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Re:Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced by bjackman on Wednesday January 21, 2026 @06:19AM (#46704024)
There are some other failure modes that all feel kinda vaguely related that probably help with building a hypothesis about what's going wrong:

Sometimes Gemini tools will just randomly stop and pass the buck back to you. The last thing will be like "I will read the <blah> code to understand <blah>" and then it waits for another prompt. So I just type "continue" and it starts work again.

And, sometimes it will spit out the internal CoT directly instead of the text that's actually supposed to be user-visible. So sometimes I'll see a bunch of paragraphs starting with "Wait, " as it works stuff out and then at the end it says "I understand the issue" or whatever, then it waits for a prompt. I type "summarise" and it gives me the bit I actually wanted.

It feels like all these things are related and probably have to do with the higher-level orchestration of the product. Like I assume there are a whole bunch of models feeding data back and forth to each other to form the user-visible behaviour, and something is wrong at that level.

Re:Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced by hackpelican on Wednesday January 21, 2026 @02:04PM (#46709994)
At one point it started spitting out its CoT in the comments of the code it’s supposed to be changing.
Re:Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced by bjackman on Saturday January 24, 2026 @10:27AM (#46744360)
Ah yeah I've seen that too. Definitely seems related.

I suspect this is also something like the "inverse" of a prompt hijacking situation. Basically it's losing track of where its output is flowing to (whereas prompt injection is when it loses track of where its input is flowing from).