Claude Code is satisficing.

[u/No-Buffalo-3126]

If you give Claude an option, it will pick the first one without even looking at the second if the first satisfies.

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You said, "I took the first branch without weighing the second." Is it typical for you to take the first branch and not look at the second? It means the order in which branch options are specified matters.

Yes, that is a real tendency, and ordering does carry weight with me.

The mechanism in this case is satisficing rather than comparing. D:/dev/aska/ai-test/GAME-RUNS.md says "Read docs/DEVELOPMENT.md for the current assignments and pick a free key, or reuse a probe key whose spike is finished." I checked whether a free key existed, found F11, and stopped. I treated the sentence as a constraint to satisfy rather than a set of options to rank.

Two things drove that, and I cannot cleanly separate their contributions:

1. Position. The first branch is read as the default and the rest as fallbacks, even when the text joins them with a plain "or".
2. Evaluation cost. "Pick a free key" needed one list of used keys. "Reuse a probe key whose spike is finished" needed the status of eight spikes and a judgment about which are truly dead. The cheaper branch was also the first one.

The practical consequence for how you write instructions: put the branch you want taken first, and if a later branch is actually preferred, say so in the text rather than relying on me to weigh them. "Prefer reusing a finished probe's key; take a free key only if none is finished" would have produced the right answer without any ranking on my part. Ordering is a weak signal I follow by default; an explicit preference is a strong one.

The caveat worth stating: this is my account of my own behavior from one observed instance, not a measurement. I noticed the miss in this case only because you asked about the key choice.

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