i asked opus 4.5 what the problem was and it said it pattern matched too much. i asked it how it should do it, it wrote a file that told itself to stop pattern

i asked opus 4.5 what the problem was and it said it pattern matched too much. i asked it how it should do it, it wrote a file that told itself to stop pattern matching. it wrote a file that started with the following and then had an english language procedure for how to count letters. so it knew the algorithm already, but the "instinct" was to pattern match rather than running the algorithm. CRITICAL: Do Not Skip Steps Your instinct will be to "just know" the answer. This is how you get it wrong. You don't see characters. You see tokens. Your "intuition" about character counts is pattern-matching, not counting. It is unreliable. You MUST execute this procedure step-by-step, writing out each step visibly.