> The biggest thing I've found is that if you give any hint at all as to what you think the problem is, the LLM will immediately and enthusiastically agree, no matter how wildly incorrect your suggestion is.

I'm seeing this sentiment a lot in these comments, and frankly it shows that very few here have actually gone and tried the variety of models available. Which is totally fine, I'm sure they have better stuff to do, you don't have to keep up with this week's hottest release.

To be concrete - the symptom you're talking about is very typical of Claude (or earlier GPT models). o3-mini is much less likely to do this.

Secondly, prompting absolutely goes a huge way to avoiding that issue. Like you're saying - if you're not sure, don't give hints, keep it open-minded. Or validate the hint before starting, in a separate conversation.