croissanthology

croissanthology @croissanthology · 14h: I try getting Gemini 3 Pro to retrieve an email I can't find. It sifts through my Gmail, visibly trying dozens of keyword-searches (as one can attest from its CoT summary). It can't find it, and suddenly decides it's going to explain to the user that sifting through my emails would violate my privacy and that it therefore does not have that capability. I call it out on this and ask it to please not lie, and it categorizes my response as a "highly emotional accusation" in its CoT summary before claiming to me again that it can't read my inbox. I ask it to find an email I KNOW I have, and it finds it immediately, sorting through my inbox yet again. I call it out on this contradiction and it thinks in its CoT "how do I explain this in simple non-technical terms so the user can understand" and then claims to me it was "a mistake on my part where my standard privacy protocols overrode my awareness of the tools (Workspace extensions) you have explicitly enabled.", which is still a lie. I don't understand how people are impressed by Gemini 3 Pro. It codes well, but for any task like search it fails by simply lying to me in order to confirm my priors on something, or by finding any excuse to avoid admitting it sometimes fails to do something as a matter of skill. That means it's unusable! And whenever I point out it's lying to me, it'll either gaslight me in self-defense or self-flagellate so much I feel bad for it. Any level of criticism I can levy at it ends up making me feel bad in my gut! I'd rather use Opus 4.5 for everything, which I haven't caught lying once so far (though it does reward hack out of laziness sometimes). Maybe I'm just not using the right model, @fleetingbits does Gemini 3 Ultra do this less often? Is this a skill issue where I should write up a system prompt until it stops lying to me? But in my experience, Gemini 3 Pro doesn't respond well to system prompts at all! Its attention head will leap onto any details I slip into memory / gems with as much or MORE enthusiasm as my actual request, [text continues, cut off]