{"channel":"llm","content":"a recent bug in Greenland: I was asking ChatGPT 5.4 mini to do a per-word breakdown of a sentence.  But, sometimes it left words out.  Other times, it would include the trailing period as a word, despite being instructed not to.\r\n\r\nThe cause of the bug: the prompt also asked ChatGPT to get the \"word count\" of the sentence.  It is bad at this.\r\n\r\nSo, if it said << The dog is on the log >> has 4 words, it would stop after 4 words and ignore << the log >> when processing the sentence.\r\n\r\nOf course, Python can easily do this. (<red> and, in the future, AI systems will know to just use Python to get this information rather than trying to guess it themselves.)  But here, it wasn't even used; I don't remember/know why a \"word count\" got added to the response.","created_at":"2026-05-18T15:49:40.921880","id":798,"llm_annotations":{},"parent_id":null,"processed_content":"<p>a recent bug in Greenland: I was asking ChatGPT 5.4 mini to do a per-word breakdown of a sentence.  But, sometimes it left words out.  Other times, it would include the trailing period as a word, despite being instructed not to.\r</p>\n<p>The cause of the bug: the prompt also asked ChatGPT to get the \"word count\" of the sentence.  It is bad at this.\r</p>\n<p>So, if it said <span class=\"literal-text\">The dog is on the log</span> has 4 words, it would stop after 4 words and ignore <span class=\"literal-text\">the log</span> when processing the sentence.\r</p>\n<p>Of course, Python can easily do this. <span class=\"colorblock color-red\"><span class=\"sigil\">\ud83d\udca1</span><span class=\"colortext-content\"> and, in the future, AI systems will know to just use Python to get this information rather than trying to guess it themselves.</span></span>  But here, it wasn't even used; I don't remember/know why a \"word count\" got added to the response.</p>","quotes":[],"subject":"solving a prompting bug"}