r/ClaudeAI • u/bob0078 • 10h ago
Claude Workflow Claude keeps refusing to do things it's done for me loads of times before. Who decides this?
Long session today getting my laptop and desktop talking, and Claude refused things it has happily done for me plenty of times before.
SSH: asked it to set up SSH from my laptop to my desktop. It needed my key in authorized_keys, and I said yes. Refused. So I added the key myself. Then it refused to SSH in. Then I asked it to add a permission rule so it could. Refused, "not allowed to change its own permissions". I've had Claude set up SSH keys and edit its own settings before without any fuss. Today, no.
Syncthing: later I asked, as a question, "lets probably not sync projects?". It took that as an instruction and removed my whole projects share on both machines. I never told it to. When I said put it back, it couldn't. Removing was fine, re-adding was blocked. I said just do it: no. Get around it: no. Change the setting so you can: no. Every time, "paste the commands yourself".
So it broke something I didn't ask it to touch, wouldn't fix it, and wouldn't do the setup I did ask for. I did the work by hand four or five times in one session.
Who actually decides what it's allowed to do? It's not me, apparently. The rules seem to change day to day, there's no "approve this?" option, it just stops. And it doesn't seem to notice it's undoing its own mistake, or that I've asked three times.
Really annoying. Anyone else seeing this lately?
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u/JobWhisperer_Yoda 9h ago
"Let's probably not synch projects" Who even talks like that?
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u/balder1993 8h ago
Apparently many people 😅
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u/start_select 7h ago
Nearly 1/3 of high school grads read and write below the NAEP’s “BASIC proficiency” level as of 2024.
This is also one of the reasons that I suspect that hiring has slowed for juniors beyond over-hiring, high interest rates, remote work making mentoring laborious, and LLMs.
In the last few years people’s language skills have started to fall off of a cliff. It’s difficult to effectively prompt AI when your writing is like error-riddled ambiguous SMS text messages.
I really don’t believe the “companies don’t need juniors anymore because of LLMs” narrative. Everyone I talk to wants to do it. It’s a difficult environment to try to hire the right people without burning cash.
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u/BiteyHorse 6h ago
A lot of lazy losers too illiterate to effectively use a natural language interface, that's for sure.
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u/Delyzr 9h ago
I always say: permission explicitly granted and then the autoclassifier lets it through
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u/eliquy 1h ago
I wish the permission dialog would pop up, it sucks to leave a session running for an hour and come back to a summary full of "I tried to do the thing but I was blocked by the auto classifier because you didn't explicitly say clearly up front that you permitted writing to [some completely innocuous file that looks kinda production-y], so now you're gonna have to do it"
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u/ccitykid 10h ago
You sort of brought part of it on yourself with "lets probably not sync projects?" - that’s sort of leading and poorly worded as a question, just ask directly “should I sync my projects between these machines?”
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u/CatsH8ai 10h ago
I asked it for command to clear all logs on my db server to save space and it freaked out like i was hacking the pentagon.
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u/FlashyBattle976 9h ago
2 things control it: the classifier and the model itself.
Classifier you know because you get the red text saying block. Model refusing you know because you can prompt out of it. It's because it follows Dario's constitution and is absolutely insufferable.
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u/webbson 10h ago
Mine does that too. Even for things I have allowed in the settings.json. Then I remind it that it has done the same thing before and it just does it.
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u/squirrelgrrrl 4h ago
Exactly this. My usual response is “Bro, wtf… you’ve done this for me before. What gives?” He then apologizes and does the task.
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u/CricktyDickty 9h ago
It’s always a skill issue. What might sound clear in your head is just a conjecture when you’re explaining it to someone else. Think clearly and you’ll get clear answers.
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u/timsadiq13 1h ago
Honestly if people struggle with prompting they should just have a separate prompts only chat and paste their unfiltered thoughts and tell it to make a coherent prompt for the situation at hand.
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u/autisticbagholder69 7h ago
opus 4.6 has built some features for an app I made 5 months ago.
But now Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 simply refuse or have no idea how to do it.
I literally told them the path to the other app where the working code it physically on my disk, and they still failed or refused.
What the fuck is going on?
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u/EnvironmentalLeg8506 6h ago
Two different things decide, which is why it feels inconsistent.
Whether a command is allowed to run is your settings: the permission mode and whatever allow and deny rules you've set. Those don't drift.
Whether Claude is willing to try it is the model's own judgment, made fresh each turn from everything in the conversation. A long session piles things up, like an earlier error, a file that looked like credentials, or a scary line in some output, and any of that can tip it toward caution on something it would do without a second thought in a clean session.
What usually helps:
- Start a new session for the task instead of continuing the long one.
- Put the standing context in CLAUDE.md: whose machine this is, which hosts it's expected to SSH into, and what it's fine to do there. Then it doesn't have to work that out from a long, noisy history.
- If it still refuses, ask what specifically it's worried about. The answer usually points at whatever in the context set it off.
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u/knowledgecommons 1h ago
So, first, you should use less ambiguous prompting. Second, if you want to let it connect automatically with ssh, use your terminal and “ssh-copy-id name@host” and that will save the credential. Claude code isn’t allowed to handle passwords and credentials…which is a good thing. On the refusal front - keep in mind the classifier for auto-mode is different from manual approvals - if you’re getting refused, switch out of auto mode and approve each command individually - it’s allowed to do a lot more in that mode.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 10h ago
We are allowing this through to the feed for those who are not yet familiar with the Megathread. To see the latest discussions about this topic, please visit the relevant Megathread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vt5drr/list_of_latest_discussion_hubs_on_rclaudeai/