I just went to bed and left it running; was expecting maybe 20 minutes :)

And I did gave the program a bunch of code guides -- this [1] for instance -- which included quotes like "Prefer straightforward code over clever code." but somehow that didn't matter.

[1] https://github.com/sergiocorreia/overengineered-rand-mcnally...

I'm an AI professor, and the same thing happened to me. I had written out contracts and specs for some novel algorithms to compare. And instead it created a new sandboxed environment with 20k lines of code to ensure we do gold standard science.... didn't implement the algorithms at all. In another case, I left it overnight with a plan, and it decided to write a 50k line new overly engineered plan. Suffice to say, I don't use any frontier models for doing coding work anymore. I use them to make detailed plans and use good worker AIs for execution, which don't overthink everything.

You write many pages telling the AI to split and structure the scripts into a bunch of folders, so why are you surprised it did exactly that!?

I just ask it verbatim “recommend some cleanup” with /plan, review, and then apply.