I still think it depends on the subject you are prompting. If LLM knows that thing very well it will stick to the answer, otherwise it can go in a different direction based on how different initial assessment was.
Yesterday I asked it to write a simple VB script to show a reminder that I will schedule via command line using Windows task schedular. In first attempt it suggested to create VB file for each message based on initial reasoning that I can not pass arguments to VB file like that. It didn't seem correct (confirmed via Google) then resubmitted the same prompt but this time it said that I can simply pass my reminder message as arg to VB script and the next code was based on that. (I don't know VB or ever used task schedular before)
This was GPT-4. You are not wrong about 'maximal degenerate behaviour' but initially generated assumption can lead to different answers overall. Chain of thought prompting stems from this exact behaviour.
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I still think it depends on the subject you are prompting. If LLM knows that thing very well it will stick to the answer, otherwise it can go in a different direction based on how different initial assessment was.
Yesterday I asked it to write a simple VB script to show a reminder that I will schedule via command line using Windows task schedular. In first attempt it suggested to create VB file for each message based on initial reasoning that I can not pass arguments to VB file like that. It didn't seem correct (confirmed via Google) then resubmitted the same prompt but this time it said that I can simply pass my reminder message as arg to VB script and the next code was based on that. (I don't know VB or ever used task schedular before)
This was GPT-4. You are not wrong about 'maximal degenerate behaviour' but initially generated assumption can lead to different answers overall. Chain of thought prompting stems from this exact behaviour.