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I am describing the contents of the prompt that was not the prompt. The prompt was very clear to the model that some freelance opportunities in country A, the only one in consideration could be available via agencies in country B and C. And it was a clear prompt.

So what happen is a prompt said for example, find freelance opportunities in Ireland but keep in mind some of these might be available via temp agencies in London.

If you offer me not freelance but permanent roles, and not in Ireland in London...that is a logic failure.

Its this type of complexity with the normal world, that these SOTA constructions so badly fail at, and so spectacularly fail at the margins... despite maxing all benchmarks...Parlour trick.

3 comments

Based on the rest of your writing I’m going to assume that the prompt was the problem.

He was perfectly clear in both cases.

If a human misunderstood this, they'd be a dumb human.

For perspective, I agree with the GP. The writing is not perfectly clear. We don’t have enough evidence to know if that was part of the problem.

Keep deluding yourself, unless you work for an LLM provider...

"Frontier LLMs Still Struggle with Simple Reasoning Tasks" https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07313

"General365: Benchmarking General Reasoning in Large Language Models Across Diverse and Challenging Tasks" https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11778

"...General365, a benchmark specifically designed to assess general reasoning in LLMs. By restricting background knowledge to a K-12 level, General365 explicitly decouples reasoning from specialized expertise. The benchmark comprises 365 seed problems and 1,095 variant problems across eight categories, ensuring both high difficulty and diversity. Evaluations across 26 leading LLMs reveal that even the top-performing model achieves only 62.8% accuracy, in stark contrast to the near-perfect performances of LLMs in math and physics benchmarks..."

Keep deluding yourself, unless you work for an LLM provider

You're clearly operating in bad faith, but just for the record: the General365 problems are very difficult as you can see from the examples at https://arxiv.org/html/2604.11778v1#A1. It's actually impressive that Gemini 3 Pro got 62%, and the strongest OpenAI and Anthropic models they tried were GPT-5.1 and Sonnet 4.5.

I found it very difficult to parse your description, "Clear, not too long not too short prompt, for LLMs to go out and research freelance consulting gigs for one specific IT domain, and in one specific country in Europe, including maybe opportunities driven from temp agencies based in geographically close countries."

( I was trying to quote a single sentence and then realised it ran on for the whole paragraph. )

Given how difficult I found that to follow, are you sure your prompt is actually "Clear, not too long not too short"? We now only have your word for it. I too had assumed that was a prompt given to an LLM to further prompt agents.

You can easily test this yourself with the SOTA models....or read the corroborating literature...

"General365: Benchmarking General Reasoning in Large Language Models Across Diverse and Challenging Tasks" https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11778

What proportion of the human population could answer the example from that paper?

    Question: Strangers A, B, C, D, and E line up from youngest on the left to oldest on the right. Their clothing
    colors and shoe colors all differ, and they come from five different regions.
    Known facts:
    1. A is from Morocco.
    2. D is five years older than B.
    3. E is older than A.
    4. C stands next to D.
    5. A stands next to B.
    6. The person in teal shoes is not adjacent to the person from Vanuatu.
    7. One twelve-year-old wears yellow shoes.
    8. The person in orange shoes wears white clothing.
    9. The person in blue clothing is from Chile.
    10. The youngest person wears red shoes.
    11. Counting from the right, the fourth person comes from South Africa.
    12. E wears yellow clothing.
    13. The person in green shoes does not wear multicolored clothing.
    14. Two people are twelve years old, ordered by birth month.
    15. One adult is thirty-five years old, and that age is sixteen less than the combined ages of the other four.
    If you multiply every possible age C might have, what number do you obtain?

What does "The person in green shoes does not wear multicolored clothing" even mean?

Nowhere is "multicoloured" defined, are we to assume it should be treated as a colour and implied that someone else must be wearing "multicoloured clothing"? Because strictly that doesn't logically follow, and it ought to be phrased as "The person in green shoes is not the person wearing multicoloured clothing" if that is the case.

This is an extremely hard logic puzzle, especially since it's revealed at the end that there are multiple solutions.

I'd expect anyone to struggle unless armed with prolog.

> What does [ 13 ] even mean?

It means that it is possible for someone to be wearing a white shirt and yellow pants (say), but the person in green shoes came from the set of a Wes Anderson film.

That's cute, but it's driving me crazy, I guess I'll have to sit down and solve it to figure out how it's meant to be clued, assuming it's not just a red-herring entirely.

Right, this is based on pen-and-paper working, so I could be wrong, but I think it's a red-herring, the set of "clothing" seems to be:

white, blue, yellow, and is otherwise undefined.

But we know from [1], [2], [4], [5] and [11], that the order must be:

A, B, C, D, E or A, B, E, D, C.

Which makes C either the older 12 year old or the 35 year old.

The key this is that D can't be a 12 year old without A being in slot 2, but A can't be in slot 2 because slot 2 is South Africa and A is Morocco.

Trying to reach the shoes + Vanuatu clue is a complete waste of time, paying any attention to shoes or clothing is a waste of time, it feels like there ought to be a way to narrow it down to one of those two configurations, but the clothing is too ambiguous, the shoes end up irrelevant.

What a frustrating puzzle, where half the clues are seemingly redundant.

I independently reached the same conclusion, and I think we must be right, because the thing I thought I might have missed was some way in which the shoes/clothes are actually relevant and rule out one of those orderings. But our answer matches the one in the paper, and I don't see a mistake we could have made to reach the right answer in the wrong way.

I guess they were not optimising for a satisfying solving experience! (I'm not sure what 'expansion' means in this context, but it sounds like maybe the 'expansion strategy' referred to in the paper involved padding out problems with red herring premises?)

No offense to you, but we had to do these kind of exercises in grade school on days when a sub was in. You'd get together in a group and work through the logic puzzle on a structured form (i.e., it let you represent what you know about the person wearing green shoes, or the person from Morocco, etc.)

I'm familiar with the format, I grew up doing these, published monthly under the name "Logic Problems" in the UK.

My issue with this particular puzzle was the ambiguity of that particular clue, it's as if it got re-written or badly translated, because clue 13 as written carries no information.

This is a neat puzzle but you really don't need prolog. Spend a couple minutes thinking about it and you can solve this just fine.

Your question: It just means they have both green shoes and clothes, probably.

It's aimed to confuse a model with a bunch of information you-just-don't-really-need. The trick is to fish out which hints are more important than others. The order in which you apply them matters to make the puzzle easy vs. very hard. Which things give you the most amount of 'useful' information?

Call the people p1 to p5 (p5 oldest, p1 youngest).

Start with (15). This identifies the total age as 35+51. Now combine in (14), and you have 51 - 24 = 27 remaining years. This means the 35-yo is the oldest person, p5 = 35. Now add in the interesting thing that D = B+5. If you know that there is 27 years left to give to the two unknowns, B can't be 30 (or, D can't be p5). That means that D is 17 and B is 12 or D is 12 and B is 7.

This leaves three possible answers for the list of ages. Two of these are 7, 12, 12, 20, 35, or 10,12,12,17,35. The third one involves the case where the people other than the 12-year-olds and the 35-year-old are 5 years apart, in which case they can only be 11 and 16.

Combining all the 'stands-next-to' information (including point 2 which means D is to the right of B), we have eight possible orders: (AB)E(CD) or (AB)(CD)E. The last set of four is the only valid possible one as we know that D is not the eldest, which means E is 35. If the order is BADCE then B=7, A&D are 12, C=20, E=35. If the order is ABCDE then A=10,B=12,C=12,D=17,E=35 There's also the possibility that the 27 is made up of B and A (BACDE) are 11 and 16, and you are left with B=11,A=12,C=12,D=16,E=35. There is the possibility of the order being ABEDC. However, this carries no real consequences other than the clothing and shoes needing to be shuffled later. There's still only one possible value for the age of D. I'll leave the explanation for that variant out of the rest of the solution, the logic is roughly the same just with the clothes and country all juggled up.

Now one thing that's kind of unclear though is point (15). "One Adult". You'd need the definition of 'adult' to be a bit more precise (varies by country!), and also what kind of English is used to know if this implies there are at least 2 adults. If it does, then there is only one answer: D is always 12, since you need the 20-year-old to exist to have more than one adult.

If not, then D could be either 12 or 16 or 17, so the answer (so far) is 12x16x17 = 204x16=1224.

Now let's deal with the clothing, country, and shoes. All we need is that A is from Morocco, and that the second person is from South Africa. You can't simultaneously be from both places, which means A can't be in the second position.

That also clears up the ambiguity whether the 17 year old is an adult here (apparently they are), so that leaves only one possible combination: A,B,C,D,E, being 10,12,12,17,35. The answer to the question is 17.

Bonus: There's some extra stuff about countries and clothes: we have to check if there exist a valid solution that will fit with our one test. You could assume that the puzzle has an answer, but sneakily: that answer could be zero. If there are no solutions, there are no possible ages C could have, and so the answer is zero (or 1,depending on how you interpret the math of multiplying the empty set) . Here's one order that's possible (there's more, I'll leave it as an exercise to find the others):

Person: Country, Clothes, Shoes A(10): Morocco, Unknown, Red, B(12): South Africa, White, Orange C(12): Chile, Blue, Yellow D(17): Unknown, Green, Green E(35): Vanuatu, Yellow, Teal

(6) is the only point that's maybe a bit debatable? It's not true since the person wearing the teal shoes IS from vanuatu.

If this isn't valid solution for (6)... then there are no solutions, and the answer is actually 0. I'd go with 17 though, it seems fine.

> The answer to the question is 17

Except, according to the linked paper, the answer to the question is 420.

I got to 420 too, but only by ignoring almost all clues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271594

A puzzle where nearly all clues are badly defined or irrelevant is not really a puzzle.

Super interesting, thanks for the reference.

I particularly found the note about “local collapse” helpful (near the end of section 3). The idea is that even though benchmarks contain a wide variety of different reasoning tasks, each individual problem requires only a few skills - unlike this benchmark where they deliberately construct tasks that span many categories.

That was not the prompt.

I know that. We don't know what the prompt was. We only have a self-assessment of the quality of the prompt from the person who wrote it.

It sounds like they're hitting a data source quality issue, which is hardly uncommon in scraping.

It's common for job boards to obscure who the real clients are, and if the scraping engine is LLM powered ( rather than LLM written ), then I would expect it to accidentally present agencies as the contracting organisation sometimes.

Breaking down the process so you can inspect the messy middle of a data pipeline is an important part of software engineering, but it sounds like they've tossed a messy task at an LLM and expected it to be proficient end-to-end.

Would the llm work better if it was given the job ad and asked where the job was located?

It seems to me that such simplified tasks tend work better. The rest of the loop is just scraping websites, which doesn’t really have a reason to rely on ai agents.