My settings are pretty standard:

% claude Claude Code v2.1.111 Opus 4.7 (1M context) with xhigh effort · Claude Max ~/... Welcome to Opus 4.7 xhigh! · /effort to tune speed vs. intelligence

I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

Walk. 50 meters is shorter than most parking lots — you'd spend more time starting the car and parking than walking there. Plus, driving to a car wash you're about to use defeats the purpose if traffic or weather dirties it en route.

To me Claude Opus 4.6 seems even more confused.

I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

Walk. It's 50 meters — you're going there to clean the car anyway, so drive it over if it needs washing, but if you're just dropping it off or it's a self-service place, walking is fine for that distance.

There is a certain amount of it which is the randomness of an LLM. You really want to ask most questions like this several times.

That said, I have several local models I run on my laptop that I've asked this question to 10-20 times while testing out different parameters that have answered this consistently correctly.

I've tried these with Claude various times and never get the wrong answer. I don't know why, but I am leaning they have stuff like "memory" turned on and possibly reusing sessions for everything? Only thing I think explains it to me.

If your always messing with the AI it might be making memories and expectations are being set. Or its the randomness. But I turned memories off, I don't like cross chats infecting my conversations context and I at worse it suggested "walk over and see if it is busy, then grab the car when line isn't busy".

Claude Opus 4.7 responds with walk for me with and without adaptive thinking, but neither the basic model used when you Google search or GPT 5.4 do.

--------> I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

Walk. It's 50 meters — driving there and back takes longer than walking, and you'd just be dirtying the car you're about to clean.

---------> haha but how can i wash my car then?

Walk to the car wash first to check what they offer — many have self-service bays where you bring your car, or full-service where they wash it for you. If it's self-service, then drive over with the dirty car. If full-service, drive over and they handle it.

Either way, the car needs to end up at the wash — the walk was just to scout it out. Or just drive straight there; 50 meters of extra dirt won't matter.

----------> you, you sound like a politician. Are you sure your first answer was really reasoned like your second answer?

You're right, my first answer was nonsense. I pattern-matched on "50 meters = walk" without thinking about the actual task. You can't wash a car without the car being there. Just drive.

Or, the first time a mistake is detected, a correction is automatically applied.

Idk but ironically, I had to re-read the first part of GP's comment three times, wondering WTF they're implying a mistake, before I noticed it's the car wash, not the car, that's 50 meters away.

I'd say it's a very human mistake to make.