alt Hacker NewsI built a toy news-summarizing agent with Gemma 4, and it was so frustrating, actually, because of the cut-off date.
The model wasted over half the token budget, each time, on internal debates over the current date.
When generating a World Cup summary, for example, it refused to believe qualification rounds were over and refused to even call the web searching tool to collect the data.
I injected the current datetime at the very beginning of the system prompt, but Gemma refused to believe it!
The m-effer insisted the timestamp was fake and hypothesized it was being evaluated in a synthetic lab test with simulated future dates!
No amount of system prompting could convince it to trust the clock.
That was the most frustrating and bizarre "bug" I ever faced!
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Did you try other models (e.g. Qwen3.6 or others)? I'm curious how others fare.
I've noticed Qwen3.6 struggles a bit with today/date based logic.
Qwen 3.6 did the same thing for me.
Only after some cajolling it finally went to check the history I asked it to (I had been testing KoboldCPP's web search).