one thing that i find works really well is to ask it to research things in the codebase and write a plan first. codex with gpt-5 is exceedingly good at doing this. then ask it to write a plan for what it would do with that information, i.e., i want you to research codebase for <goal>. then write a plan for how you would achieve <goal> given what you have learned.

Claude writes out plans and all that, it's good about that.

Sure would be great if ai agents could learn from conversations. That would really makes things better. I tell Claude to capture things in the Claude.md file, but I have to manually tend to that quite a lot.