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I have also had this experience. Learning a new language and I couldn't tell whether my code was right or not. Claude Opus 4 spent an hour saying "oh sorry my previous code was wrong," and then give me slightly-rewritten copy of the same thing which had the same problem - it crashed on some function. Finally I suggested an environment setup issue and turned on search and it figured it out (a function it was using was deprecated two years ago). But the number of times it told me "oh you're right, I was wrong, here's a fix", and for the fix to not fix the issue was incredibly frustrating.
I had a similar loop with GPT-o3 a few weeks later, where it just made up academic references in my new (to me) sub-subfield. I swore at it, and had the chat banned for inappropriateness :)
This is awakening me to a sort of Gell-Mann amnesia effect: if the LLMs are this wrong and this stubborn in areas where I can test its output, where else is it wrong? Can I trust it in the rough analysis of a legal situation? In a summary of the literature on global warming? In pulling crime stats? I'm inclined to think it shouldn't be trusted for anything not either harmless or directly verifiable.
Angela Collier has a video about "vibe physics" that talks about this in some detail. In the section I linked to she discusses how crackpot physics emails have changes since the advent of LLMs. People will add caveats about how they talked to this or that LLM about their theory and the LLM told them it made sense. She'll point out in reply how LLMs will just agree with whatever you say and tend to make stuff up. And then the people sending the email will... agree with her! They'll talk about how the LLM made simple mistakes when talking about the physics the emailer does understand. But obviously once the discussion has gotten to physics the emailer doesn't understand the LLM is much more intelligent and accurate! It turns out having the kind of meta-cognition to think "If this process produced incorrect outcomes for things I do understand, maybe it will also produce incorrect outcomes for things I don't understand" is basically a fucking super power.
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