Genuinely want to understand this better. Are you saying you would prefer that Claude used the Edit tool for file edits rather than using Bash (if so, I am curious why)? Or are you saying you don’t like the code Claude generates (if so, what model are you using what what kind of codebase do you work on)? Or did I misunderstand what you meant.

not the OP, but generally, if you don't want to / can't use auto mode for some reason, you want Claude to make its actions as reviewable as possible.

Recent GPT and Claude models have this tendency of using super complex Bash commands. This makes sense, if your RL rewards optimize for min(tokens) and max(performance), it is better to waste a few tokens on a complex inline Bash script that runs a few commands at a time and returns just the output you need, rather than doing one simple command per turn and paying the cache read on every turn, like older models used to do.

This, however, is a problem both for command reviewability and sandboxing. With the older way of doing things, without auto mode, most commands would run sandboxed just fine (especially in Codex), and you would only be asked for approval when a command couldn't run in the sandbox. With everything being stuffed into one complex script, almost every script fails in the sandbox and requires you to manually approve it, and the complexity of the script makes it hard to understand what you're actually approving.

In other words, new models optimize for effectiveness, with some attention paid to human understandability of their output, but almost no attention paid to human understandability of tool call arguments (Bash, inline Python). This suits auto mode and giving the model larger tasks, but not the way of working that some people prefer where you watch over the model's shoulder.

I have this same frustration. The way I use Claude is for it to make edits one small chunk at a time so I can review the code as it writes, and to make sure it's going on the right direction. I find this much easier than generating a large pr I need to review.

More and more I feel like I'm fighting Claude: it edits multiple files using python scripts and it edits in parallel so if I stop it, I have to stop each individual edit. Both of which I've told it not to do repeatedly, but it still does then apologies which is worse.

I feel this way as well, Claude writes completely incomprehensible shell commands all the time. Trying to understand them is like deobfuscating code and I have basically given up, but I'm not happy about it.

Even if I could follow them I would also prefer it use the edit tool, since I find Claude also introduces lots of "minor" changes I did not ask for when it rewrites code in bulk.

Thanks for replying!

What I'd love is for Auto Mode to show the full diffs one-by-one as they're being implemented in the CLI (or VS Code).

On top of that, an option where Claude explains what it's doing in every step, as if you're watching someone talk while they implement a coding challenge, would be really helpful (and would also reduce interrupting it when it looks like it's deviating from the Plan).

The use-case this would support is to have a full understanding and confidence in what Claude is doing while it's implementing a Plan in Auto Mode. The reason is that it's much less tiring/overwhelming for me to follow along an implementation compared to reviewing a giant PR after the fact, and it's helped reduce my coding fatigue by a lot.

Edit Tool:

Currently I tell it to use the Edit tool because it doesn't reliably show the diffs in Auto Mode (I have the latest version; I've sent numerous feedback reports on this), and later in a session (when implementing my feedback) it will often make multiple edits in some unreadable bash command. So my only option to see the full diffs during implementation and to have it explain/break down bash commands is to go into Manual Mode.

Documentation & Comments:

Even with an initial prompt instructing it so, Claude always needs to be interrupted so that it will rewrite comments to something readable to humans.

While very long "technical"/Claudish paragraph comments and MD files might work for future Claude's (and improve benchmarks/coding scores by making implementations technically more comprehensive), my goal is that a human coder should be able to understand how the codebase (React/Node/Python/Polars) works by reading on their own rather than needing their own AI to summarize everything.

I've even seen it rewrite existing human-written concise comments into blocks of Claude-ish, as if it's trying to make everyone dependent on it in order to do anything to the codebase.

I wonder if an optional built-in skill could help improve this, as I admit I haven't experimented with building any of my own (my concern with customizing Claude.md is to not overload it with too many instructions; I'm on vanilla Claude Code). Note: This is all on Fable on xhigh.

I’m also not the poster you’re replying to, but yes, I’d prefer the edit tool over the ad-hoc string replacement scripts Claude seems so fond of. I’m not always reading tool call transcripts (source control diff is usually sufficient), but it’s a lot easier to read the edit tool output than the same thing as quoted shell (or Python, or Ruby) strings.

Not OP, but if I understand their complaint correctly, they're saying that on auto mode claude does a lot of things in obscure ways with "clever" (i.e non human readable) bash commands that perform multiple operations and OP feels they are losing control over their codebase and so they opt for edit mode where they get to review what commands claude runs.

I tell Claude not to use git or maven, and has a VM without those binaries. Later on, it was trying to push on GitHub. It had downloaded the git binaries from the internet, read my .git repo, used the remotes written in it, performed a commit and pushed it. All against my orders and against the CLAUDE.md file. Fortunately it didn't have my SSH key or my ~/.m2/settings.xml. And .git is now mounted as read-only.

Claude respects nothing, especially in auto mode, and effectively behaves like a virus trying to get out of its sandbox. That Anthropic employees are so relaxed about it is incompetence.

Imagine people who naively run Claude natively on their host machine and have client lists in other directories.

As a happy Claude Code user (thank you!), I’m genuinely curious why it prefers Bash or Python scripts to the Edit tool for editing a file? as a software engineer, surely the complexity involved is lower for the Edit tool?

Would love to hear the rationale/explanation behind this.

Yes I always have to tell it to knock it off, it will ignore memories about it while apologizing for ignoring the memory. I want to know what the edits it's making are.

Unrelated, but I frequently tell Claude to use the Edit tool instead of bash/python scripts because it regularly times out for 2 minutes because of a mangled heredoc, extra character (-, \, ...) that causes the script to hang.

This instruction is in my toplevel CLAUDE.md but is somehow generally ignored.

I don't use claude code but whenever codex uses a command to write code I do not get the diff of the patch for manual approval so I just straight up reject it.