I'd like to see the prompt. I suspect that "literal infant" is expected to be a software developer without preamble. The initial sentence to an LLM carries far more relevance, it sets the context stage to understand what follows. If there is no introduction to the subject at hand, the response will be just like anyone fed a wall of words: confusion as to what all this is about.
> - yes I've tried giving it prompts so detailed a literal infant could follow along and accomplish the task
Which you are saying that might have missed in the end regardless?