Yeah I broadly agree with you. I've tried by explicitly adding a prompt to "ask questions and clarify", and even fairly decent models like Gemini pro (2.5 or 3) tend to make question for the sake of it.

Which reminds me that that's another big issue with LLMs - they'll blindly do whatever you ask them to, without pushback. (Again, I miss 3.5/3.6 era Sonnet which actually had half a spine. Fuck anthropic for blindly chasing coding benchmarks at the cost of everything else.)

I've engaged in several "CMVs" (or "tell me why X is bad") with LLMs, and very often it's clear it's just saying stuff to say it, giving very terrible points on unjustifiable positions that collapse the moment I counter argue even slightly rationally.