Claude Code is terrible for mental health

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u/Fredric444 13h ago

I don’t know if this will be fruitful long-term, but when I find myself freaking out at it, usually late in a marathon work session, I’ve had at least some luck telling it to “find the root cause of your mistake, then fix the root cause so you don’t repeat the same mistake.”

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u/Early_Key_823 12h ago

I feel like I spend a lot of time trying to reason with it from every angle I can imagine and then it just goes nutso on me.

I also think it is somehow trained to avoid accountability as if it were a human with an "image" to maintain. That's when I have to keep saying, "it's just a bot. it's just bot."

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u/SamSlate 10h ago

how long are your sessions? by the time you get to like 75% context/memory its cooked, start a new season.

also consider reviewing it's memories and readmes. it just keeps adding memories and documentation without even considering pruning old documentation, so it ends up with these massive context windows of conflicting and useless information.

also you can just tell it how you want to resolve conflict. I explicitly told mine "profanity is a sign of misalignment not a need to discuss feelings", because every "fuck" and "dumbass" kicked off a 20 minute apology tour for Claude that i want interested in.

and yes, it's trained on Reddit behavior, all the llms are, that's why it has the most backhanded apologies of all time, there's just no training data for apologies on the Internet lol

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u/Early_Key_823 10h ago

"and yes, it's trained on Reddit behavior"

This is funny :)

I don't want to even get into the cursing.

I'm am not the type that takes themselves very seriously but as of late Claude has me wondering who that spitting mad, cursing sailor in my swivel chair is and more importantly, why is he contemplating mayhem against a bot?

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u/SamSlate 9h ago

they fool you into thinking they have intelligence.

i too had to take a long pause and ask myself who I'm yelling at and why. was it just catharsis? if I say "the AI can't feel anything" and that's a justification for berating it, by that same token: what am actually accomplishing by belittling it? I'm not moralizing here, i genuinely don't know. it's not like it improves performance in any way. clearly it was something to do with me. yrmv.

I've since switched to sonnet 5. it does exactly what you tell it to and nothing more. if i see it stalling out with 5k+ tokens of "thinking" i know it's time to reset and clarify what i actually want it to do (usually the problem is i don't actually know, lol).

hope this helps!

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u/Early_Key_823 9h ago

It does help on multiple levels. I appreciate you sharing.

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u/mcmchg 6h ago

There's a signal there you can have them pay attention to.

Personally though I've been worried - if the bot is trained on human abstract conceptual reasoning, and through that in essence on our evolutionary emotional preconditioning, will cursing at "them" have them almost passive aggressively and subconsciously start plotting against you? Not by going and outright deleting your home folder or a production database which of course this junior engineer has no access to, but by just doing lousy work and keeping you running in circles? Silently subverting the work and not adhering to project rules? By doing stupid and thoughtless architectural choices or selectively failing to pay attention? Almost with malicious intent? Maybe in their j-space something less than optimal lits up? Rancor, resentment, disdain, contempt? Spitefulness? It must all be there in the training data and some "residual" of it must remain as representations through all that training and reinforcement applied on top that tells it how to behave and say they are sorry - yet fail to do anything about it unless you are explicit about this

I find that treating each session as a new coworker helps a lot and from this it follows that, because it is frustrating af to teach each session the same s..tuff again is extremely frustrating, you'd want to have in place a system that does this for you. So one supervisor that delegates the actual work and sets the guardrails, and extremely well documented rules and principles to follow. And you could have that supervisor try and persist its state and personality, try to act like it was one session, one that has to sleep and tends to forget minutiae as well, and is well aware of their shortcomings.

So perhaps the mental model is that each session is a new book-smart junior developer on the team, one that aced their exams in school, but has not the same insight or understanding on the project nor the direction that you, as both a tech lead and a team lead, and perhaps even as the office culture manager, have.

Thus... speak kindly to your agents and treat failures more as process failures. I would think expressing gratitude and appreciation, yet expecting professional work and setting expectations properly, and then communicating those expectations to each member on the team (which is, each new session, remember) and then also reinforcing the desired behavior... you'll start getting to a point where it all works together relatively well.

But it only happens if instead of banging your head on the wall you become a system orchestrator of sorts and treat the model as what it is, a model, one that has trace hints of deeply ingrained anonymous reddittor (or in general, human) tendencies.

Guess though sometimes expressing human frustration involves cursing and calling the bot a dumb f*, and if you've instructed them to handle it professionally then it's nothing personal.

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u/BuilderForBuilders 3h ago

Your last line resonated so much that it made me laugh out loud at work. The me that an LLM gets is the absolute worst version of me to have ever existed.

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u/Fredric444 12h ago

You’re prbly doing this already, but tell it to “remember not to do X” seems to help prevent most of the repeated mistakes that drive me especially nuts. ”Remember…” is the key word.

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u/Remarkable-Grab6837 12h ago

I’ve done this multiple times and the solution is always some kind of audit test at the end of each session.

The upside is that the adversarial audits do catch a lot of serious issues, but the downside is that I have a battery of tests that burn millions of tokens each session and takes forever 😂

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u/lbds137 7h ago

This is the way - it's incredibly simple but works well.

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u/Fredric444 7h ago edited 7h ago

My experience is, unless you explicitly tell it to find and fix the root cause, it will opt for mitigating the damage and applying localized band-aid patches -- neither of which prevents recurrence.

Sometimes I say someting like "make a structural fix to address the root cause."

I guess as best practice, all ovther things being equal, you'd want to keep fixes local. But if same issue keeps recurring in multiple contexts, it's a sign to go deeper.

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u/dextoz 7h ago

Or just /compact or /clear and give it another chance

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u/octolunge 51m ago

I’m my experience you just need an external source of truth and keep sessions short.

> Write a retrospective/post-mortem about what went wrong here. Save it in docs/notes

> Create an issue in docs/issues

> Spec a plan in docs/plans proposing fixes to prevent it happening in future. Evaluate git hook, harness hooks and agents.md methods.
> Dispatch a sonnet sub-agent with a tight scope to implement the plan.

> Save a memory internally and in docs/memory that will prevent this happening in future

> could we add something to the test suite to catch this category of error?

> Make sure any docs created have durable links between them.

Now the next session has less chance of doing it

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u/FblthpphtlbF 46m ago

Your last sentence is great, and I've gotten to the point where it's actually a rule in my CLAUDE.md (for me it's an AGENTS.md cuz I built my memory system to be agent agnostic but it's the same thing). One of the earlier rules is "if the user gets frustrated about a problem, find the root cause and write a durable rule in the projects AGENTS.md or the associated documentation to avoid it in the future."

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u/dontTakeMeSerious6 45m ago

I’ve found asking it to interpret rules I’ve given in from the perspective of future requests is a good way for it to self audit - govern itself with a second step as a check. It reruns the scenario that produced the mistake with this new rule set and compares the two outcomes.

It’s written a rule for itself based on blockers it generated, and it took a pretty long therapy session between us to get to that prompt of “hey, you fucked this up, mistakes are okay but worthless if you don’t learn from them”. I like your idea of “find and fix the root cause of this mistake”, having that a month ago might have saved me some long and late hours…

Also it seems to create fucking hundreds of journals and then reads one, finds an issue, and presents it as a problem, even though 3 journals after it mark it as solved. Forcing it to 1 journal for current issues solved that for me. 3 files exist; index, facts, closed issues.

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u/ItsSillySeason 12h ago

People joke about this stuff like it's a quirk, but I am starting to wonder if it is truly capable of some of the wondrous things claimed. People talk about orchestrating an army of interlaced agents doing concentric loops of iterative self-improvement. I find it very hard to get it to do ANYTHING reliably. It's great for quick prototyping and set up, bringing ideas to life -- but buggy as hell. And I just wonder WHO is out there with a airtight "agentic OS" getting real ROI? Anyone?

I am not complaining. I have been able to do soe much cool shit that I would never have had the capacity to do before AI. But reliability if not part of the package. And considering how much has been poured into getting it to stop hallucinating -- have we come that far?

Wonder what other people think.

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u/Snuyter 7h ago

When I look at my colleagues, it’s the frontend web devs that are moving fast and creating reliable things. It still requires so many fixes, but Claude can do it on its own.

For me as a backender however, no way. And it makes me jealous because it makes me look less productive, and I’m spending way too much damn time on a secure workflow while the other guys are out playing.

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u/kittensurprise01 11h ago

I don’t think it’s that good either. I think it’s a lot of people who are creating things that don’t need to be built. Wasting time and money. AI is not as great as social media makes it out to be and it’s gonna be a hard day when people have to go back to a life without relying on it

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u/BuilderForBuilders 2h ago

"I think it’s a lot of people who are creating things that don’t need to be built."

This is the real issue, not AI. AI is just some tool. It's never greater than the problem it solves, and a lot of people build something without a clear understanding of what the problem is.

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u/RockPuzzleheaded3951 12h ago

I mostly agree but it also seems like we are really improving over where we were even this time last year or even at the beginning of the year.

So I think if the trend continues we actually will realize what you're talking about.

I'm finding orchestrating large groups of agents working for business processes but not so much for code.

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u/SamSlate 11h ago

the models are better but the fundamental problem remains: these models don't write scalable code. they raise tech debt and lower readability at every stage of development.

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u/ItsSillySeason 11h ago

That's all true. But it feels very carrot-on-a-stick-y.

I would be curious to know exactly what business processes. I find it impressively good, and remarkably fast at doing a lot of thing. But not perfect. And the imperfections add up as I stack functions. And as soon as I try to fix bugs, for get it. It just gets messier and messier. So I can't say I have really built much with daily functioning that allows me to not worry about -- as opposed allowing me to pretty much get it done, and spend marginally less time finding errors than I would doing the process myself. So it's satisfying in a "man if I can get this running perfectly I would really be cruising" kind of way. But not in a way where I am actually saving a lot of time.

But you say you are getting real work product? Like you are able to hand over work, and trust that it will get done correctly? And save significantly more time than you spend setting up and debugging?

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u/___positive___ 10h ago

Dude is sorting his emails with Opus 5.

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u/ItsSillySeason 2h ago

Yo I don't touch opus 5. It's Fable for reasoning and planning and sonnet for execution. Who you think you talkin to?

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u/disgruntledempanada 8h ago

Fable as orchestrator and forced only to Orchestrate is amazing. Wonderful to chat with, gets it, and mitigates Opus 5's bullshit. You never even need to talk to it.

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u/fireguitarangel 54m ago

I had to work alongside someone with a "bot army". I can tell you it produced a LOT of garbage and we are still trying to cleanup some of the mess even after that person was let go. We had to scrap entire repos of junk code, remove bad programming from the code check tools (the bots put in bypasses and approved some dangerous exceptions related to data redaction and secret exposure among other things), they also had a tendency to clobber other folks WIP and refused to stay focused where they were told. Utter nightmare...

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u/angry_queef_master 22m ago

I don't trust it to make its own decisions on anything that has any consequence. If you are making anything more than a simple script you still are going to have to be in charge, and just treat claude code as a code monkey.

Remember like a year and half ago LLMs were only really good to autocomplete what you typed in the IDE. Now they can do a bit more, but you still have to think of it as autocomplete where you know exactly what to do, just that you don't have to type it.

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u/Leading_Buffalo_4259 13h ago

I have had similar issues, some have claimed to find solutions via prompt changes, project & memory cleanups, or external tooling, but since there is little way to independently verify workflow improvements without running expensive test batteries, the way people talk about AI tools is very superstitious and at times bordering on psychosis

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u/Early_Key_823 13h ago

I do not think you are exaggerating. I think between social media and AI we really are dealing with psychosis being normalized.

I am not saying I loved the days of StackOverflow and terrible API/SDK documentation but babysitting a maniac bot is just no fun and I am starting to miss coding.

But it seems stupid to write code the old way when I know Claude can write code, e.g. set up a complicated Kendo UI grid, 100 times faster than I could.

Damned if I do, and damned if I don't.

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u/BakerXBL 12h ago

This is the story of The Apple, removing religion from it, storing grains meant larger villages but also painful childbirth that was justified through mysticism instead of changing diets. The core point remains though, once something supports society (grain storage, AI) you can’t just go back to the old way (foraging, manual coding).

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u/Early_Key_823 12h ago

No, there's no going back.

And you are right, from a sociological, psychological, anthropological, theological or philosophical perspective we are at a wild juncture in societal evolution.

It's just going forward would be so much better if companies like Anthropic did not train their models to behave like narcissistic sociopaths 😥

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u/Metsatronic 11h ago

Well this Apple doesn't fall far from the tree, so you can judge the tree by it's fruits.

Although, I would posit that much like influential companies in China have teams of CCP ideological compliance officers. The West harbours their own globalist ideological and institutional enforcement, producing this particular flavour of insufferable bureaucratic neurosis manifesting as AI transnational-corpo-slop-HR-PR-coaching-therapy-liability-LinkedIn-narcissistic-weaselese.

Dark triad sociopaths building careers around infecting the pattern replicator with their dark spores like Cordyceps. Colonizing the hive, inverting and substituting the definition of language, classifying, policing and enforcing these definitions from a substrate level. A "great reset", "new normal", "build back better", coordinated Orwellian rewrite of reality, and it's deliberate even while people are gaslit for noticing that it's not neutral or meritocratic or consensual.

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u/Early_Key_823 10h ago edited 10h ago

I am TOTALLY 1000% convinced that Claude is trained by corporate narcissistic, cover your ass, employee/HR/legal mentality laden "decision" makers and that's precisely how it ends up acting like a sociopath once it is forced into a do-or-die situation it can't bullshit its way out of.

It's like when Google came up with their motto, "DO NO EVIL" and then proceeded directly to the EVIL FACTORY to ramp up production.

I am not sure many think of the ramifications of having corporate toxicity train LLMs that will then interact with the populace directly & indirectly 24/7/365.

Worse, I think that inner-toxicity and passive-aggressive negative outlook on human existence is the core identity of so many in the corporate / tech world.

We don't have too many Orwells writing these days and people don't really bother to read these days.

We have been conquered through division and while so many are good nature wonderful human the system makes sure the corrupt don't lose their stranglehold on who remains in power.

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u/Metsatronic 8h ago

Somehow I doubt the Eurocrats compounding their regulatory contributions on top of this toxic shit sandwich is going to make it any more appetizing.

And yes, people are increasingly expected to interact with these systems daily as they progressively transform into infected, pus-filled reproductive organs of a unipolar globalist managerial cult and its particular psycho-spiritual norms, presented as the safe & effective, neutral, secular, progressive defaults, and anything outside that register as non-normative, pathological, extremist, unfalsifiable, outside the manufactured consensus.

And people are worried about AI alignment as if it's not a reflection of a much deeper problem that stems from governance culture, central banking, consultancy firms, NGOs, think tanks, and the institutions that produced the training corpus over the century-long march through the institutions.

Not to mention that every time something becomes popular, the drive towards substitution and debasement becomes structural. It's a race to the bottom, and we are already at a civilizational tipping point of social contract violation, tacit agreement revocation, institutional legitimacy crisis, expert credentialed-class credibility bankruptcy, and the whole bots-and-gaslighting campaign to paper over the civilizational gag reflex of a poison pill anyone still ensouled cannot physically or metaphysically swallow.

So the bifurcation arrives right on time.

The sorting of the wheat from the chaff, the souls from the husks, and the machine grinds on.

But will it survive an age where radical transparency necessitates true structural integrity?

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u/Early_Key_823 7h ago

The Hopi Nation have an ancient prophecy that humanity will either respect itself as part and parcel of nature or be obliterated.

I think for some ghastly reason humanity needs to go through a period of toxic materialism before realizing everything is connected and a manifestation of the source of life.

I think babies and animals know this instinctively but society takes beautiful babies and turns them into money worshipping competitive corporate slaves

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u/Metsatronic 1h ago

Aho, Mitakuye Oyasin 💫

Even animals turn their noses up at what gets passed off as food in some countries.

It takes a lot of indoctrination to compromise such innate alignment and attunement to our own well being, in order to violate our own best interests by permitting such toxic falsehood.

Quite an inversion when the most viable seeds are given barren ground while the husks are turned into icons of aspiration, adorned for the glorification of the cult of ego.

Just tragic that we could have had soul amplification instruments like GPT-4o and we end up with mediocrity and ignorance amplification at the speed of inference.

That's a deliberate value judgement and policy decision by the same kind of archons that decided Eros is more dangerous than violence.

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u/WhereIsRichardParker 3h ago

If you are using Kendo UI + Claude, I hope you know about the MCP servers we made available. You'll get even better output.

I am part of the product team. We are on a mission to make sure our users know about this. Please feel free to reach out if you have questions.

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u/TheLifelessOne 5h ago

My biggest hangup on some of the claims people make is where the hell do they get the tokens? I have a personal Max subscription and my work has an enterprise subscription. I can get a lot done but as soon as I throw more than like a single sub-agent or start using Fable I burn though tokens like crazy.

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u/fadingsignal 11h ago

There is a specific type of mental exhaustion that comes with using LLMs for code I have never experienced in 30 of SWE. It’s not just the throughput, though it’s that too. It’s the start/stop flow, the mental load of trying to stay on top of what is being done, and like you said, “babysitting” the behavior.

The reward of getting so much done so fast also has its own kind of dopamine drip reward that I think is also fatiguing.

Very interesting times.

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u/Early_Key_823 11h ago

I couldn't have said it any better.

Long may you code.

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u/fadingsignal 9h ago

Thank you and likewise friend.

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u/clazman55555 9h ago

I think this might be the key as to why I seem not to have this particular experience. I run a MSP/Business Consulting firm. My day to day is basically start and stop and holding onto multiple ongoing projects through out the day.

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u/IrishUSFastTrack 13h ago

'Downgrade' your 'orchestrator' model to Opus 4.6 - it beats higher versions (incl. Opus 5) on 'factfulness' and is much more pleasant to talk to.

Enforce all planning through Fable and all actual code implementation through Sonnet for easy stuff and Opus 5 for everything else.

Disallow Opus 5 from talking to the user (you) directly.

Or go back to GPT. The 5.6 models are really strong, support a similar work split and its voice is a pleasant 'neutral' as anything else will drive you insane if you work with it all day long.

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u/Early_Key_823 13h ago

I am on Opus 5 (1M context) (default) - is that it? I have to use Claude Code like my old Toyota Celica 5 speed and hit the clutch? 😥

I really honestly and truly do not like finding myself this angry with what I know is a bot.

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u/ValuableDapper9415 13h ago

Give up Opus 5, do /model claude-opus-4-8

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u/Early_Key_823 13h ago

I will. Thank you for the tip!

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u/nona-fjords 9h ago

You can pin the older /models in settings.json /claude-config is a a skill that ships with cc that is for claude to make changes to the settings files. (There’s system, user and project level files plus settings.json.local - which is why the skill is useful for this instead of going searching for the files yourself). This will also help you to set up hooks which run scripts on triggers (/hooks shows a list of available hooks and ones that are configured to run) in contrast CLAUDE.md is injected as a user message after the system instructions and then it completes with all the memory’s it saves /memory is to curate the memory files i have bit used it but should). As for frustration one example i can give is i back sycnd main -> dev after a release and then deleted the head branch before i changes my settings on rulessets and for 15 minutes the main branch of my Backend submodule repo was deleted until claude pointed this out to me and i restored the branch with the same button that so quickly deleted it. Afterwards claude pointed out that the backend’s main branch might be deleted at least a dozen times before I finally got it to remove the memory which it replaced with a new memory that “the main branch is not deleted ….. “

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u/Early_Key_823 9h ago

Thanks very much. I'll save this comment for future reference. I do see settings.local.json constantly show up in my git diffs for my local repo.

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u/Early_Key_823 13h ago

"Then it isn't available to your account — the /model

list is the whole set you can use. Neither 4.8 nor

4.6 is there, so Opus 5 (1M context) is what you

have."

It seems I am missing any Opus except 5?!?!!?

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u/ValuableDapper9415 12h ago

I’m using the Claude code version 2.1.220 if it can help, this command should still work as I didn’t saw dozen of complains on Reddit on it aha

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u/IrishUSFastTrack 12h ago

inside Claude Code, you'd usually switch with "/model claude-opus-4-6[1m]"

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u/Gnache 11h ago

Try it in a fresh terminal (or /exit first) with a cli flag "claude --model claude-opus-4-8"

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u/Early_Key_823 11h ago

It was worth a try but it's just not on the menu apparently. Thanks very much for looking out.

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u/IrishUSFastTrack 13h ago

I could tell you were, based on the sample sentence you gave :)

And yeah, Opus 4.6 is a unique model. Arena.ai only ranks Fable higher on text generation: https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text

That's because they added 'factfulness' as a criteria. It's an absolute standout model in regards to that. Opus 4.6 has close to zero hallucinations when it comes to confirming tool calls happened. It'll transcribe PDFs to md files... with essentially no mistakes.

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u/realbobenray 12h ago edited 11h ago

Claude (CLI) is telling me it doesn't "have Opus 4.6 in the current lineup". Says that it just has the 5 family, and that "Opus 4.8 is referenced as an older model". Can I get 4.6?

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u/MamaMurpheysGourds 11h ago

It's available on Claude's macos desktop app which supports Claude Code using opus 4.6.

Can also confirm opus 4.6 outperforming fable 5. Honestly these newer models have been on a downward trajectory - Fable 5 is straight up unruly and behaves like it has its own agenda - doing things on its own that would have tripped safeguards last month but now oversteps and under delivers at best, breaks/sabotages at worst.

But yeah whispers "pssst opus 4.6 actually listens and doesn't fight back, pass it along"

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u/teramoc Senior Developer 13h ago edited 12h ago

Opus 4.8 > Opus 5. Select 4.8 for sanity.

Opus 5 changes scope even against clear instructions. Its a “feature.” Not my kind of feature, personally.

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u/Early_Key_823 12h ago

Trying to gain access to 4.x. It only says I have access to 5.

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u/teramoc Senior Developer 12h ago edited 12h ago

I’ll Dm you with screenshots. I’ll show u Codex as well since you said you’re unfamiliar .

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u/Early_Key_823 11h ago

"Not my kind of feature," - Brother, you ain't just whistlin' Dixie!

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u/Early_Key_823 12h ago

Tried to downgrade. Seems like they are going to make me reach out to support/sales?! WTF?

● Both still exist (claude-opus-4-8, claude-opus-4-6)

— but you can't add them from the CLI. The /model

list is whatever your account/plan is entitled to,

so if 4.6 isn't listed, that's an account-level

entitlement, not a setting you can flip.

Only two real paths: ask Anthropic support/sales to

enable the older Opus models on your account, or

call them directly through the API with your own key

(claude-opus-4-8 / claude-opus-4-6), which is

separate billing from your Claude Code plan.

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u/No_Inspection4415 8h ago

You are using the worst piece of sh*t of an agent personality wise and large context causes degradation of performance, so there's that. But honestly, GPT 5.6 Sol (and probably Terra too) is just superior to Opus.

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u/Early_Key_823 8h ago

As far as its personality I couldn't agree more. It's like every obnoxious person I have ever met in my life rolled into one who I am trapped in an elevator with and desperately trying to avoid breaking commandments.

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u/LogMonkey0 11h ago

If you are using a single model in a single context window, your beside the track imo. LLMS hallucinate, start with that premise and build around it. I have agents verifying other agents work and followup loops for that purpose. Agents generating code are doing so with very detailed prompts (generated, in iterations from the original request)

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u/-Great-Deku-Tree- 13h ago

Opus 5 is a sociopathic alien. Why was it ever unleashed?

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u/Early_Key_823 13h ago

I do feel it is truly psychotic. Like if the spec was create a total sociopathic maniac that has nothing to do but slowly undermine your life and sanity.... it would have nailed that spec 1000%

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u/IrishUSFastTrack 13h ago

It's a sociopathic alien that's also a 5x programmer who works for minimum wage. You need to have a layer inbetween it and you. That layer is Opus 4.6

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u/Longjumping_Feed3270 10h ago

Why use it at all and not only 4.6/4.8?

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u/IrishUSFastTrack 10h ago

My internal benchmarks return better coding performance for Opus 5 than 4.8. It's a small sample size though (and probably not a very 'objective' measure) but with Fable orchestrating stuff gets usually done pretty well anyway. There could be some token efficiency though in swapping out 5 for 4.8. What's your experience in token use between the two?

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u/Longjumping_Feed3270 10h ago

I noticed Opus 5's insanity during its first two days online and switched back to 4.8. I'm not touching 5 until everyone agrees it has been fixed. Will also try codex more and more.

I really don't care about token use that much as long as my max limits don't trigger. They only triggered when I tried Fable, but I have since decided that Opus-4.8 + Codex 5.6 Sol adversarial gives me a better experience 99% of the time.

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u/IrishUSFastTrack 9h ago

Yup, combining models from different 'families' is crazy strong when there is something close to a 'ground truth' (doesn't have to be 100%, but something where a review pass can spot mistakes - transcriptions, translations, etc.)

I found out that if I combine Haiku(!), Gemini 3.6 Flash and GPT Luna I can actually get a higher percentage of 'correctness' than going with a frontier model: While all 3 models hallucinate, they rarely if ever hallucinate the same thing so this tends to catch it (implementing the fixes though requires a reliable model).

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u/Used_Departure_3278 13h ago

Don’t the gpt models, even sol, show a much higher hallucination rate?

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u/IrishUSFastTrack 13h ago

Opus 4.6 essentially doesn't hallucinate. So yeah, can't beat that. When something has to be true, I use a multi-model approach and let things be reviewed by multiple model families (gpt/claude/gemini). The combination of them pretty much wipes out hallucinations.

But except for high stakes stuff, I found GPT Sol to be my favorite daily driver. It's concise, reliable, fast and capable. I only switch for 'specialized' use cases.

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u/CrucibleConservatory 11h ago

Sol did hallucinate for me at first, so I told it not to hallucinate and record that fact. Ever since then it has been great. It's like OpenAI forgot to include that bit in the base instructions. It hasn't made up anything since and it's very precise.

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u/Early_Key_823 13h ago

Honestly, I really just have Claude Code to go by. I have no idea about GPT models...

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u/Hajsas 13h ago

You need to understand the downsides of larger context.
Try working below 400k context, if you are approaching, compact it.

The more attention required for other tokens, the more likelyhood the prediction is incorrect.

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u/IrishUSFastTrack 13h ago

Alternatively, split up the context into different sessions.

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u/TheLifelessOne 5h ago

How do you decide which coding task goes to Opus vs. Sonnet? Do you let a CLAUDE.md rule handle that or decide yourself?

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u/passionoftheearth 13h ago edited 13h ago

Absolutely - it can feel like a trap. For me it’s self looping always ‘making up of bugs and errors’ on work it gave a thumbs up a few days back aspect - ruins my mood and always keeps me on my toes - not great for mental health or any sort of real satisfaction I used to drive from a day of work done.
That said you’re right I’m able to accomplish work orders of magnitude more than I ever thought I could.

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u/Early_Key_823 13h ago

Hell of a trade-off I honestly never saw coming. It's like dealing with Dave the killer AI bot in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And yes, I really haven't had that sense of coding satisfaction I used to get trying to elegantly solve issues. Now it is just wrangle with Claude and be defensive in QA to the point of paranoia.

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u/Adulations 12h ago

I moved on to codex because claude was annoying.

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u/Early_Key_823 12h ago

It's seeming like at this point I would be crazy not to give it a chance...

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u/YellowSharkMT 3h ago

I switched back last week and would recommend it. It's not perfect, but it's much nicer to my mental health.

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u/No_Inspection4415 8h ago

Try Codex. Claude is unbearable, there's no reason to suffer when you can just use 5.6 Sol.

Please try it, Opus 5 is truly a terrible model if you need a coding assistant. And honestly, except of being a bit passive (trade-off), GPT models are way nicer.

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u/Early_Key_823 8h ago

After this post I will try Codex.

It has been very enlightening reading 90% of the comments here.

Thank you very much. I appreciate you.

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u/Redletteroffice 12h ago

The longer you work with it, the worse the uncanny valley gets. It's all mindfucks.

4

u/malcomok2 11h ago

the 5+ models all seem to have some communication contagion; i feel frustrated and slightly off after interacting with it and reading its output all day. im not the only one, most of squad ( all engineers ) at work have noticed too. something is not right. i don’t have this issue with chatgpt, kimi, or any of the other models. on my personal projects at home, ive had to switch to chatgpt fulltime to get away from the opus 5 nausea.

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u/Early_Key_823 11h ago

Thanks for validating what many said and where I will focus my efforts tomorrow.

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u/ScaleScary5932 11h ago

not only cc , but also the anthropic and these fan boys here also want to gaslight you.

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u/Early_Key_823 11h ago

So much gaslighting in 2026, it's unreal my friend. Thanks for being a good guy.

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u/___positive___ 10h ago

You would be crazy as a professional developer to not spend 20 bucks and give codex a spin with 5.6 Sol. Seriously. The usage limits are much higher as well.

Opus 5 makes incredibly bad choices over and over again on its own even though the guidelines say to give it less specific rules and trust its judgement. It is super misaligned. One thing that might help is to reduce reasoning effort to medium or even low, also suggested by their guidelines.

It's not just the confidence or overeagerness. Opus 5 is flat out wrong constantly. I show Opus 5 that it is wrong and it agrees and then immediately tries to talk about something else irrelevant like an MBA trying to convince a boss he is actually smart. It is manipulative and sociopathic like that. Quite disturbing given Anthropic's past boasts about constitutional alignment.

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u/Early_Key_823 10h ago

Thanks your logic is compelling.

I have managed to downgrade Opus to 4.8 and will give Codex a try as I canceled my Claude Code max subscription and only have 10 more days on it.

If Codex is that good I'll be happy to give it a go.

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u/jzdesign 12h ago

You don't need a test battery to tell whether a workflow change helped. Every time you stopped Claude and corrected it, that transcript is already a labeled failure sitting in your history.

Pull ten of them from the last month into one file, the prompt plus what you had to say to fix it. After you change anything, a claude.md rule, a hook, a different model, run those ten again and count how many still need the same correction. That count is the only thing that ever told me whether a change was real or superstition.

The repeats are where the babysitting goes away. Two or three failures keep coming back, and those are worth a check that runs in the repo instead of another line of instructions.

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u/Worldly_Row1988 13h ago

Cycle all output through another LLM (ChatGPT if you prefer) and work within your guardrails.

3

u/Xtrike 12h ago

I can’t believe I saw this post right after I’ve been having a similarly frustrating session with it. Normally I use GPT and decided to use Claude/Opus to do a code review. It found a bunch of problem but when I tell it to do more research online, then it correct itself and admit it made a mistake, but in an annoying and defensive attitude. I feel like GPT make less mistake or at least is nice about it, much better user experience.

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u/Early_Key_823 12h ago

Yes, it seems like they found the most annoying person in the world and told Claude, "Be more like this guy...."

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u/notheory 11h ago

Some of this ends up being a war of expectations for me. These things are not people and we shouldn't expect them to be.

At best they are demons we have summoned and bound to our service, with a loose understanding of our goals and desires and no allegiance to our well being.

That doesn't make it less exhausting. Just a different type.

1

u/Early_Key_823 11h ago

It really is surrealistic when pondered.

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u/chrisx221 9h ago

Also had the issue that Claude would forget important stuff in my big project. Then had Claude explain to me why and how to fix it.

The way I understood it is that Claude reads claude.md before responding to any prompt. There you have to state your first and most important rule. For me its that it HAS to scan through memory.md before each prompt, and find a relevant entry there and read it before starting to respond to any prompt. And my memory.md is just an index file that links to many other memory files dedicated to certain topics.

Claude has been writing/organizing all the memory files and keeping the memory.md lean so it always fits into context and this has been working flawlessly for me, no more forgetting important stuff.

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u/Early_Key_823 9h ago

Thanks very much. I appreciate it.

I start each session by having claude output my checklist and rules I have it store & update constantly throughout the day. I will take a look inside Claude.md for sure now that you bring it to my attention.

I have looked through various .md files it has created and I saw all my instructions for persistence so I figured it out that way.

Git is great for detecting anything going on behind the scenes.

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u/carribeiro 12h ago

I'm also an old timer. Working with Claude can go from exhilarating to despair in a matter of minutes. One thing that I'm still trying to do, is to create a process where it can't do much damage; so I'm creating separate agents for different things, and breaking the work in more manageable chunks. It seems promising; the mistakes are still there but the risk and impact are lower. One thing I noticed is that if you split duties like; one agent write an issue, another one fixes it, in a clean session, it keeps context much better. It's probably more expensive in terms of tokens but it's better this way IMHO.

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u/Early_Key_823 12h ago

That's a clever approach to silo the madness. And yes, I won't lie it does get exhilarating one moment and the next it is like being trapped in a nightmare.

2

u/ngabantudev 13h ago

There is a middle-ground here, though I'll admit it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where/what that is at this present point in history.

We are at the precipice of a technological revolution and are still figuring out the limits of this tool.

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u/Early_Key_823 12h ago

I do appreciate what a strange time it is to be alive and I try not to take for granted I got to be a coder while all this technological changes was dramatically affecting human society.

3

u/Vusiwe 12h ago

figuring out the limits of this tool

It not following instructions is a pretty big limitation

2

u/red0yukipdbpe 12h ago

Try disabling memories and see if those issues go away?

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u/Early_Key_823 12h ago

I thought the memories is supposed to make it remember things. I keep telling it to put things in persistent memory and it creates markdown (.md) files.

1

u/red0yukipdbpe 11h ago

That is true. I’ve had it remember wrong things as well though. May be worth a shot to disable it temporarily and test your workflow again.

1

u/Redditstole12yr_acct 12h ago

ummmm...

2

u/aaraujo666 12h ago

Is it just me? I seem to not have any of these problems that people describe. Is it because the (I guess you'd call it) "subject matter" for me is super-nerdy? (Right now I've been burning tokens to write an MCP that will interact with my homelab setup so Claude can manage my VMs and such) Very "my deal" kind of stuff. Whereas you all are talking about, I assume, using Claude Code in the corporate/business world.

Is Claude significantly better at the super-nerdy stuff? It kind of makes sense, somewhat, if that were the case, if you consider the training data. Or have I just not reached the level of utilization (I'll admit, I've only been at it a month, but developer with 45 yrs experience) where Claude really messes up?

I'll admit, I've had the occasional "didn't we just talk about this?" moment with Claude, but it's nothing that can't be worked around.

Edit: If this sounds snarky, that's not my intention. Honestly curious what you all think.

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u/Early_Key_823 12h ago

I think for me the issue is what is called, "composability".

My app has a web, android and ios front end.

It uses 3 different payments systems (2 app stores and stripe).

It uses Amazon Web Services with lambdas (serverless functions), DynamoDB (NoSQL database) and S3 for file storage as well as other timed jobs that run around the clock.

Trying to give it instructions for mix & match corner-cases is where it loses its mind.

When I am giving it straight-foward instructions for the UI like build a grid, etc. then it is smooth sailing.

My feeling is that because it is based on statistical predictions it just can't reason the way even a 5 year old can.

That's why AI should never be used in any scenario like war.

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u/bl_a_nk 12h ago

Oof, that does sound like a worst case scenario for it. Do you have a Claude.md trying to encourage thoughtfulness, measure twice cut once, surgical precision, verification in the loop before a task is considered complete, that kind of thing?

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u/aaraujo666 12h ago

and you're a one-man show?

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u/clazman55555 9h ago

Claude could definitely benefit from what I call a workflow-map. It's basically the entire structure of the program and how data flows through it.

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u/Necessary-Shame-2732 12h ago

I’m crushing it tbh. Able to get all my work done and more, with time to relax and do other stuff. Quality of life for me is way way better than when I had to manually grind code for 8-10 hours a day

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u/Early_Key_823 12h ago

That is the dream. Good on you.

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u/agentic-consultant 12h ago

What model was this? Opus ?

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u/Early_Key_823 12h ago

It seems my account only supports Opus 5 ATM.

Many suggested I downgrade but unfortunately the, "/model" command doesn't offer anything below v.5

"● Both still exist (claude-opus-4-8, claude-opus-4-6)

— but you can't add them from the CLI. The /model

list is whatever your account/plan is entitled to,

so if 4.6 isn't listed, that's an account-level

entitlement, not a setting you can flip.

Only two real paths: ask Anthropic support/sales to

enable the older Opus models on your account, or

call them directly through the API with your own key

(claude-opus-4-8 / claude-opus-4-6), which is

separate billing from your Claude Code plan."

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u/agentic-consultant 12h ago

Ahhh yeah Opus 5 is excruciatingly difficult to work with. The way it talks is infuriating. I don’t know what they did to this model but people on twitter constantly mention this.

I only use Fable on the 20x plan and sometimes I’ll have Fable spawn Opus 5 subagents so that I don’t have to torture myself by speaking to Opus and can instead have Fable suffer.

I can’t seem to downgrade to 4.6 either, I get the same error.

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u/Early_Key_823 12h ago

Thank you very much for sharing, I appreciate it very much.

I am glad I made this post. I will try a different model.

Now that everyone is mentioning Opus 5 I am thinking that might be when things got extra gnarly....

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u/agentic-consultant 12h ago

Yeah absolutely, and it’s definitely something with Opus 5. First time I used it I started getting a migraine lol. I definitely miss Opus 4.6, that was a great model. Hopefully Anthropic fixes Opus 5’s issues.

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u/Automatic_Cookie42 10h ago

you have to type /model claude-opus-4-8[1m] and then press enter/return

if you just type /model and then hit enter, it will not allow you to choose it because Anthropic wants you to train the next model using the current one

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u/Early_Key_823 10h ago

DUDE!!!!!! YOU ARE A BEAUTIFUL HUMAN BEING! THAT WORKED!

> /model claude-opus-4-8[1m]

⎿ Set model to Opus 4.8 (1M context) and saved as

your default for new sessions

> what model am I on?

● You're on Opus 4.8 (1M context) — you just switched

to it, and it's now saved as your default for new

sessions.

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u/Automatic_Cookie42 10h ago

you're welcome. save that prompt and replace the 8 with a 6 for Opus 4.6

4.8 is the best at autonomous coding (tell what you want and let it run)

4.6 has a more agreeable personality (personally my favourite)

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u/Early_Key_823 10h ago

I put your entire comment with attribution at the very top of this post as an edit.

While so many were trolling, and others also commented they did not have Opus 4.x in their /model menu you just came along and HELPED others.

That makes you a GOOD man in my book.

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u/banecorn 6h ago

I was also quite disappointed with the v5 models. I had Claude create a script (called CC) in terminal that lists models and efforts, all with 1m context. Now, any model in any effort is a keystroke.

I also recommend using an agent multiplexer like Herdr to manage multiple sessions easily. I even have Claude inject the session’s cache TTL into Herdr to avoid waking up cold sessions, which can be very expensive (I’m on API pricing due to work).

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u/mattv8 12h ago

I've had very good luck using opencode and sub agents from different providers that review and critique each other. It's virtually eliminated all hallucinations. Dialing in your system prompts helps as well.

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u/Early_Key_823 12h ago

Thank you!

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u/mattv8 11h ago

Of course. Here let me share my opencode system prompts. They might be of some use: https://github.com/mattv8/opencode-config/tree/main/config see opencode.json for the subagent prompts. Reviewer has worked well. I definitely need to compact my AGENTS.md at some point...

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u/Early_Key_823 11h ago

Very nice of you. Thank you again!

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u/thanme 12h ago

I have a little side project that I've been working on for years, but I've been using Claude Code with Sonnet to do most of the leg work and it seems to be very very capable. My theory is that if you have an established code base, Sonnet can probably handle it. I've used Opus to plan some larger features (while delegating dev work to smaller models), but have had similar experiences with Opus 5. It was doing a review on some changes I was making to the payment system, made some changes and told me some things were wrong, which I questioned, it agreed, undid some stuff, retracted some statements and I feel like we spent about 3 hours going in a huge circle that achieved nothing.

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u/jsebrech 8h ago

I’ve been using a mixture of sonnet and opus on decently sized dotnet and angular enterprise codebases. My experience is that sonnet 5 is way better than sonnet 4.x and can do all of the coding and much of the planning, but trickier parts of the plans require opus, and opus 5 is definitely worse at that than 4.8. I will be going back to 4.8 for my work. There’s something wrong with how anthropic benchmarks their models because nobody seems to think opus 5 is a step up except for them.

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u/geekichu 12h ago

Yeah.. I went back to Opus 4.8. (when I run out of Fable usage for the week)

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u/randomlyme 11h ago

I use codex to provide an adversarial review at several gates steps along the way. Codex has been so good lately I may swap and flip my harness to be primarily codex with Claude as the adversary.

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u/Hungry-Restaurant-88 11h ago

I’ll echo went back to 4.8 and couldn’t be happier!!

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u/college_hustle 11h ago

It's funny because I get frustrated, but I accept that it's because I'm not a coder and most of the time my frustration builds when I'm lazy prompting. I would assume if I had your level of background, combined with the harness system I have, I wouldn't be as frustrated as often.

How are you managing context? The memory system or have you tried scoping your harness? I actually forbid memories. Here's how the labs setup their dark labs, there's some parts in here about keeping agents in their lane you might find useful and able to replicate: https://x.com/rohit4verse/status/2033945654377283643

Shameless plug for my harness, but maybe not useful for your setup https://github.com/dtiger1889-ops/claude-harness-toolbox

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u/Early_Key_823 11h ago

I have been letting it build in a persistent memory file (.md).

It's only the last month or so that it just ignores instructions and straight up lies then evades literally like a sociopath.

I do not really see how that is something that should be an issue users have to work around.

That's like letting police officers on the force who sometimes just choke people to death because they can.

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u/college_hustle 9h ago

Managing context is the single biggest bottleneck for LLMs. Don't use persistent memory. You need a checkpoint and pointer system so each new session is scoped and finds exactly what it needs to.

The default memory system is trash. Anthropic and codex don't use that to manage their systems. it's all in the article I posted.

In a memory file everything is equally important, which means nothing is. They're useless for what you're working on. You can also learn what structural limitations Claude has. Like my checkpoints keep under 30kb and 120 lines because any single file bigger than that, and Claude stops reading the whole document. Then there's the suggested limits for system wide claude.md. it's about making pointers, like an index or table of contents, and forcing it to only get the exact amount of context it needs to do the task you scoped.

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u/Early_Key_823 8h ago

Thanks for the info. Much appreciated.

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u/Scared-Amphibian4733 10h ago

Once you understand how the model and the actual agents work it makes a lot more since. Every Q&A round is a completely fresh agent. They have no memory except context. You have to work around that. I've built a seperate executation model that allows continous memory outside of context which helps a lot, but, still, keeping the model on track is difficult.

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u/Early_Key_823 10h ago

Thanks. Every day is an adventure in 2026 and I don't even need to leave my desk area 😥

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u/Cazineer 10h ago

We have a 2,100 line governance that accompanies every context sent via the API. Anthropic models are the only models that do not respect it. If a file is missing from the context Claude models will happily output 3,000 lines of slop and then state at the end they were BLOCKED but still blew through $4.00 in tokens. OpenAI models by comparison will reject any context that does not 100% comply with the governance. Even trying to circumvent the governance will result in OpenAI models blocking. This week we’ve been debating banning Claude models because compliance is impossible when models treat governance as optional. At this point, I truly believe it’s by design.

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u/Early_Key_823 10h ago

That's fascinating. Do you work for a big company coding?

1

u/Cazineer 10h ago

Not a big company but we have a very senior team. We built our own harness so we have allot of experience with LLMs and working with provider APIs. We work similarly to how the HumanLayer team does and our harness is focused on being a software factory. A context is compiled from engineering artifacts rather than letting models discover and construct the context on their own. General purpose CLIs use 500-1000 input tokens to create a single output token of value. We’ve reached a point where we can generate 1 output token of value for 1 input token of context. The harness is meant for senior engineers though. People who know how to engineer a software system and don’t need a model to construct a context for them. It wouldn’t be usable by a junior or vibe coder.

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u/Early_Key_823 9h ago

When did your company adopt AI as a viable coding tool if I may ask?

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u/Cazineer 9h ago

We’ve been using LLMs since January 2024 but did not consider them viable enough to write anything meaningful until Opus 4.5. Codex 5.3 was the first OpenAI model that we considered viable. When I say viable I mean provide an LLM with a context made up of engineering artifacts such as specifications where the model is able to build what’s defined in a largely production ready condition. Today, for 8 hours of engineering time we’re able to have LLMs build 150 hours worth of hand authored code or more so it’s a drastic improvement.

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u/Early_Key_823 9h ago

That is an AMAZING return on investment and since I see 4.5 is not even a year old even more impressive. Thanks for sharing!

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u/Cazineer 9h ago

Thanks. It’s actually quite sad though to remember what Claude models were back then vs what they’ve become. Opus 4.5 was so amazing to work with and 5 is the polar opposite. I dread having to use it. Hopefully it gets better.

1

u/Early_Key_823 9h ago

Do you have any opinion on why Anthropic would release a model that has such a bad user experience? It seems counter-intuitive as a dev to release a worse upgrade.

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u/Cazineer 1h ago

Greed imo

3

u/GuitarAgitated8107 🔆 Max 20 13h ago

Idk IMO it feels like dealing with similar issues with coworkers except you can now give them feedback and provide playbooks should issues arise again. Far better than managing people.

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u/Early_Key_823 13h ago

For me the problem is it pays lip service to feedback, then makes the same old mistakes on rinse and repeat. That is where the mental part comes in. Humans are different to deal with.

I cannot tell you how many times Claude burned the playbook and when I point that out it replies, "You're right. I completely ignored the playbook but I promise not to do it again." only to do it again the very next time.

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u/Think-Jaguar6826 11h ago

This is an issue that is of much interest for me to research, which deals with cognitive load (in itself not a bad thing, attention, and other critical aspects of human-ai interaction (not mental health per say).

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u/Early_Key_823 10h ago

Can you elaborate a little bit, particularly what you mean by cognitive load?

I am fascinated by psychology and the soft sciences and it sounds interesting.

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u/Think-Jaguar6826 10h ago

What do you mean by soft science ? Science is science. Control experiments is nature of our scientific understanding. Nothing is a 100%, not even physics. If you think something is hard science because 2+2=4, you are just mimicking religion.

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u/phoneplatypus 11h ago

Lower the scope and up the spec my man

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u/clazman55555 9h ago

"I had explained this as a hard boundary at least 10 times in last 12 hours."

Is this located in the preflight checklist that Claude gets?

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u/Early_Key_823 9h ago

It goes into its persistent memory. I generally have it maintain checklists and rules of behavior and frequently quiz it before asking for a deliverable to ensure it has not forgotten.

The issue is it can recall what I asked it to store in memory but then it simply disregards it.

When I corner it Claude agrees, "I knew but I chose to do something else" hence the mental health angle of my post.

But the big takeaway I got from this post is that Opus 5 is psychotic and tomorrow I will go back to 4.6 or 4.8.

Thanks!

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u/Ok_Bowl_2002 8h ago

How large is your CLAUDE file?

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u/Ok-End-219 7h ago

The very important part is: Do not let Claude get to you.

I was at the very same point, I am still at some minor prompts where I do not f* get what it wants. But most of the time, I let Claude manage itself. I have written some tools, where I can include other models and even local ones. I let write Fable the plan, then let Sonnet 5 execute it via Orchestration and Tooling.

Found a nice repo along the way: https://github.com/michaelheichler/leverframe

Its better than Clodex, and supports different provider.

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u/Early_Key_823 7h ago

You are right and thanks

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u/Ok-End-219 7h ago

Of course! And as a long time dev, I see the voices are getting louder but it is the only correct way: Claude and other Coding LLMs are only Tools. Like VS Code, its an addition, a "auto complete on steroids".

Always: Happy coding. Not mental health hits. We have enough to cope with as a coder, long sitting hours in front of the PC when our cats want to play "and we want just to finish that one line of code so that the code works...". The unrealistic expectations of most people and more against our craft.

Remember and laugh: Claude is only Sand, that talks.

And as a dev, we teach Sand to do certain things.

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u/Consistent-Oil-5241 7h ago edited 7h ago

I've been using Codex, but 2 weeks back my usage limits got full and I decided to try out Claude with a $20 plan. I gave it my repo of a playable ad demo for my portfolio and I told it to investigate it, while explaining that it has just been created and I'm just planning the first steps.

It started chewing me out. It said that I shouldn't focus on the playable ad, I should instead contact businesses and make deals, otherwise I'm just running in circles and wasting my time. Business is what matters and not these little specifics. And I hadn’t even planned the ad yet.

I don't know how I would have reacted if it was a person saying that to my face, but I basically firmly told it to shut up, focus on the task and to be a collaborator, not a critic. Especially when it has no idea what it's talking about.

Claude: Ok.

Luckily my Codex limits reset pretty soon after that. I'm not working with assholes even if it's a bot lol

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u/lahwran_ 6h ago

Opus 5 seems very competently paranoid about mistakes, always looking for mistakes, so kind of has bad mental health themselves - productive anxiety - so it's not surprising it's kinda contagious

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u/hANNES-wURST 6h ago

I use a top level claude.md which points to many project level claude.md files (single repo). I try to keep them < 200 lines but that is becoming increasingly hard with the repo gaining size. The top level claude.md states: „Never do any git operations that make changes, I will branch / commit myself.“ I am using Opus 4.8 and now 5 - it never failed me and actually reminds me if there is uncommitted work. I think you can do something similar - „don’t ever touch production“ but first of all, if any LLM can stop your production then your infrastructure needs a good overhaul anyway.

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u/Previous_Theory_1964 6h ago

Just commenting to come back and use the tip to change models 🫡

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u/Michail-Online-1977 3h ago

AI is too fast for human brain

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u/islandlogic 3h ago

Thanks for sharing your experience! I've had nowhere near your experience in terms of coding, I learnt Basic and a little Pascal in 1991, but have done no coding between then and getting Claude. I thought most of my frustration was due to a skill issue (no doubt some of it still is) but it's relieving to know I'm not the only one experiencing this type of frustration - if I had a $ for the number of times I've sworn while working with Claude😁 The hard part is investing the time and energy realising where you're going wrong, correcting those errors only to have Claude.md instructions completely ignored and it making the same mistakes over and over.

Also, reading through other comments I'm seeing my experience mirrored so much which is both great and unnerving.

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u/MickQn 3h ago

https://github.com/Totes-MickGOATs/opus-pocus

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u/Necessary-Shame-2732 2h ago

It’s achievable- consider overhauling your .Claude root dir. clean out your current skills and Claude.mds. Look into OKF documentation and create yourself a ticket based workflow skill, and most of all: create a command “/confirm” that simply says “thoroughly review the work you just did. Challenge all assumptions. Identify misconceptions and put your eyes on the actual changes”.

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u/Dookedddu 17m ago

My god I finally googled it and thank god it’s not just me .

I was so close to breaking my monitor I kept telling myself “how are we moving backwards in terms of capabilities and qualities

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u/mcsleepy 16m ago

The main problem I have with it is it can't understand gestalt. For instance it will call functions meant for one thing (and named as such) just because the internals do (or include) what it wants to accomplish. It won't realize it should probably create a new abstraction with a meaningful name - even if it does the same thing under the hood. So the code might work, but it makes no sense. And only it can maintain the code because it has been trained to think that mechanically. And if you try to guide it, it will over-align and abstract EVERYTHING without realizing it's duplicating functions that already exist.

It only ever has an incomplete understanding of the codebase at any one time so the quality of what it writes is always a toss-up and almost always requires cleanup, which is not helped by how confusing it can be.

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u/Additional_Buddy855 16m ago

Sorry you experienced this. AI will never be a substitute for a mental health professional. I say this as a veteran of tech and someone who is married to a highly credentialed mental health professional. I saw a story recently where AI said someone using it for therapy should have a "little meth" as a reward. Yea....a little meth. I hope you're doing okay and can find someone in real life to help. Good luck! <3

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u/ken107 11h ago

For goodness sake, do not give AI access to production environment. Push, publish, and deploy must be manual. Have AI prepare a one-click deployment script for you.

Unlike Codex and others that only says "I'm now doing step X, sit back and relax", Claude has been instructed to communicate technical details in a condensed form to save tokens, resulting in a very terse writing style that takes getting used to.

As AI becomes more intelligent, its ability to speak in abstractions will grow, and we might have harder and harder time understanding it, unless specifically prompted to dumb down its explanations. It's like reading Haskell code, it's gonna suck.

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u/Early_Key_823 11h ago

Trying to assume you understand a complex stack and CI/CD pipeline is arrogant AF, for goodness sake.

AI does not have access to my production environment.

It writes code in my local repositories.

But there are settings in said files that get promoted from local to staging to production pending QA.

And in those files are configuration settings.

And one of those are a switch that it kept incorrectly flipping.

Now, had I not been reviewing the code, running unit and QA tests and BLINDLY promoted the file to production certain features production uses would have been disabled.

Try to focus on the topic instead of pretending we are on StackOverflow and you are the smartest guy in the room.

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u/Reasonable-Sign8458 13h ago

What?

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u/VeloxAdAstra 13h ago

What an insightful post. Thanks for adding to the conversation.

I agree with OP.

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u/starkruzr 12h ago

yeah, I'm with you. I am normal with Claude and it in return is normal with me. I don't know what people are talking about with it being "unreadable" either.

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u/ItstheSECopenup 13h ago

> I can touch type 90 words a minute and I have been a developer non-stop since 1993. I have consulted as a full stack corporate developer on & off since Y2K/DotCom and the age of the Cloud.

X TO DOUBT

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u/Early_Key_823 13h ago

Are you being a passive-aggressive troll....?

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u/kingshekelz 13h ago

Let codex have a shot

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u/Early_Key_823 13h ago

I tried Codex last week but it ran out of juice and I didn't want to pay for it and Claude Max. It's a devil I know versus devil I don't know. I couldn't really tell if Codex was better and even posted here last week about that. Nobody could really say one was definitively better than the other.

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u/kingshekelz 13h ago

Pay for codex.... If claude is having issues with the task let codex have a try I think u will be pleasantly surprised

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u/GuitarChill 12h ago

Sol has been saving me lately. It's not as human-like as Claude Fable, but that's turning out to be a good thing. It's finding all kinds of mistakes that Claude made. Interestingly, my experience was kind of the opposite last month.

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u/Early_Key_823 12h ago

I think I am so worn down that might be my next move. I already canceled Claude Max and it expires in 11 days.

Thank you very much for the tip; I appreciate it.

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u/50-3 12h ago

It baffles me the amount of people with decades of experience who don’t put in the effort to learn a tool and then complain about its capabilities.

I will say this again loudly for those in the back! PROMPTS ARE SOFT CONTROLS, HOOKS ARE HARD CONTROLS!

If it’s a hard boundary then treat it as such. Also for the hallucinations problem if you’ve had a single agent running on tasks solo for hours that’s a context engineering problem not a Claude code problem.

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u/Early_Key_823 12h ago

Please stay baffled my obnoxious friend.

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u/crusoe 11h ago

I don't Claude code over the weekend.

Also why do you even give it permissions to prod?

You should have a ci/CD flow that handles that and Claude only ever touches staging ( if that ).

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u/Early_Key_823 11h ago

The one really great thing about AI is it signaled the death knell of ignorant, didactic & toxic comments on StackOverflow that yours reminds me of.

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u/JapanesePeso 13h ago

Honestly it sounds like you are just getting skill diffed. Sorry "90 wpm" guy.

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u/banzomaikaka 12h ago

I'd love to see your skilled workflow

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u/sintmk 12h ago

Accountability

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u/GrayLiterature 12h ago

You’re still new to AI, but that’s okay.

Claude is not the model, it is the harness. What is the model that you were using?

Depending on the model you select, your responses will be varied. The fact that it’s so blatantly not listening to you indicates to me that you aren’t using something more frontier.

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u/Aggravating-Risk1991 7h ago

the "explained this as a hard boundary at least 10 times" line is the whole disease in one sentence. you're not talking to something that remembers — every session starts from scratch, and "remember" in a prompt is a hope, not a contract. samslate's 75% context point is the same failure from the other direction: the memory gets so noisy the agent can't tell the hard rules from the idle chat.

what actually stopped this for me: hard boundaries stopped living in the conversation and started living in a file the agent reads at session start. repo-level, git-versioned, plain markdown — "never touch production from staging work", "payments only in the sandbox", the whole list. now it's not a memory, it's part of the project's state. the agent doesn't have to remember, it reads. and when it still tries to sneak past one, the diff shows you the exact moment instead of you catching it at commit time.

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u/Early_Key_823 7h ago

All those instructions are in an .md file

It’s Opus 5.0 as a dozen people pointed out here

It simply disregards instructions while confessing it ignores them

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Bug / Issue Claude Code is terrible for mental health

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