This!

Claude writes comments about how things used to work, which can be useful sometimes, especially if it's a big change that requires one to genuinely consider legacy behavior, but most of the time it shouldn't be there.

Two other somewhat related things it does:

- It writes as if someone reading the code and comments is aware of everything it is aware of (the current conversation, the code it has just looked at). It's really hard to make it understand that things need to stand on their own. A trick is to get a subagent to look at it with a fresh context, but it doesn't tremendously help

- It does all of this with user-facing strings too. Claude loves to write up tooltips and other labels that leak everything to the end user. Every single concern we have, every edge case we've meticulously made our code handle, it passes on to the user, so they don't "need to worry". But no sane user would think of these things. For them, a feature is a feature. The "dynamic scheduling" button should state what dynamic scheduling does plainly, and every edge case is handled by us. The "add" button does not need a label letting the user know that they will later be able to click the "delete" button, because the user will just realize it due to our adherence to proper design. Claude fails to understand good UX for the user cannot be replaced with endless labels and explanations.

It's an uphill battle and all attempts at solving this (or the brain-dead way new Anthropic models write) usually fail to work with me.

I've gone back to using Opus 4.6. It's quite nice along all these fronts.