I've heard a similar story before. Guy tried to get Claude to build a thing, Claude said "nah too hard" for weeks. He finally convinced it to try, it one shotted it in like 30 seconds.

My thinking here is that Claude's "self concept" for what is easy and what is hard comes from human training data. Its ideas about what is hard and easy come from humans, and much of that doesn't apply to transformers at all.

I also often have the opposite problem, where I'll use AI to compensate for the fact that I can't process a lot of information simultaneously, but they'll treat me like a transformer and give me 17 research projects in response to a single question.

They seem to be oblivious to the fact that humans don't have infinite working memory.