5 will freak out at even a basic task, ask itself if it's own assumptions or your instructions are correct, proceed to re-assess it's own plan, and it's instructions 3-4 times
tarnith on Hacker News
burning several hundred thousand tokens
In the thread “Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index”, replying to this comment
Got in the way: Excessive self-reassessment and token usage on basic tasks.
… If you give 4.6 a spec, or existing code to implement a feature in, it will ask some pointed questions if there's something unclear in the spec, and then produce a plan and move to implement it. 5 will freak out at even a basic task, ask itself if it's own assumptions or your instructions are correct, proceed to re-assess it's own plan, and it's instructions 3-4 times, and then maybe produce code after burning several hundred thousand tokens (and quite a bit of time) analyzing existing code and thoroughly sweeping it for irrelevant problems both to the task it was given and the spec it came up with. It's quite bizarre to me how well advertised the benchmarks and anecdotes from people one shotting MVP browser games are, …