Comment by nxobject
2 days ago
Re context and overthinking:
> One thing I noticed from early access: if you don’t give it enough context, it does tend to overthink.
I agree with this – that being said, I find that simply asking at the end of a prompt "Do you need any clarifications before you continue?" does a pretty good job at helping AI pin down details as well.
The first thing I asked was along the lines of "Find me an implementation of X that does not depend on framework Y, because it's not maintained". o3 thought for a minute and then returns a repository that depends on Y. In its defense, 4.1 also found the same repo and commented that it "has a light dependency", which was cute, if unhelpful.
Adding a "think about whether your answer actually depends on Y" fixed it, and the response was pretty well thought out. My only gripe is the current persona seems to be tech-bro-informal. It opened with "TL;DR" and included a lot of developer slang that reads like it's trying to be cool in a way that masks overconfidence.