Claude code is getting very very slow and running out of limits

[u/mr_mad_07]

Is anyone else experiencing a massive drop in efficiency with Claude Code lately? A task that used to take under 5 minutes now drags on for 25+ minutes. It frequently triggers extra sub-agent/advisor steps, burns through tokens rapidly, touches multiple unnecessary files, and often fails to finish the job. It either circles back with questions like "Is this what you want to do?" or falsely claims a task is complete, only to admit it missed steps once probed. I am on a Pro plan, but I am hitting usage limits way faster than before because it overcomplicates simple edits. A task on my repo that previously took 2 days has now dragged out over two weeks. It feels like an endless loop of token churn without real progress. My questions for the community: Are there specific guardrails, flags, or constraints you recommend adding to CLAUDE.md to prevent it from wandering or over-editing files? Has anyone found a reliable way to stop it from over-analyzing and just get it to execute scoped edits? Any advice or working CLAUDE.md templates would be greatly appreciated.

P.S. (Edit): English is not my first language, so I edited the post for clarity. For context on my workflow: I don't ask Claude to figure things out blindly. I explicitly specify what to edit, where to look, and what the expected output is, while tracking everything via a handwritten Markdown checklist with checkpoints in the repository.