  | I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

  ● Drive. The car needs to be at the car wash.

Wonder if this is just randomness because its an LLM, or if you have different settings than me?

▲ shaneoh 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My settings are pretty standard:

% claude Claude Code v2.1.111 Opus 4.7 (1M context) with xhigh effort · Claude Max ~/... Welcome to Opus 4.7 xhigh! · /effort to tune speed vs. intelligence

I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

Walk. 50 meters is shorter than most parking lots — you'd spend more time starting the car and parking than walking there. Plus, driving to a car wash you're about to use defeats the purpose if traffic or weather dirties it en route.

▲ reddit_clone 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To me Claude Opus 4.6 seems even more confused.

I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

Walk. It's 50 meters — you're going there to clean the car anyway, so drive it over if it needs washing, but if you're just dropping it off or it's a self-service place, walking is fine for that distance.

	▲	lr1970 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Just asked Claude Code with Opus-4.6. The answer was short "Drive. You need a car at the car wash". No surprises, works as expected.

▲ lambda 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is a certain amount of it which is the randomness of an LLM. You really want to ask most questions like this several times.

That said, I have several local models I run on my laptop that I've asked this question to 10-20 times while testing out different parameters that have answered this consistently correctly.

▲ kalcode 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've tried these with Claude various times and never get the wrong answer. I don't know why, but I am leaning they have stuff like "memory" turned on and possibly reusing sessions for everything? Only thing I think explains it to me.

If your always messing with the AI it might be making memories and expectations are being set. Or its the randomness. But I turned memories off, I don't like cross chats infecting my conversations context and I at worse it suggested "walk over and see if it is busy, then grab the car when line isn't busy".

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jorvi 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Even Gemini with no memory does hilarious things. Like, if you ask it how heavy the average man is, you usually get the right answer but occasionally you get a table that says:

- 20-29: 190 pounds

- 30-39: 375 pounds

- 40-49: 750 pounds

- 50-59: 4900 pounds

Yet somehow people believe LLMs are on the cusp of replacing mathematicians, traders, lawyers and what not. At least for code you can write tests, but even then, how are you gonna trust something that can casually make such obvious mistakes?

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nickjj 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, ChatGPT's paid version is wildly inaccurate on very important and very basic things. I never got onboard with AI to begin with but nowadays I don't even load it unless I'm really stuck on something programming related.

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dyauspitr 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So what? That might happen one out of 100 times. Even if it’s 1 in 10 who cares? Math is verifiable. You’ve just saved yourself weeks or months of work.

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icedchai an hour ago | parent [-]

You don't think these errors compound? Generated code has 100's of little decisions. Yes, it "usually" works.

	▲	dyauspitr an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Not in my experience. With a proper TDD framework it does better than most programmers at a company who anecdotally have a bug every 2-3 tasks.

▲ TeMPOraL 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Idk but ironically, I had to re-read the first part of GP's comment three times, wondering WTF they're implying a mistake, before I noticed it's the car wash, not the car, that's 50 meters away.

I'd say it's a very human mistake to make.

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magicalist 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I'd say it's a very human mistake to make.

>> It'll take you under a minute, and driving 50 meters barely gets the engine warm — plus you'd just have to park again at the other end. Honestly, by the time you started the car, you'd already be there on foot.

It talks about starting, driving, and parking the car, clearly reasoning about traveling that distance in the car not to the car. It did not make the same mistake you did.

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thfuran 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't want my computer to make human mistakes.

	▲	AgentOrange1234 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It may be inescapable for problems where we need to interpret human language?
	▲	scrollaway 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		then don't train it on human data

▲ heurist 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Claude Opus 4.7 responds with walk for me with and without adaptive thinking, but neither the basic model used when you Google search or GPT 5.4 do.