LLMs skew toward over-focusing on things that you mention.

The reason "the agent suddenly started suggesting all kinds of things to make its code more robust" is because you said you "want to build reliable software".

It's not a signal of good judgment or understanding. It's just how LLM attention works.

I thought exactly the same at first. But then i wondered if that still holds true with today's advanced thinking, RLHF involved, frontier models. I guess to a certain extend it did indeed behave better, as a reaction to his self description into account.

EDIT: I mean, those systems accumulated so much complexity around the attention based next token predictor.