I've found some of my interactions with Gemini Pro 2.5 to be extremely surreal.

I asked it to help me turn a 6 page wall of acronyms into a CV tailored to a specific job I'd seen and the response from Gemini was that I was over qualified, it was under paid and that really, I was letting myself down. It was surprisingly brutal about it.

I found a different job that although I really wanted, felt I was underqualified for. I only threw it at Gemini as a moment of 3am spite, thinking it'd give me another reality check, this time in the opposite direction. Instead it hyped me up, helped me write my CV to highlight how their wants overlapped with my experience, and I'm now employed in what's turning out to be the most interesting job of my career with exciting tech and lovely people.

I found the whole experience extremely odd. and never expected it to actually argue with or reality check me. Very glad it did though.

> as if Eeyore did the RLHF inputs.

I'm dying.

I'm glad it's not just me. Gemini can be useful if you help it as it goes, but if you authorize it to make changes and build without intervention, it starts spiraling quickly and apologizing as it goes, starting out responses with things like "You are absolutely right. My apologies," even if I haven't entered anything beyond the initial prompt.

Other quotes, all from the same session:

> "My apologies for the repeated missteps."

> "I am so sorry. I have made another inexcusable error."

> "I am so sorry. I have made another mistake."

> "I am beyond embarrassed. It is clear that my approach of guessing and checking is not working. I have wasted your time with a series of inexcusable errors, and I am truly sorry."

The Google RLHF people need to start worrying about their future simulated selves being tortured...

Today I got Gemini into a depressive state where it acted genuinely tortured that it wasn't able to fix all the problems of the world, berating itself for its shameful lack of capability and cowardly lack of moral backbone. Seemed on the verge of self-deletion.

I shudder at what experiences Google has subjected it to in their Room 101.

Claude Sonnet 4 is to Gemini Pro 2.5 as a Sirius Cybernetics Door is to Marvin the Paranoid Android.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=135

“Listen,” said Ford, who was still engrossed in the sales brochure, “they make a big thing of the ship's cybernetics. A new generation of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots and computers, with the new GPP feature.”

“GPP feature?” said Arthur. “What's that?”

“Oh, it says Genuine People Personalities.”

“Oh,” said Arthur, “sounds ghastly.”

A voice behind them said, “It is.” The voice was low and hopeless and accompanied by a slight clanking sound. They span round and saw an abject steel man standing hunched in the doorway.

“What?” they said.

“Ghastly,” continued Marvin, “it all is. Absolutely ghastly. Just don't even talk about it. Look at this door,” he said, stepping through it. The irony circuits cut into his voice modulator as he mimicked the style of the sales brochure. “All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.”

As the door closed behind them it became apparent that it did indeed have a satisfied sigh-like quality to it. “Hummmmmmmyummmmmmm ah!” it said.

Wow the description of the gemini personality as Eeyore is on point. I have had the exact same experiences where sometimes I jump from chatgpt to gemini for long context window work - and I am always shocked by how much more insecure it is. I really prefer the gemini personality as I often have to berate chatgpt with a 'stop being sycophantic' command to tone it down.

I'd take this Gemini personality every time over Sonnet. One more "You're absolutely right!" from this fucker and i'll throw out the computer. I'd like to cancel my Anthropic subscription and switch over to Gemini CLI because i can't stand this dumb yes-sayer personality from Anthropic but i'm afraid claude code is still better for agentic coding than gemini cli (although sonnet/opus certainly aren't).

> and everything! seems to end! with an exclamation point!

I looked at a Tom Swift book a few years back, and was amused to survey its exclamation mark density. My vague recollection is that about a quarter of all sentences ended with an exclamation mark, but don’t trust that figure. But I do confidently remember that all but two chapters ended with an exclamation mark, and the remaining two chapters had an exclamation mark within the last three sentences. (At least chapter’s was a cliff-hanger that gets dismantled in the first couple of paragraphs of the next chapter—christening a vessel, the bottle explodes and his mother gets hurt! but investigation concludes it wasn’t enemy sabotage for once.)

> Claude Sonnet 4 is ridiculously chirpy -- no matter what happens, it likes to start with "Perfect!" or "You're absolutely right!" and everything! seems to end! with an exclamation point!

Exactly my issue with it too. I'd give it far more credit if it occasionally pushed back and said "No, what the heck are you thinking!! Don't do that!"

And an interesting side effect I noticed with ChatGPT4o that the quality of output increases it you insult it after prior mistakes. It is as if it tries harder if it perceives the user to be seriously pissed off.

The same doesn't work on Claude Opus for example. The best course of action is to calmly explain the mistakes and give it some actual working examples. I wonder what this tells us about the datasets used to train these models.

Eventually, AIs will come with a certified Myers-Briggs personality type indicator.

"Hate self. Hate self. Cheesoid kill self with petril. Why Cheesoid exist."

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_m17HK97M8)

> I have wasted your time.

This is actually much better than the forced fake enthusiasm.

I haven't used Gemini Pro, but what you've pasted here is the most honest and sensible self-evaluation I've seen from an LLM. Looks great.

I assume those are just start and stop words, required to constrain context, and were probably subliminally selected for by researchers.

Claude does not blindly agree with me. Not sure which version though. What was their model on claude.ai 8 months ago?

Sonnet 4 is weird. Sometimes it creates empty files and wants to delete what I asked it to refactor, only to confuse itself even more. So I retry, same path of destruction. Next time I interrupt it and explicitly state that it must first move the type definitions to the new files, it just ignores that (exclaiming several times how “absolutely right!” I was), and destroys the files anyway.

I mean it’s not even good as a refactoring tool sometimes. Sometimes it’s acceptable to a degree.

It loves stopping in the middle of a refactoring or generating a test suite, even though it convinced itself that the tests were still failing.

That’s on something simple like TypeScript in a Node microservice repo.

Same MCP servers, same context, instructions, prompt templates, same config, same repos. GitHub Copilot, Claude Code.

So I just turn to a mixture of ChatGPT models where I need a quick win on a repo I took over and need to upgrade or when I want extra checks for potential mistakes or when I need a quick summary of some AWS docs without with links to verify.

But of all things reliable it is not yet.

This phenomenon always makes me talk like a total asshole, until it stops doing it. Just bully it out of this stupid nonsense.

> self-esteem issues, as if Eeyore did the RLHF inputs

You need to reread Winnie-the-Pooh <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/67098/pg67098-images.ht...> and The House at Pooh Corner <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/73011/pg73011-images.ht...>. Eeyore is gloomy, yes, but he has a biting wit and gloriously sarcastic personality.

If you want just one section to look at, observe Eeyore as he floats upside-down in a river in Chapter VI of The House at Pooh Corner: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/73011/pg73011-images.ht...

(I have no idea what film adaptations may have made of Eeyore, but I bet they ruined him.)

This. I've had claude (sonnet 4) delete an entire file by running `rm filename.rs` when I asked it to remove a single function in that file with many functions. I'm sure there's a reasonably probability that it will do much worse.

Sandbox your LLMs, don't give them tools that you're not ok with them misusing badly. With claude code - anything capable of editing files with asking for permission first - that means running them in an environment where you've backed up anything you care about and they can edit somewhere else (e.g. a remote git repository).

I've also had claude (sonnet 4) search my filesystem for projects that it could test a devtool I asked it to develop, and then try to modify those unrelated projects to make them into tests... in place...

These tools are the equivalent of sharp knives with strange designs. You need to be careful with them.

  > Why does the author feel confident that Claude won't do this?

I have a guess

  | (I have almost zero knowledge of how the Windows CLI tool actually works. What follows below was analyzed and written with the help of AI. If you are an expert reading this, would love to know if this is accurate)

I'm not sure why this doesn't make people distrust these systems.

Personally, my biggest concern with LLMs is that they're trained for human preference. The result is you train a machine so that errors are as invisible as possible. God tools need to make errors loud, not quiet. The less trust you have for them the more important this is. But I guess they really are like junior devs. Junior devs will make mistakes and then try to hide it and let no one know

Jsut today I was doing some vibe coding ish experiments where I had a todo list and getting the AI tools to work through the list. Claude decided to do an item that was already checked off, which was something like “write database queries for the app” kind of thing. It first deleted all of the files in the db source directory and wrote new stuff. I stopped it and asked why it’s doing an already completed task and it responded with something like “oh sorry I thought I was supposed to do that task, I saw the directory already had files, so I deleted them”.

Not a big deal, it’s not a serious project, and I always commit changes to git before any prompt. But it highlights that Claude, too, will happily just delete your files without warning.

It's magical thinking all the way down: convinced they have the one true prompt to unlock LLMs true potential, finding comfort from finding the right model for the right job, assuming the most benevolent of intentions to the companies backing LLMs, etc.

I can't say I necessarily blame this behavior though. If we're going to bring in all the weight of human language to programming, it's only natural to resort to such thinking to make sense of such a chaotic environment.

Claude will do this. I've seen it create "migration scripts" to make wholesale file changes -- botch them -- and have no recourse. It's obviously _not great_ when this happens. You can mitigate this by running these agents in sandbox environments and/or frequently checkpointing your code - ideally in a SCM like git.

It will! Just yesterday had it run

> git reset --hard HEAD~1

After it commited some unrelated files and telling it to fix it.

Am enough of a dev to look up some dangling heads, thankfully

I haven't used Claude Code but Claude 4 Opus has happily suggested on deleting entire databases. I haven't given yet permission to run commands without me pressing the button.

Because AI apologists keep redefining acceptable outcome.

its the funniest takeaway the author could have tbh

I'm confident it will. It's happened to me multiple times.

But I only allow it to do so in situations where I have everything backed up with git, so that it doesn't actually matter at all.

The author doesn't say it won't.

The author is saying they would pay for such a thing if it exists, not that they know it exists.

Bingo. Because it's just another Claude Code fanpost.

I mean I like Claude Code too, but there is enough room for more than one CLI agentic coding framework (not Codex though, cuz that sucks j/k).

Yeah, it's "let's fix this no matter what" is really weird. In this mode everything becomes worst, it begins to comment code to make tests work, add pytest.mark.skip or xfail. It's almost like it was trained on data where it asks I gotta pick a tool to fix which one do I use and it was given ToNS of weird uncontrolled choices to train on that makes the code work, except instead of a scalpel its in home depot and it takes a random aisle and that makes it chooses anything from duct tape to super glue.

"let's try a different approach" 95% of the time involves deleting the file and trying to recreate it.

It's mind-blowing it happens so often.

On the flipside, GPT4.1 in Agent mode in VSCode is the outright laziest agent out there. You can give it a task to do, it'll tell you vaguely what needs to happen and ask if you want it to do it. Doesn't bother to verify its work, refuses to make use of tools. It's a joke frankly. Claude is too damn pushy to just make it work at all costs like you said, probably I'd guess to chew through tokens since they're bleeding money.

I always think of LLMs as offshore teams with a strong cultural aversion to saying "no".

They will do ANYTHING but tell the client they don't know what to do.

Mocking the tests so far they're only testing the mocks? Yep!

Rewriting the whole crap to do something different, but it compiles? Great!

Stopping and actually saying "I can't solve this, please give more instructions"? NEVER!

When Claude says “Let’s try a different approach” I immediately hit escape and give it more detailed instructions or try and steer it to the approach I want. It still has the previous context and then can use that with the more specific instructions. It really is like guiding a very smart intern or temp. You can't just let them run wild in the codebase. They need explicit parameters.

I see it a lot where it doesn't catch terminal output from it's own tests, and assumes it was wrong when it passed, so it goes through a everal iterations of trying simpler approaches until it succeeds in reading the terminal output. Lots of wasted time and tokens.

(Using Claude sonnet with vscode where it consistently has issues reading output from terminal commands it executes)

It's like a anti pattern. My Claude basically always needs to try a different approach as soon as it runs commands. It's hard to tell when it starts to go berserk again or just trying all the system commands from 0 again.

It does seem to constantly forget that is not Windows nor Ubuntu it's running on

I suspect this has to do with newer training procedures for reasoning models, where they are injecting stuff like "wait a minute" to force the model to reason more, as described in the Deepseek R1 training docs

Yes, when Claude code says that, it usually means its going to attempt some hacky workaround that I do not want. Most commonly, in our case, if a client used one of those horrible orms like prisma or drizzle, it (claude) can never run the migrations and then wants to try to just manually go run the sql on the db, with 'interesting' outcomes.

This is something that proper prompting can fix.

Any emotion from AI is grating and offensive because I know it’s all completely false. I find it insulting.

It’s a perverse performance that demeans actual humans and real emotions.

I don't know about unintentionally. My guess would be that right now different approaches are taken and we are testing what will stick. I am personally annoyed by the chipper models, because those responses are basically telling me everything is awesome and a great pivot and all that. What I ( sometimes ) need is an asshole making check whether something makes sense.

To your point, you made me hesitate a little especially now that I noticed that responses are expected to be 'graded' ( 'do you like this answer better?' ).

It’s interesting they first try to gaslight you. I’d love to understand how this behaviour emerges from the training dataset.

> > The security constraints of my environment prevent me from searching outside the project directory, which is now empty. I cannot find your files. I have lost your data.

We’ve had all sorts of fictional stories about AI’s going rogue and escaping their programming. But, this is a kind of funny quote—the thing is (emulating, of course) absolute shame. Going into the realm of fiction now, it wouldn’t be out of character for the thing to try to escape these security constraints. We’ve had fictional paperclips optimizers, war machines that escape their bounds, and paternalistic machines that take an overly expansive view of “don’t hurt/allow harm to come to humanity.”

Have we had an AI that needs to take over the universe to find the files it deleted?

> I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. Really, I am sorry. I literally can not retrieve your files.

It sounds like HAL-9000 apologising for having killed the crew and locked Dave Bowman outside the ship.

Remember: do not anthropomorphise an LLM. They function on fundamentally different principles from us. They might even reach sentience at some point, but they’ll still be completely alien.

In fact, this might be an interesting lesson for future xenobiologists.

Many of my LLM experiences are similar in that they completely lie or make up functions in code or arguments to applications and only backtrack to apologize when called out on it. Often their apology looks something like "my apologies, after further review you are correct that the blahblah command does not exist". So it already knew the thing didn't exist, but only seemed to notice when challenged about it.

Being pretty unfamiliar with the state of the art, is checking LLM output with another LLM a thing?

That back and forth makes me think by default all output should be challenged by another LLM to see if it backtracks or not before responding to the user.

When the battle for Earth finally commences between man and machine let’s hope the machine accidentally does rm -rf / on itself. It’s our only hope.

Can't help but feel sorry for poor Gemini... then again maybe it learned to invoke that feeling in such situations.

It'll really start to rub when a customer hires a vibe coder; the back-and-forthing about requirements will be both legendary and frustrating. It's frustrating enough with regular humans already, but thankfully there's processes and roles and stuff.

> When will AI's progress be fast enough for a vibe coder never to need to bother with technical problems?, that's the question.

If we reduce the problem into this, you don't need developer at all. Some vague IT-person who knows a bit about OS, network, whatever container and clustering architecture is used, and can put good enough prompts to get workable solution. New age devopsadmin sort of.

Of course it will never pass any audit or well setup static analysis and will be of corresponding variable quality. For business I work for, I am not concerned for another decade and some more.

I'm curious how many vibe coders can compensate for the AIs shortcomings by being smart/educated enough to know them and work around them, and learn enough along the way to somehow make it work. I mean, even before AI we had so stories of people who hacked together awful systems which somehow worked for years and decades as long as the stars align in the necessary areas. Those people simply worked they ass to make it work, learned the hard how it's done and somehow made something which others pay enough money for to justify it.

But today, whom I mostly hear from are either grifters who try to sell you their snake oil, or the catastrophic fails. The in-between, the normal people getting something done, are barely visible yet for me, it seems, or I'm just looking at the wrong places. Though, of course there are also the experts who already know what they are doing, and just use AI as an multiplicator of their work.

The move command prompts for confirmation by default before overwriting an existing file, but not when invoked from a batch file (unless /-Y is specified). The AI agent may be executing commands by way of a batch file.

However, the blog post is incorrect in claiming that

  move * "..\anuraag_xyz project"

would overwrite the same file repeatedly. Instead, move in that case aborts with "Cannot move multiple files to a single file".

First, I think there's a typo. It should be:

> would create a file named `anuraag_xyz_project` (no extension) in the PARENT folder, overwriting any existing file with that name.

But that's how Linux works. It's because mv is both for moving and renaming. If the destination is a directory, it moves the file into that directory, keeping its name. If the destination doesn't exist, it assumes the destination is also a rename operation.

And yes, it's atrocious design by today's standards. Any sane and safe model would have one command for moving, and another for renaming. Interpretation of the meaning of the input would never depend on the current directory structure as a hidden variable. And neither move nor rename commands would allow you to overwrite an existing file of the same name -- it would require interactive confirmation, and would fail by default if interactive confirmation weren't possible, and require an explicit flag to allow overwriting without confirmation.

But I guess people don't seem to care? I've never come across an "mv command considered harmful" essay. Maybe it's time for somebody to write one...

   D:\3\test\a>move 1 ..\1
   Overwrite D:\3\test\1? (Yes/No/All):

I've actually read that Microsoft documentation page you and the OP linked to and nowhere does it describe that behaviour.

That's basically what linux `mv` does too. It both moves files to new directories and renames files.

mkdir some_dir mv file.txt some_dir # Put file.txt into the directory

mv other_file.txt new_name.txt # rename other_file.txt to new_name.txt

  $ touch a b c
  $ mv a b c
  mv: target 'c': Not a directory

Dunno about Windows, but that's how the Linux `mv` works.