This is my most common experience with Gemini. Ask it to do something, it'll tell you how you can do it yourself and then stop.

Somehow I like this. I hate that current LLMs act like yes-men, you can't trust them to give unbiased results. If it told me my approach is stupid, and why, I would appreciate it.

Given that Gemini seems to have frequent availability issues, I wonder if this is a strategy to offload low-hanging fruit (from a human-effort pov) to the user. If it is, I think that's still kinda impressive.