My robot can't add 1 + 1 = 2

Robot Assistant
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I asked my robot today to make a log entry to last Friday’s daily note, and instead of adding it to Friday’s daily note, it added it to Saturday’s daily note. I told it to correct the mistake and then asked it why it got the date wrong. Here’s the answer it gave me.

"Fixed. Both entries are now in 2026-05-08 and removed from 2026-05-09.

As for why I got it wrong — I had the right information (today is Monday May 11th) but made a simple arithmetic error and landed on the 9th instead of the 8th. I’ll save a reminder about this."

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Math end especially dates seem to be an issue for many AI models.

I asked Claude Cowork to set up weather updates for a trip Tuesday 5/12 thorugh Thursday 5/14 and it “corrected” that to Tuesday 5/13.

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AI can’t draw analog clocks with the correct time either. See my blog post Can’t Do 11:00 – Shortcomings of AI?

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Language models are just not designed to do math, it’s extremely expensive in terms of compute to make it accurate. They understand tokens and don’t even know the difference between a 1 and a 2, and you have to force them to and in the process you burn tones of energy for no reason.

Why use a cluster of computers when the machine in front of you is perfectly capable of solving the problem with 100000% more efficiency? It’s the wrong tool for the job!

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This is one of the advantages of using Claude Code. I had a very similar problem today where Claude was putting the wrong time in a file. I eventually told it to use bash to run the date command and have it parse the date in the format that made sense for me. Works every time now.

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2 things that give all programmers nightmares

F’ing Dates
F’ing Names

Guaranteed to be the root cause most alcohol consumption for everyone I’ve ever met who works with computers.

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and you can add timezones to the list

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There two hard problems in computer science:

  • Date Math
  • and counting past 1
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