis you may not need to split.

Similarities, if you wrongly assume two things are similar, means you're just wrong.

Of course, we know from computer science that doing more computation isn't free either.

I find myself often being more and more pedantic the more I want correctness - but of course this comes with the tradeoff of losing the high level abstract picture.

Saying what you're not going to do is also good design hygiene.

I will say that I'm annoyed by this behavior too. It feels like the models are writing their state of mind directly to output that should be clean. Often times, I will push back, and then it will... do the correction, and write the push back into the damn output. "Claude, I want burgers, not fries". The button text now changes to "Fries (NOT BURGERS)". Like, what?

Distinctions are powerful local reasoning tools, but a component of "real" reasoning is synthesis. Which they clearly can do sometimes - but not every time and not even remotely a probable amount of times.

[dead]

I see this so much with Opus it is infuriating. It usually then seems to devolve into some sort of obsession that makes it almost impossible for me to complete a task. I can start a new session and try to continue to previous work and get something like "I wanted to call out an important distinction between ham and toilet water before we continue. Our current documentation couples the lack of water to its source and that's a gap I'd rather address now than ignore."

"on the contrary, it was not lost on me..."