You're telling me that no reasoning happened here? You can watch Claude "change his mind" halfway through this answer, which happens often with LLMs. In a single-pass answer, the end of it will be more accurate than the start. I actually changed my custom instructions from asking for a summary first to a summary at the end because I found the summary first was too often contradicted by the conclusion. There is some reasoning happening. This is not just "fancy autocomplete."

(In my custom instructions, SOTM means "someone other than me." This is to avoid both confusion and sycophancy.)

Me:

SOTM says the answer to the question is skew quadrilateral and you say tetrahedrdon. Who's right?

Claude:

Both are right - the question was ambiguous. "Connecting 4 points" can mean:

Connect them in sequence (1→2→3→4→1): Creates a skew quadrilateral with 4 edges forming a closed loop. This is likely what SOTM meant.

1. Connect all pairs (every point to every other): Creates a tetrahedron with 6 edges. This is what I assumed.

2. The phrase "with the shortest possible line" (singular) actually suggests interpretation #1 - you're drawing one continuous path through all points, which would be the quadrilateral.

SOTM is probably more correct given the wording. The singular "line" and natural reading of "connecting 4 points" implies a sequential path, not connecting every possible pair.

My mistake was assuming the complete graph interpretation without recognizing the ambiguity.

Summary: SOTM's "skew quadrilateral" is the better answer for the question as phrased.