In one case, it made a thoroughly convincing argument that an approach was justified. The second time it made exactly the opposite argument, which was equally compelling.

I now see LLMs as persuasion machines.

I was using Copilot and asked it a question about a PDF file (a concept search). It turned out the file was images of text. I was anticipating that and had the text ready to paste in.

Instead, it started writing an OCR program in python.

I stopped it after several minutes.

Often Copilot says it can't do something (sometimes it's even correct), that's preferential to the try-hard behaviour here.

This nails an important thing IMHO. I've absolutely noticed this, for better or worse. Gemini can produce surprisingly excellent things, but it's unpredictability make me go for GPT when I only want to ask it once.