I'm glad someone else is finally saying this, I've been mentioning this left and right and sometimes I feel like I'm going crazy that not more people are noticing it.

Gemini can go off the rails SUPER easily. It just devolves into a gigantic mess at the smallest sign of trouble.

For the past few weeks, I've also been using XML-like tags in my prompts more often. Sometimes preferring to share previous conversations with `<user>` and `<assistant>` tags. Opus/Sonnet handles this just fine, but Gemini has a mental breakdown. It'll just start talking to itself.

Even in totally out-of-the-ordinary sessions, it goes crazy. After a while, it'll start saying it's going to do something, and then it pretends like it's done that thing, all in the same turn. A turn that never ends. Eventually it just starts spouting repetitive nonsense.

And you would think this is just because the bigger the context grows, the worse models tend to get. But no! This can happen well below even the 200.000 token mark.

Flash is (was?) was better than Pro on these fronts.