Same problem, same solution: For technical docs, tell it when facts change, rewrite as if the wrong fact never happened, with no references or even allusions to the obsolete fact or the change. It's been effective.
From time to time I have to go further and tell it to imagine an alternate reality where the fact never happened, and write this doc as if the new thing had been true all along. This second iteration always gets it.
(A separate instruction keeps the fact-change in a dev log that serves as basis for release notes.)
In my experience they're pretty well aware of this failure mode, to the point where I learned the word accretive from adversarial agent code reviews this week. Less good at fixing it, but once you know it'll happen you can ask it not to.
Same problem, same solution: For technical docs, tell it when facts change, rewrite as if the wrong fact never happened, with no references or even allusions to the obsolete fact or the change. It's been effective.
From time to time I have to go further and tell it to imagine an alternate reality where the fact never happened, and write this doc as if the new thing had been true all along. This second iteration always gets it.
(A separate instruction keeps the fact-change in a dev log that serves as basis for release notes.)
This word can be understood by many people at first sight but I don't think I had ever seen it in that form in writing before 2026.
Now everything is accretive this, accretive that.
Someone must have fed the wrong dictionary page into ChatGPT.
In my experience they're pretty well aware of this failure mode, to the point where I learned the word accretive from adversarial agent code reviews this week. Less good at fixing it, but once you know it'll happen you can ask it not to.
I just tell it to make a hard switch and remove references to the old way. It is in git anyway.