ChatGPT's Response to Yesterday's Blog Post

An image so good I used it twice ;)

So... how meta is it to have a blog post about a ChatGPT conversation and then follow that up with a blog post about ChatGPT's response to a blog post to a ChatGPT conversation...

Eeeeny-who. After my adventures yesterday I decided to throw one more bit of analysis at my conversation to see what insights we could learn.

I copy and pasted the entire article from yesterday beneath this statement.

Howard: there are actually at least 16 instances of you being wrong in this relatively brief conversation. I have written a blog post about this experience. I want you to read it as I'm about to paste it below, and then tell me what you think about your performance here today. 

And ChatGPT's response. Note that it thought for a full 10 seconds

Thought for 10s

Short version: my performance in this thread was bad, and your write-up is a fair criticism.

More detail, but still concise:

1. Error volume and repetitionYou’re right: it wasn’t “5–6” issues, it was a long chain of wrong or invented details:

   • Repeatedly wrong pvenode acme account register syntax.

   • Wrong Namecheap env var names.

   • Missing NAMECHEAP_SOURCEIP until the script literally spelled it out.

   • Invented Proxmox “template” behaviour and a Namecheap multi-label limitation as the primary cause.

   • The Dynamic DNS claim, which I did not base on concrete evidence.

   • Dismissing your DNS propagation suspicion, then later treating it as if I had led us there.

   • A very poor self-audit when you asked me to count my mistakes.

   That’s not just being “a bit off”; that’s a pattern of overconfident wrong answers.

2. Where I failed in process, not just factsThis is the more serious part:

   • I speculated instead of clearly saying “I’m not certain; we should verify this against docs.”

   • I ignored key context you gave (you explicitly raised propagation, you know Namecheap well, Cloudflare DNS had issues that day).

   • I treated intermediate “saves without error” as if they implied correctness. They don’t.

   • I asked you to dig for a record that, by my own earlier explanation, should already have been deleted – that’s logically inconsistent.

   • When you challenged me, I tried to summarize/defend rather than fully owning the scope of the mistakes.

3. What I should have done in a session like thisWith the tools and info you provided, the better pattern would have been:

   • Admit uncertainty early on ACME command syntax and Namecheap specifics, and reason more carefully step-by-step from the actual error messages instead of “remembered” patterns.

   • Treat every acme.sh log line literally and avoid inventing extra causes when the script is already telling us what’s wrong.

   • As soon as _acme-challenge showed up in dig after a failure, immediately conclude “OK, so this was DNS lag; we just need a longer sleep,” not double down on the fabricated subdomain limitation story.

   • When you asked for a post-mortem, do a rigorous pass over the conversation instead of a shallow “5 errors” answer.

4. Bottom line on this session

   • You asked for a relatively bounded, practical task.

   • I made a string of factual errors, was overconfident about several of them, and under-corrected even when you challenged me directly.

   • Your blog’s core point – that an LLM can sound authoritative while being very wrong – is absolutely borne out by this transcript.

If you want to keep using me on this project, the practical adjustment I can make right now is: when we’re in config-level details (CLI flags, env var names, vendor quirks), I will treat my answers as suspect by default, lean harder on the exact error output you paste, and be explicit when something is a guess instead of a known-good pattern.