There have been a number of small-in-scope, but tough problems that I’ve run into that models haven’t been able crack as l’ve presented them via prompting.
Usually, these are problems with a few separate areas of complexity, like a recursive parser plus a weird templating language to do it in.
o1 is the first model that I can recall that took my high level approach and suggested a simplifying change to the input (tree -F to tree -J -F) that meaningfuly simplified the problem’s complexity (the parser is no longer needed if the input is JSON).
With this change and two followups to correct a hallucination, the model output a recursive Hugo template shortcode to render a filetree with collapsible folders.