this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2026
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They dont lol
Pretty much always this is just the fact cheaper, especially free, chatbots, have very limited context windows.
Which means the initial restrictions you set like "dont do this, dont touch that" etc get dropped, the LLM no longer has them loaded. But it does habe in the past history the very clear and urgent directives of it going overtime trying to do this task, its important" so it'll do whatever it autocompletes its gotta do to accomplish the task.
When you react to their fuck up, it *reloads the context back in
So now the LLM has in its history just this:
So now the LLM is going to autocomplete its generated text on top being very apologetic and going on about how it'll never happen again.
Thats all there is to it.
It's not just cheap agents. I've witnessed paid MS Copilot give a decade old depreciated Microsoft product in response to a single sentence prompt, then when called out a non-existent Microsoft product, then finally giving the right answer after being called out a second time.
LLMs are not good at answering fact based questions, fundamentally. Unless its an incredibly well known answer that has never changed (like a math or physics question), they dont magically "know" things.
However, they're way better at summarizing and reasoning.
Give them access to playwright web search capability via MCP tooling to go research info, find the answer(s), and then produce output based on the results, and now you can get something useful.
"Whats the best way to do (task)" << prone to failure, functional of how esoteric it is.
"Research for me the top 3 best ways to do (task), report on your results and include your sources you found" << actually useful output, assuming you have something like playwright installed for it.
A user on here built what appears to be a layer over the LLM that runs the query through several other processes first in an attempt to answer the question before it gets to the LLM, and I think it's brilliant.
Cheap fuckers cheaping out, shocker (context is (V)RAM). AI speedrunning enshittification, who'd of thunk.
Uh... no its just the free models being free, theyre lower cost intentionally to provide free options for people who dont wanna pay subscription fees.
Eh sort of, its more operating costs, the larger the context size the more expensive the model is to run, literally in terms of power consumption.
Keep in mind we are on the scale of fractions of cents here, but multiply that by millions of users and it adds up fast.
But the end result is that the agent will fuck stuff up, and will even quickly /forget/ it fucked that up if you dont catch it asap
A lot of them have a context window that can be wiped out within like, 2 minutes of steady busywork...
I love how your response to the catastrophic results of stupidly trusting ai is "pay more money to ai companies".
Sane person's response: don't trust llms.
What are you talking about.
No? I never said that.
I just explained /why/ it happened, I literally nowhere in my post said, or implied, someone should pay for more expensive models. What are you smoking?
You just have to be aware they have very short memory when using a cheap model and assume anything you wrote 1 minute ago has already left its memory, which is why they produce pretty dumb output if you try and depend on that... so... dont depend on that.