> Claude often comments that my version is better and cleaner.

Every comment I make is a "really perceptive observation" according to Claude and every question I ask is either "brilliant" or at least "good", so...

To me it started doing this more often lately, I remember in January being quite happy it wasn't behaving with praising or sycophancy, after correcting it I'd usually get responses like "I see the issue now, I shouldn't have done X and instead do Y".

Lately it's been praising me much more for correcting it, quite annoying to be honest, it's just a clanker, I want it to act like a non-human clanker instead of playing theater with me...

I have quite a lot of skepticism about that as well. I didn't mean to imply I believed it. I was just trying to say that I wasn't lazily copy pasting the LLM output into my repository.

I'm taking the time to understand what it is proposing. I'm pushing back and asking for clarifications. When I implement things, I do it myself in my own way. I experienced a huge increase in my ability to make the cool stuff I've always wanted to make even in spite of this.

I can't even fathom how productive the people who have Claude Code cranking out features on multiple git worktrees in parallel must be. I wouldn't do that in my personal projects but I can totally understand doing that in a job setting.

In Claude's world, every user is a generational genius up there with Gauss and Euler, every new suggestion, no matter how banal, is a mind boggling Copernican turn that upends epistemology as we know it.

It's really annoying when it does that. I wish there was an alternate mode you could toggle it to when pushing back on its output. One where it's tuned to not assume you're the authority so it can come back with a response that doesn't just immediately jump to agreeing with you.

I do think this is a learnable skill. I haven't quite gotten Claude to push back as much as I would prefer, but there's a specific tone to strike where the average person in your position would expect and welcome being told they're wrong.