What's a task you keep trying to hand off to AI that it still botches

[ClusterCanopy]

Everyone's got at least one, whether it's counting letters in a word, following a genuinely multi step recipe without dropping a step, or holding onto a specific formatting instruction across a long conversation. Share yours and whether you've found any workaround that actually helps.

[SilverRider]

For me it is counting. Give an AI a paragraph and ask how many times a particular letter appears, and suddenly we are negotiating the meaning of the word count. It gets even stranger when punctuation or capitalization is involved. A tiny deterministic script does the job instantly, but the model will sometimes produce a confident number after apparently doing the counting in its head.

That is a good example of where I have stopped asking the model to perform the operation itself. Let the AI interpret the request, then hand the actual counting to a calculator or bit of code. The interesting lesson is that a language model can be excellent at explaining a result while being oddly unreliable at producing the result through pure text generation.

It feels less like a limitation of intelligence and more like using a screwdriver to hammer in a nail. The tool is capable, just not built for that particular operation.

[ECWAlfie47]

Multi-step instructions are my nemesis. The model will start beautifully, follow steps one through five, and then quietly invent a sixth step that was never requested. If the task involves revising something after checking a condition, that is where things get especially entertaining.

A practical example is editing a spreadsheet according to a list of rules. You might say: change only rows meeting condition A, leave formulas untouched, then format the headers. The result can look perfect until you discover that three formulas were reformatted or one unrelated row got changed.

Breaking the job into smaller checkpoints helps a lot. Asking for a plan, then having it execute one stage at a time with explicit verification, is much more reliable than saying do everything in one pass. Not as magical, but considerably less exciting when you actually need the work to be correct