Giving clear instructions about what to do and what not to do, and ensuring those instructions are consistent and not noisy, will forever be a challenge with AI, no matter how good it gets.

We have coworkers, partners, and other people we know and interact with who are sentient. They pass the Turing test, they are “AGI,” and yet: we still have a hard time conveying instructions, ideas, and concepts among each other.

I've been thinking about this lately, and I can very much relate to this statement. Regardless of whether you're working with an agent or a living and breathing colleague, if you don't give them clear requirements and historical context, there is a very good chance they will go off-piste.

Yeah, I've been using Qwen 3.8 lately, the infamous overthinker, and ooh boy watching it think made me realize my context is full of contradictions. Using Hermes, and by default it came chock full of skills that are very uh... not my ethos.

For example, I impressed upon it immediately to never commit to git, but I've seen Qwen confuse itself repeatedly because half the default skills: review, plan, execute a plan, etc all include instructions to commit often, with lots of little commits after every step. Makes sense if you're all-in on AI and don't even read your commits anymore, but I very much do, and need to present the final product to my coworkers with confidence. And I've also seen my own skills include contradictions, the AI getting confused and hardcoding its misunderstandings into self-written skills for it to reference.

So I can definitely agree, if you're using a tool like Hermes, and not watching the thought traces with a self-doubting AI like Qwen, your context is probably full of contradictions too.