What I've noticed is that whenever Claude says something like "the simplest fix is..." it's usually suggesting some horrible hack. And whenever I see that I go straight to the code it wants to write and challenge it.

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StanAngeloff 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That is the kind of thing that I've been fighting by being super explicit in CLAUDE.md. For whatever reason, instead of being much more thorough and making sure that files are being changed only after fully understanding the scope of the change (behaviour prior to Feb/Mar), Claude would just jump to the easiest fix now, with no backwards compatibility thinking and to hell with all existing tests. What is even worse is I've seen it try and edit files before even reading them on a couple of occasions, which is a big red flag. (/effort max)

Another thing that worked like magic prior to Feb/Mar was how likely Claude was to load a skill whenever it deduced that a skill might be useful. I personally use [superpowers][1] a lot, and I've noticed that I have to be very explicit when I want a specific skill to be used - to the point that I have to reference the skill by name.

[1]: https://github.com/obra/superpowers

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Larrikin 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I did not use the previous version of Opus to notice the difference, but Sonnet 4.6 seems optimized to output the shortest possible answer. Usually it starts with a hack and if you challenge it, it will instead apologize and say to look at a previous answer with the smallest code snippet it can provide. Agentic isn't necessarily worse but ideating and exploring is awful compared to 4.5

	▲	StanAngeloff 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I did my usual thing today where I asked a Sonnet 4.6 agent to code review a proposed design plan that was drafted by Opus 4.6 - I do this lately before I delved into the implementation. What it came back with was a verbose output suggesting that a particular function `newMoneyField` be renamed throughout the doc to a name it fabricated `newNumeyField`. And the thing was that the design document referenced the correct function name more than a few dozen times. This was a first for me with Sonnet. It completely veered off the prompt it was given (review a design document) and instead come out with a verbose suggestion to do a mechanical search and replace to use this newly fabricated function name - that it event spelled incorrectly. I had to Google numey to make sure Sonnet wasn't outsmarting me.

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sixothree 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Superpowers, Serena, Context7 feel like requried plugins to me. Serena in particular feels like a secret weapon sometimes. But superpowers (with "brainstorm" keyword) might be the thing that helps people complaining about quality issues.

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loloquwowndueo 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

lol this one time Claude showed me two options for an implementation of a new feature on existing project, one JavaScript client side and the other Python server side.

I told it to implement the server side one, it said ok, I tabbed away for a while, came to find the js implementation, checking the log Claude said “on second thought I think I’ll do the client side version instead”.

Rarely do I throw an expletive bomb at Claude - this was one such time.

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sixothree 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Using superpowers in brainstorm mode like the parent suggested would have resulted in a plan markdown and a spec markdown for the subagents to follow.

	▲	loloquwowndueo 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Dunno man, Claude had a spec (pretty sure I asked it to consider and outline both options first) or at least clear guidance and decided to YOLO whatever it wanted instead. It’s always “you’re using the tool wrong, need to tweak this knob or that yadda yadda”.

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denimnerd42 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

this prompt is actually in claude cli. it says something like implement simplest solution. dont over abstract. On my phone but I saw an article mention this in the leak analysis.