> After ~30 or so commits it apparently started instructing subagents to copy the "existing verbose comment style of the codebase" - a verbose style it initiated.

Yes, the "Y would make more sense, but the doc says do X..." YOU wrote the doc, if it doesn't make sense, change it! But of course, it can't tell who wrote the doc.

I wonder whether its tendency to scribble status updates and todos and decisions all over whatever it's working on is a side effect of its amnesia -- it can't follow the side-quests and knows it won't remember to do them if they're not written down somewhere.

FWIW I haven't had the problem either of Claude lying to me, or of going off and doing its own thing; if anything I've been somewhat frustrated when I ask it to start something, go AFK, and come back to find it stopped a short way in to ask my opinion on something trivial. I generally have to explicitly say, "I'm going AFK for a chunk of time. My goal is for you make as much progress as possible before I come back; try to make reasonable judgements and only stop if there's something where you're really stuck. We can always change it later."