Arguing with an LLM is silly because you’re dealing with two adversarial effects at once:

- As the context window grows the LLM will become less intelligent [1] - Once your conversation takes a bad turn, you have effectively “poisoned” the context window, and are asking an algorithm to predict the likely continuation of text that is itself incorrect [2]. (It emulating the “belligerent side of OSS maintenance” is probably quite true!)

If you detect or suspect misunderstanding from an LLM, it is almost always best to remove the inaccuracies and try again. (You could, for example, ask your question again in a new chat, but include your terminal output + clarifications to get ahead of the misunderstanding, similar to how you might ask a fresh Stack Overflow question).

(It’s also a lot less fun to argue with an LLM, because there’s no audience like there is in the comments section with which to validate your rhetorical superiority!)

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44564248 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43991256