The few times I've resigned myself to asking Gemini or ChatGPT something I couldn't find an answer to, my experience has been the same. 100% of the time. An LLM has never, not once, given me a correct answer or not lied to me. It's always been the same experience you describe. It goes in circles "Try X... Try Y... Try X?" Until I tell it to stop telling me X or Y, and then it goes, "LOL you can't do that at all, I was just wasting your time."

Most recently, I was considering moving away from iterm2 on MacOS, and I wanted to know if any other terminal emulator supported gestures for switching between tabs. So I asked Gemini, and it says, "Yes Ghostty supports gestures for switching between tabs."

"Ok I just installed Ghostty and I can't find anything about gestures."

"You need to add foo=bar to your conf file."

"I added foo=bar to my conf file and now it's saying the conf file is invalid."

"Sorry bro, remove foo=bar and add baz=boo to the conf file."

"It says baz=boo is invalid too."

"baz=boo isn't a real option. Remove that and add foo=bar to your conf file."

"You already told me to do that and I already told you that doesn't work."

"You shouldn't put foo=bar or baz=boo in the Ghostty conf file. Both are invalid. Ghostty doesn't support gestures. Have you considered iterm2?"