The few times I've resigned myself to asking Gemini or ChatGPT something I couldn't find an answer to, my experience has been the same. 100% of the time. An LLM has never, not once, given me a correct answer or not lied to me. It's always been the same experience you describe. It goes in circles "Try X... Try Y... Try X?" Until I tell it to stop telling me X or Y, and then it goes, "LOL you can't do that at all, I was just wasting your time."
Most recently, I was considering moving away from iterm2 on MacOS, and I wanted to know if any other terminal emulator supported gestures for switching between tabs. So I asked Gemini, and it says, "Yes Ghostty supports gestures for switching between tabs."
"Ok I just installed Ghostty and I can't find anything about gestures."
"You need to add foo=bar to your conf file."
"I added foo=bar to my conf file and now it's saying the conf file is invalid."
"Sorry bro, remove foo=bar and add baz=boo to the conf file."
"It says baz=boo is invalid too."
"baz=boo isn't a real option. Remove that and add foo=bar to your conf file."
"You already told me to do that and I already told you that doesn't work."
"You shouldn't put foo=bar or baz=boo in the Ghostty conf file. Both are invalid. Ghostty doesn't support gestures. Have you considered iterm2?"
Gemini is utterly useless, but every other modern model would be capable of answering this correctly. If you ran a local coding agent, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could one-shot implement gesture support in Ghostty. It’d definitely configure BTT for you.
Here’s GPT 6’s answer to the prompt “What macOS terminal apps support gestures? Include a reference to the docs on how to enable/configure them.”:
iTerm2 supports configurable three-finger taps and swipes for switching tabs/panes, creating splits, pasting, etc. Set them up under Settings > Pointer > Bindings. Check for conflicting macOS trackpad assignments. [1]
The others are more limited: Ghostty supports macOS lookup/Quick Look gestures [2], while WezTerm lets you bind scroll events—for example, Ctrl+scroll to change font size. [3] Neither is equivalent to iTerm2’s gesture bindings.
For custom gestures without switching terminals, BetterTouchTool can map app-specific trackpad gestures to the terminal’s existing keyboard shortcuts. [4]
[1] https://iterm2.com/documentation-preferences-pointer.html
[2] https://ghostty.org/docs/features#macos
[3] https://wezterm.org/config/mouse.html
[4] https://docs.folivora.ai/docs/trackpad-mouse/magic-mouse-tra...
Pretty sure it's the harness here, not Gemini per se. Plug Gemini into pi or any harness that has any competence pointing to web search and the hallucinations drop 75% immediately.
This whole tree just made me realize that people have wildly different prompting styles, and Gemini is probably too specialized for usage patterns of long-time Google Search users. The prompt my finger generated(before this comment was posted) was "are there any terminal emulator that supports gesture actions, on macOS, other than iterm2", and Gemini gave me Tabby, WezTerm, Kitty, and BetterTouchTool gestures.
This is a different experience to GP from query to result. I thought they've all fixed that issue of difference in tones affecting results. I guess it was never easily fixed.
1: https://gist.github.com/numpad0/c40c16232288d544f7ea46521c64...