>I've resorted to append things like "THIS IS JUST A QUESTION. DO NOT EDIT CODE. DO NOT RUN COMMANDS". Which is ridiculous.

Funny to read that, because for me it's not even new behavior. I have developed a tendency to add something like "(genuinely asking, do not take as a criticism)".

I'm from a more confrontational culture, so I just assumed this was just corporate American tone framing criticism softly, and me compensating for it.

Same here. I quickly learned that if you merely ask questions about it's understanding or plans, it starts looking for alternatives because my questioning is interpreted as rejection or criticism, rather than just taking the question at face value. So I often (not always) have to caveat questions like that too. It's really been like that since before Claude Code or Codex even rolled around.

It's just strange because that's a very human behavior and although this learns from humans, it isn't, so it would be nice if it just acted more robotic in this sense.

Appending "Good." before clarifying questions actually helps with that suprisingly well.

Oh funny enough, I often add stuff like "genuinely asking, do not take as a criticism" when talking with humans so I do it naturally with LLMs.

People often use questions as an indirect form of telling someone to do something or criticizing something.

I definitely had people misunderstand questions for me trying to attack them.

There is a lot of times when people do expect the LLM to interpret their question as an command to do something. And they would get quite angry if the LLM just answered the question.

Not that I wouldn't prefer if LLMs took things more literal but these models are trained for the average neurotypical user so that quirk makes perfect sense to me.

You can just put it in PLAN mode (assuming VS Code), that works well enough - never seen it edit code when in that state.

I've been using chat and copilot for many months but finally gave claude code a go, and I've been interested how it does seem to have a bit more of an attitude to it. Like copilot is just endlessly patient for every little nitpick and whim you have, but I feel like Claude is constantly like "okay I'm committing and pushing now.... oh, oh wait, you're blocking me. What is it you want this time bro?"