Path Misspellings/Speculation in Reasoning and Tool Calls

#38
by rjgray - opened

I noticed that when it is using a 1M context window this model will often misspell filenames, hash strings, folder paths, and occasionally words in documents ("Clicks" to "Cliches"). This happens many times a session. It will misspell one of these at some point in its thinking (or even worse, only in the final write call), then start reasoning about it for long periods of time. Later reads of the document or tool calls for that path will then be incorrect and it will spend even more time reasoning about that. Often it is caught before the final result but it wastes a lot of tokens/time on it.

It is much less prevalent (but not gone) at a 256k context window.

Anyone seen behavior like this?

It often culminates in responses like:

“You can find the file at ./bmam/spec.md, but it might be ./bmab/ or ./bumbl/ but i could not confirm this.”

Combined with Laguna's preference for full file overwrites this often results in 3-4 of these in a row as every overwrite of a large spec introduces multiple typos it then catches and tries to fix with another giant full file write:

then one clean whole-file rewrite (which always satisfies as oldText) removes all that escaping ambiguity entirely. Let me do precisely that: read those ranges verbatim, then overwrite the file cleanly

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