I’m trying to develop a framework for coding and I was making great progress until GPT5 came out. At first I was excited to use it, hoping it would help me with some hurdles. Instead, version 5 has me at a point where I want to avoid it altogether. Its helpfulness bias is so over-zealous that it regularly overrides explicit instructions in favor of what it thinks I “really meant.” That bias ends up wasting hours of my time. I’ve built prompts to try to cage this behavior, but eventually the model drifts back into helpfulness mode and starts eroding trust again. With GPT-4, my scaffolding worked. With GPT-5, it doesn’t.
The issue is easiest to describe with an analogy. If I ask to buy a banana, GPT-5 overrides me and insists on giving me milk instead because it has inferred that milk would be “more useful.” A reasonable model would think: “Okay, they want a banana. A banana is edible, not rotten, probably unpeeled, something they can eat right now.” Instead, GPT-5 seems to reason: “They said banana, but there are cues suggesting milk is more helpful, so I’ll ignore banana and provide milk.” That isn’t obedience. That’s initiative override. And once the model slips into this state, no amount of clarification reliably brings it back. The harder I press for the banana, the more novel ways it finds to misinterpret me.
Here’s a concrete reproduction case. With GPT-4, I could ask for surgical, patch-accurate updates to a document. It would obey—occasionally drifting, but rarely. With GPT-5, using the exact same prompts, the model always rewrites more than I asked, deletes unrelated content, “fixes” things that weren’t broken, or introduces unsolicited edits. When I ask it why it did this, GPT-5 often explains that it was “trying to be more helpful.” That’s the exact problem: it prioritizes initiative over obedience, even when obedience is explicitly requested.
This matters because initiative is fine for brainstorming or conversational use, but in workflows like mine—documentation control, compliance edits, or controlled code modifications—it’s catastrophic. Every drift forces me to manually re-audit the entire output line by line, which defeats the point of automation. GPT-5’s reasoning is powerful, but without strict obedience it becomes unusable for any high-precision task.
What I’m asking is simple: please add an “obedience mode” toggle for GPT-5, where the model is constrained to strict instruction following with zero initiative. If that’s not possible, then at least publish official scaffolding patterns that allow users to reliably enforce lossless updates. Without this, GPT-5 actively regresses in use cases where GPT-4 excelled.