> it's has spent a fair bit of time going through an infinite seeming loop before finally unjamming itself.

I think this is part of the model’s success. It’s cheap enough that we’re all willing to let it run for extremely long times. It takes advantage of that by being tenacious. In my experience it will just keep trying things relentlessly until eventually something works.

The downside is that it’s more likely to arrive at a solution that solves the problem I asked but does it in a terribly hacky way. It reminds me of some of the junior devs I’ve worked with who trial and error their way into tests passing.

I frequently have to reset it and start it over with extra guidance. It’s not going to be touching any of my serious projects for these reasons but it’s fun to play with on the side.

Some of the early quants had issues with tool calling and looping. So you might want to check that you're running the latest version / recommended settings.

> and it's has spent a fair bit of time going through an infinite seeming loop before finally unjamming itself

I can live with this on my own hardware. Where Opus4.6 has developed this tendency to where it will happily chew through the entire 5-hour allowance on the first instruction going in endless circles. I’ve stopped using it for anything except the extreme planning now.

I don't know much about how these models are trained, but is this behavior intentional (ie, the people pulling the levers knew that this is how it would end up), or is it emergent (ie, pulling the levers to see what happens)?