alt Hacker NewsIt's an excellent demonstration of the main issue I have with the Gemini family of models, they always go "above and beyond" to do a lot of stuff, even if I explicitly prompt against it. In this case, most of the SVG ends up consisting not just of a bike and a pelican, but clouds, a sun, a hat on the pelican and so much more.
Exactly the same thing happens when you code, it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do "helpful" drive-by-refactors, and it keeps adding code comments no matter what I say. Very frustrating experience overall.
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Would be really interesting to see an "Eager McBeaver" bench around this concept. When doing real work, a model's ability to stay within the bounds of a given task has almost become more important than its raw capabilities now that every frontier model is so dang good.
Every one of these models is so great at propelling the ship forward, that I increasingly care more and more about which models are the easiest to steer in the direction I actually want to go.
I have the same issue. Even when I ask it to do code-reviews and very explicitly tell it not to change files, it will occasionally just start "fixing" things.
Asking LLM programs to "not do the thing" often results in them tripping and generating output including that "thing", since those are simply the tokens which will enter the input. I always try to rephrase query the way that all my instructions have only "positive" forms - "do only this" or "do it only in that way" or "do it only for those parameters requested" etc. Can't say if that helps much, but it is possible.
> it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do "helpful" drive-by-refactors
This has not been my experience. I do Elixir primarily and Gemini has helped build some really cool products and massive refactors along the way. And it would even pick up security issues and potential optimizations along the way
What HAS been an issue constantly though was randomly the model will absolutely not respond at all and some random error would occur which is embarrassing for a company like Google with the infrastructure they own.
> it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do "helpful" drive-by-refactors
Not like human programmers. I would never do this and have never struggled with it in the past, no...
This matches my experience using Gemini CLI to code. It would also frequently get stuck in loops. It was so bad compared to Codex that I feel like I must have been doing something fundamentally wrong.
I was using gemini antigravity in opencode a few weeks ago before they started banning everyone for that and I got into the habit of writing "do x, then wait for instructions".
That helped quite a bit but it would still go off on it's own from time to time.
Every time I have tried using `gemini-cli` it just thinks endlessly and never actually gives a response.
Do you have Personalization Instructions set up for your LLM models?
You can make their responses fairly dry/brief.
true, whenever I ask Gemini to help me with a prompt for generating an image of XYZ, it generates the image.
> it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do "helpful" drive-by-refactors
Just asking "Explain what this service does?" turns into
[No response for three minutes...]
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