Giving hints.

On math or programming problems, they are overfit to solving the entire thing end to end (presumably for benchmarks). I have had very poor results asking for pointers and hints that don't give away key insights. This has been the case across models I have tested.

An architecture with a "judge" that gates responses and ensures a lack of spoilers would probably work better. But this is a simple thing that they keep messing up.

I haven't had this experience at all. I've used Cursor+Opus on homework e.g. to understand algorithms, but I usually prompt it with something like "DO NOT GIVE ME THE ANSWER, I care about understanding and solving this myself".