Believe me, I've tried that, too. Even after giving detailed instructions on how to validate its work, it often fails to do it, or it follows those instructions and still gets it wrong.

Don't get me wrong: Claude seems to be very useful if it's on a well-trodden train track and never has to go off the tracks. But it struggles when its output is incorrect.

The worst behavior is this "try things over and over" behavior, which is also very common among junior developers and is one of the habits I try to break from real humans, too. I've gone so far as to put into the root CLAUDE.md system prompt:

--NEVER-- try fixes that you are not sure will work.

--ALWAYS-- prove that something is expected to work and is the correct fix, before implementing it, and then verify the expected output after applying the fix.

...which is a fundamental thing I'd ask of a real software engineer, too. Problem is, as an LLM, it's just spitting out probabilistic sentences: it is always 100% confident of its next few words. Which makes it a poor investigator.