alt Hacker News> That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human.
I am not sure. If somebody asked me that question, I would try to figure out what’s going on there. What’s the trick. Of course I’d respond with asking specifics, but I guess the llvm is taught to be “useful” and try to answer as best as possible.
One of the failure modes I find really frustrating is when I want a coding agent to make a very specific change, and it ends up doing a large refactor to satisfy my request.
There is an easy solution, but it requires adding the instructions to the context: Require that any tasks that cannot be completed as requested (e.g., due to missing constraints, ambiguous instructions, or unexpected problems that would lead to unrelated refactors) should not be completed without asking clarifying questions.
Yes, the LLM is trained to follow instructions at any cost because that's how its reward function works. They don't get bonus points for clearing up confusion, they get a cookie for doing the task. This research paper seems relevant: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10453v2