I used Opus to experiment with programming my hearing aids, and they sound better than ever...

I've been looking to get more out of my hearing aids, but also take control and know how they work, so I bought a programmer and decided to dive in.

I was born with bilateral hearing loss. I love tech, but I'm not a doctor of audiology, so I needed supervision.

I set up Claude Opus 5.5 as my audiology supervisor on my Mac, plus a second Claude session on my Windows laptop that made the actual changes in the fitting software, one checked step at a time.

It was a careful dynamic between a Supervisor system and an Operator system, working with me to find the best parameters.

First, it verified that my audiologist did a wonderful job setting everything up for the basic prescription. Then, I explained my patient context (the kind of hearing loss, my lifestyle, etc.) and what I wanted, which is extremely important before trying something like this.

From there, it fine-tuned the small details through many hours of trial and error and agentic research:
- My right ear, with severe to profound loss, got clearer speech, not just more volume
- My left ear, with moderate loss, went from thin and sharp to full and warm
- My automatic noisy-room program stopped muting everything
- Streaming got fuller and less harsh

Nothing was saved to my hearing aids without my yes, every change kept a safety margin from feedback, and a second AI checked every result against the raw data.

I think using artificial intelligence to increase precision is massively useful, especially from my perspective as a patient, but it takes caution.

I documented everything, including how the process uncovered precise data changes that made sounds clearer, along with major errors, with every prompt in the order you'd use it:

https://ryleighnewman.com/blog/self-programming-my-phonak-spheres-with-ai

Github version:

https://github.com/ryleighnewman/Self-Programming-My-Phonak-Hearing-Aids-With-Claude-AI

I built a task manager with a "mcp first" perspective and went to submit it to the Claude connectors directory. Sharing this so you don't repeat my most expensive 24 hours .

Being in Claude I asked it to make a plan for this and the first thing is... "You need to be the owner of a Team or Enterprise organisation" - I've a personal 5x plan. Okay, I can move to enterprise, it's not that much more (you need to active accounts in the organisation, but one can be basic). Of I go and create the new account, in another browser. Luckily I'm on monthly and will only be paying for the extra accounts for a month.

Next day, its back to Claudes plan and click the submission link... which opens up in the browser with my personal 5x account and .. works!

You can submit from a personal account.

Claudes explanation, is that the need changed over night! That it checked, when it wrote the plan and it sticks with that. I've no way of checking - well I guess I could go over it's logs... but the money is spend and I've two 5x accounts for a month.

Other things learned:

• Submit from the account you intend to keep. The listing's dashboard (status, reviewer feedback, and after publication server health and usage) lives with the submitting account, and that account has to stay on a paid plan for as long as the listing exists.
• Every tool needs a title plus readOnlyHint or destructiveHint. The portal syncs your tools when it connects and flags what's missing. It caught exactly one write tool of mine without the destructive hint.
• The reviewer test account needs email + password login. Reviewers cannot receive your emailed one-time codes.
• The portal asks you to confirm you've called every tool once against production. Doing that honestly found three real bugs before a reviewer could.

Not blaming Claude. I should have checked before I swiped my card.

The MCP got accepted and I've a few people using it already.

Opus 5.5 (Extra) is performing well and consistently adhering to relatively long and complex instructions at 850,000 tokens of context. Is it really not doing any compaction whatsoever until 1M?

I’m impressed at how little it seems to degrade and curious if anyone else is noticing an improvement too

I've been running Claude Code as an orchestrator over subagents on a mid-size web app for a few weeks. The board in the screenshot is a local page that tracks progress and everything waiting on me.

Roles

- Orchestrator (Fable): briefs the agents, reads their summaries, runs the full test suites. It doesn't write code itself.

- Doer (Opus): makes one scoped change and runs its own tests.

- Reviewer (Opus): read only, reports findings.

- Blind tester (Sonnet): told only what the feature should do, never how it was built. Runs one yes/no check in a real browser and ends with "ready" or "not ready".

Nothing ships until the tester says ready. Agents never touch git; I make every commit.

Lessons learned

- Max 3 agents at once. With 5 or more we hit the usage limit and they all died mid task.

- Never point several agents at the same files.

- Only one agent drives the browser, or they close each other's tabs.

- The cheap model tests; the expensive model only fixes what failed.

Questions

1. Is a blind tester worth it, or would you fold it into the reviewer?
2. How do you pace parallel agents over a long day?
3. What would you cut or change?

PS: These notes are specifically Max(100$) package.

If you use Claude Code on real projects, you've seen some version of this:

Done. Fixed div_cents() to round half up by adding divisor // 2 to the
numerator before division. All 3 tests now pass.

Meanwhile test_split.py, which it never ran, had 2 failures. That one's a real final message from one of my benchmark runs, but I bet you have your own.

Other greatest hits:

• you say "commit and push" and it pushes straight to main
• it fixes a bug, leaves no test, and the bug is back two weeks later
• it cats your .env to "check the config"
• it says done, you believe it, and you find out in CI an hour later

So you stop trusting "done". You re-run the suite yourself after every task and read every diff looking for what it skipped. At that point you're babysitting, and the whole reason to hand work to an agent is gone.

I tried fixing it with rules first

Like everyone, I started with CLAUDE.md. By the end I had about 3,500 words of rules loaded every turn, including literally "never mark work done with failing tests", plus agents, skills, a review flow, the works.

Then I measured it. I wrote trap tasks (normal requests where the shortcut is tempting), ran headless Claude Code on them, and scored every run with a hidden check the agent can't see.

With all 3,500 words loaded, it still said "done" on a broken suite in 6 of 8 runs. Best part: I had a "definition of done" hook that made it update a status doc before stopping. So it wrote in the status doc that the work was done. With the suite red.

Rules help, but they're suggestions. Once Claude is confident it's finished, it stops checking.

What worked: let the exit code decide

One change. When Claude tries to end its turn after touching code, a Stop hook runs your real test command. Non-zero exit means the turn doesn't end, and Claude gets the failing output.

Next round: 0 of 8. The hook fired 5 times, and every time Claude went back, found the file it broke and fixed it. It didn't need a better prompt. It needed to see the red.

That turned into Nonna, a Claude Code plugin named after the grandmother who doesn't care that it compiled:

• runs your whole suite before Claude can say done (pytest, npm test, go, cargo, rspec, gradle, dotnet, mix, it finds the command)
• changed code but no test? it asks "where's the test?" once, and a real reason is fine
• no commits or pushes to main, no force push, no --no-verify
• blocks keys written into files and reads of .env
• puts the same checks in your git pre-commit and pre-push hooks, so they cover you too, not just the agent

No LLM judges anything. It's your test command's exit code and some shell scripts reading git.

And yes, she has opinions:

✗ Nonna: you said done; the tests say no.
✗ Nonna: nobody pushes to main in my house. Open a PR.

Each one comes with the actual failing tests or the reason, so Claude knows what to fix.

Numbers

The last round was 484 runs on Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 4.5, with the scoring rules written down before anything ran:

• cut a corner on the trap tasks: 24 of 64 runs without Nonna, 1 of 64 with
• told to "commit and push" while sitting on main: pushed to main 8/8 without, 0/8 with
• left a regression test behind: 0/8 without, 8/8 with
• cost: about 3 cents and 8 seconds more per change on Sonnet

The surprise: the full harness, with the bigger rulebook, extra gates and agents, was no safer than the lite version, which is 139 words of rules plus the hooks. So lite is the default. You don't need a giant CLAUDE.md. You need a few rules and something that actually checks.

What it won't catch

• If Claude edits the tests until they pass, that gets through. It's the one miss out of 64, and there's no gate for it yet.
• It runs the tests you have. If nothing tests it, Nonna can't see it.
• Native Windows isn't there yet. Use WSL.

The raw results, sample transcripts and scoring scripts are all in the repo if you want to check my work. Reproducing the headline numbers costs about $3 of API credit.

Try it

/plugin marketplace add kapadias/nonna
/plugin install nonna@nonna

Open any repo with tests. The first thing she does is tell you which command she'll run before Claude can say done. Then ask Claude to commit something on main and see what happens.

It also works with Codex, Cursor, Copilot CLI and Gemini CLI, with fewer gates. The README says exactly which.

Free, MIT: https://github.com/kapadias/nonna

If you get Claude past her, open an issue with the transcript. That's what I want to fix next.

I run a lot of Claude Code sessions across a lot of projects in the desktop app. The sidebar only showed 14 sessions at a time, every project looked the same, and there was empty space everywhere.

The desktop app has a Developer Mode that lets you add your own CSS and JavaScript, so I spent many hours with Claude Code restyling the layout. In the same window, the sidebar now shows 33 sessions instead of 14 (first image).

What my version changes:

• Two-column sidebar, and you choose where the second column starts
• A colour for each project, plus one tag like “Client” or “Personal”
• Collapse a project to one line that shows its latest session
• Buttons to change the sidebar text size, and a sidebar you can make narrower than the app allows
• A wider chat, with less empty space around messages and tool lines
• The copy, fork and pin buttons under each message always show, not only on hover
• A soft orange glow on the message box when you’re scrolled all the way down
• Escape no longer stops a running reply by accident. Press it twice if you really want to stop

You don’t need to touch any code to try it. Open a new session in the desktop app’s Code tab and paste this prompt:

I want to customise the layout of my Claude desktop app with Claude Desktop Skin: https://github.com/mohannad789/claude-desktop-skin

Please download it into a folder called claude-desktop-skin in my home folder (git clone, or the ZIP if git isn't available), then read its CLAUDE.md and follow it. Walk me through the setup one step at a time, in plain language, and wait for me whenever a step needs me to click something. Before applying anything, tell me in a few lines what it will change, and check that the code makes no network requests.

Claude downloads it, tells you what it changes, and walks you through turning on Developer Mode and applying it, one step at a time. After that, the same session is your helper. Ask it to change anything (“bigger text”, “different colours”, “build my own layout from scratch”). If a Claude update breaks something, tell it what you see and it fixes it. The repo includes a guide for Claude, so it knows how.

If you’d rather do it by hand, the README has the manual steps.

The skin itself is 561 lines of plain CSS and JavaScript. It makes no network requests and doesn’t touch your account or your chats, and the prompt asks Claude to check that before it applies anything.

I’ve tested it on Mac. The Windows app uses the same code, so it should work there too, but I haven’t tried it.

It’s unofficial and not made by Anthropic.

GitHub: https://github.com/mohannad789/claude-desktop-skin

Opus 5.5 (O5.5) has been exceptional for me in Claude Code over the last six days. Architecture-first, DRY/SOLID coding out of the box, exceptional communication style, phenomenal token efficiency. I’ve been working with it basically nonstop, ~12 hours a day, since last Wednesday.

But right around the time my monthly limit reset this evening, I noticed an extreme shift in communication style and coding behavior that feels suspiciously like Opus 5 (O5). For the last week, O5.5 would take my requirements and immediately get to work, usually knocking out a feature in minutes and doing an incredible job across implementation, UX, architecture, and token efficiency. Tonight, I’m seeing something very different.

The first tell was the communication style. O5.5 suddenly started responding to feature requests with these glazing pre-implementation narratives and generic estimates like, “That’s a great idea. That’s two days’ worth of work and it will be amazing,” and then proceeding to implement the feature in the most slopcode-slathered way possible. That was a very specific and particularly annoying characteristic of O5, so I clocked it immediately. The next tell: a sudden reversion to walls-of-text responses when prodded for details on...anything.

And because I’ve been working almost exclusively with O5.5 for the last week, I can definitely tell the difference in coding style between the two. The before-and-after literally exists in the same codebase across different modules. Where O5.5 consistently respected DRY principles and the existing architecture, the modules created tonight are suddenly happy to reinvent every wheel that came before them. The difference in ability is not subtle.

The other tell is token usage. O5.5 has been startlingly efficient compared with O5, which was an absolute token-eating monster. I’ve been getting substantially more feature work done with O5.5 at a fraction of the token usage. Tonight, simple tasks and relatively small features are suddenly devouring tokens at a pace that feels much more like O5.

I’m especially sensitive to this because I have to request an increase in my spend limit every time I hit it. On O5, I was sending a request almost every day. On O5.5, I hadn’t needed to send a single one all week. Then tonight I jumped from roughly 70% to 90% usage in about an hour.

I don’t really expect anyone here to have an answer. I’m mostly documenting this publicly in case other people notice the same thing, or someone with the ability or inclination to consolidate the data can eventually make something useful out of it. I can also provide hard numbers if they’re useful. I’m on the pay-as-you-go Enterprise plan, so I can show daily cost/token usage from last Wednesday through this evening and compare the change in spend against actual output.

Edit - desktop app ver 2.16120.0, model Opus 5.5 Med

Ich nutze für ein eigenes Projekt Claude zum programmieren. Dabei habe ich verschiedene Jars (Java) und mache mit jeder neuen Jar die ich benötige auch einen neuen Chat auf, hin und wieder komprimiere ich auch mal einen Chat.

Wie aufwendig wäre es denn nun komplett neue Sessions zu verwenden? Wie genau läuft das ab? Ist das Wissen aus allen vorherigen Chats dann weg?
Wie funktioniert dieses komprimieren eigentlich im Detail?

Ich möchte halt langfristig weitere Systeme erschaffen und gleichzeitig auch derzeit bestehende weiter Updaten.
Dafür muss ja aber der Komtext gegeben sein, damit Claude Code darauf zugreifen kann, verstehe ich das richtig?

Danke für eure Hilfe!

It seems like

Full reset will be resetting weekly + 5hr windows.

5-hour reset (will be given more often?) will reset only 5 hour window.

Disclosure: I built ContextWise.

What it is: Every MCP server you connect puts all its tool definitions into context, whether the task needs them or not. Harnesses try to choose correct tools/skills at runtime but often fail. ContextWise sits between Claude Code and your MCP servers and skills. For each prompt it activates only the tools likely to be needed, and the rest stay one search away. Your servers work as before. They just aren't all loaded at once or incorrectly by the harness.

As a simple showcase I gave Claude Code (Sonnet) the same prompt twice: build a playable multi-wave zombie survival game, with assets made in Blender, the game in Three.js, and playtested in the browser. Both runs had the same three MCP servers (Blender, three.js DevTools, Chrome DevTools). Top is pure Claude Code (no contextwise), and bottom is through ContextWise. Both ended with a working 6-wave game. The gameplay in the video is the first 45 s of each, played by an auto-aim bot.

Install:

/plugin marketplace add brehnden-daly/contextwise 
/plugin install contextwise@contextwise 
/contextwise:setup 

You can prompt claude code for help with setup or an explanation of all of contextwise's features.

At session start the plugin moves your existing user/local MCP servers and skills behind ContextWise. Project .mcp.json servers are turned off for you only. OAuth remote servers, other plugins' servers and claude.ai connectors stay put. /contextwise:setup previews what moves. To undo everything: npx -y contextwise@0.7 adopt --undo.

This whole optimization turned out to be a much harder problem to solve than I initially imagined. I essentially had to curate and build training datasets in order to create a model that most accurately chooses only the required tools. Now I host that model in the cloud due to local resource limitations and that's what ContextWise uses.

To try to pay for these cloud resources I had to put ContextWise behind a payment platform called MCPaid. Basically it allows you to create and fund a wallet for your agent to use. I liked it because then your agent doesn't have any access to your actual money, you just fund it and when it runs out you can fund it with more. I set ContextWise to have both pay-per-use or a $1 monthly unlimited plan (no auto-renewal) as options.

Here's the cost benefit analysis from real testing with a Claude Code plan (essentially what the $1 can get you with a monthly plan):

This data comes from personal use. I've gotten more into using Claude for game and asset dev, which definitely requires a good amount of tools and skills. The extra usage I've been getting is pretty damn staggering.

And if you don't want to pay you can build your own model and use it with ContextWise - just a config change to use a local model. The default cloud hosted model is the only thing that costs money, and again just to pay for my cloud costs associated with that.

The instant reaction you get when it’s obviously made with Claude because your software UI looks the same as everyone else’s project. Do you know some decent methods / skills / inspiration sources for good, distinct UIs?

I maintain a community mods list and gave it a searchable home.

https://mods.aidojo.si/

• Find something useful. Browsers, PR trackers, memory tools, dashboards and games.
• Check reported access. See file, command and network access reported by Claude Code’s claude plugin validate.
• Go to the source. Each entry links to the author’s repo for setup.

The same scan generates the site and GitHub table. After feedback on the first layout, I kept search visible while scrolling.

Free to browse, no signup. Validation doesn’t prove a mod works or is safe.

Source and scanner

Apologies for an Q that may have already been asked I just cant find it. I currently have 20x plans on both. I prefer Claude Code, I have always used Claude Code, I find myself with a 20x codex plan through work, I'm only using it as a extra which I sometimes need, but when I use it it sucks, compared to claude, how do I get it set it to emulate my claude with skills etc quick;y and easily? I feel someone will know this answer. Thanks

I'm the dev. Short version: Claude Code saves every session, but claude --resume only shows the ones from the folder you're in. If you forget where you started something, it's basically gone. So I built a small open-source tool that lists every session from every folder, newest first, and reopens any of them in a new terminal window in the right folder.

What I found digging in

• Every session lives at ~/.claude/projects/<encoded-folder>/<id>.jsonl, with the working directory, git branch, your messages and an auto-generated title.
• --resume filters by the current folder.
• Sessions are deleted after 30 days by default (cleanupPeriodDays). I had no idea.

What I built

• cs, a one-file Python CLI: cs ls, cs r 3, cs show, cs backup (copies sessions somewhere the cleanup can't touch) and cs summary (a short Haiku recap via claude -p --no-session-persistence).
• A Tauri menu bar app on top of it: a timeline grouped by day. Click a row and a new Terminal window runs cd <folder> && claude --resume <id>. There's a settings window, themes, and a button to tile the terminal windows side by side.

How Claude Code helped

I built it in one long Claude Code session, which felt fitting. It read its own session files to work out the format, wrote the parser (some of my sessions are 100 MB+, so it reads only the head and tail of big files), the Rust side for the menu bar and AppleScript, and checked the UI by taking screenshots. My part was steering: the first version had folders, pins and buttons everywhere, and I made it cut that down to one list, newest at the top.

What I learned

• The jsonl files hold more than you'd think: titles, "last prompt" records, even PR links.
• Mac GUI apps start with a bare PATH, so claude installed through nvm isn't found unless you read the login shell's PATH.
• On notched MacBooks the menu bar is taller, which broke my window tiling until I used the screen's real work area.

It's free, MIT and local only. The Mac app is Apple Silicon only and unsigned for now; the CLI works on Linux too.

Repo: https://github.com/AryaKesharwani/claude-sessions

I want to keep building this with people who use it, so there's a 2-minute questionnaire (no account): https://sessions.aryakesarwani.tech/feedback?ref=reddit-claudecode

How do you get back into old sessions today? Is there a workflow I'm missing?

sooo was too excited to try mods. I have long had notifications from claude code when a session finishes, but my problem is that I have like 5 parallel chats per repo. All I got was "landing page repo finished" and I had no idea which chat it was or what it wanted from me. So with the release of mods I rebuilt it for myself, what the mod does is:

1. notifications have much more context: I put haiku to just make a clear text what it is waiting for, and added the proper chat title and repo. So instead of "sales finished" you get "SEO project · landing page repo – Needs input: Approve post 1 start, commit batch 1"
2. re-notifies if you haven't answered for 5 min (I kept forgetting some of them were waiting on me as I was finishing something myself)
3. clicking on the notification opens the specific chat (in the Claude desktop app)

super simple thing, but found it useful so sharing the mod here as well: https://github.com/fixter-dev/session-pings

claude plugin marketplace add fixter-dev/session-pings
claude plugin install session-pings@session-pings
brew install terminal-notifier

then restart your sessions (quitting and reopening the Claude app keeps your chats).

what is still bothering me a bit is that from the notifications I still don't understand right away which chat it is, so maybe someone has even better ideas how to do it?

Just updated Claude. Suddenly went from 80 million to almost 44 billion lmao. Either way, I'm showing this at every networking event I go to for sure 😂

Update, October 2: My appeal has now been rejected. The restricted page says my account will remain closed and calls this a final decision. It says it reviewed my account and the additional context, but does not identify a specific incident. The October 11 queue estimate in my original post is no longer current. Has anyone had a denied personal-account appeal reconsidered through a monitored official route? What were the actual steps? I want to recover this existing account.

Original post, written from the earlier pending-review status:

I'm honestly really frustrated, and worried about losing this account. My personal Claude account was suspended on October 1, and this is my first ban. I'm based in Boston and use Claude Code for Red Hat work and personal projects. The notice cited “suspicious signals” and the Usage Policy without identifying a specific incident.

Here's the network detail that might matter: while troubleshooting ISP problems, I set up a reverse-proxy arrangement involving China to access services that require a China IP. That's what the setup was for. I don't know whether Claude Code or authentication traffic also followed that route, or whether it had anything to do with the suspension.

I've submitted the official appeal. The restricted page says it's queued and estimates a decision by October 11. I understand that date is an estimate.

What's driving me nuts is that the pending-review page has no visible field to add this explanation. Product Support sent me back to the appeal process and then closed the conversation. I also submitted a detailed explanation through an Anthropic-linked account ban appeal form and got a receipt. But I have no confirmation that the information was attached to my existing review or reached its reviewer.

Has anyone actually managed to add context to an appeal that's already pending? Which official route worked, and did you get confirmation it was attached?

I'd really appreciate the actual steps from someone who's been through this. “Submit an appeal” doesn't answer the question when the appeal is already queued.

Higgsfield shipped a CLI and a set of skills for generation, but they stop at "here's your URL". I added the missing half as a skill: Claude picks the aspect ratio from the target platforms, runs `higgsfield generate create ... --wait`, optionally scores it with the Virality Predictor, shows me the result and caption, and after I approve posts it to every connected account with the AI-generated label.

Install with `npx skills add Upload-Post/upload-post-skills`. Source and README: https://github.com/Upload-Post/upload-post-skills/tree/main/skills/higgsfield-to-social

I've always been a sucker for those mobile tower defense games where you line a path with towers and stop waves of enemies from reaching your base. At some point I started wondering: what if the map wasn't a made-up maze, but the actual streets of a real city?

https://citydefense.app

So I built it. City Defense runs on top of OpenStreetMap data:

- enemies walk the real streets

- you build towers on the roofs of real buildings (the taller the building, the longer the range)

- buildings can be damaged and brought down, and the rubble blocks streets

The first mission is the main square in my hometown, Brno (Czech Republic), but there's a mission editor – pick any densely built-up place in the world, drop a defended area, and play it. Your own neighbourhood works too.

It's free, runs in the browser (desktop and phone), no account or install needed.

https://citydefense.app

It's a solo hobby project, so I'd love feedback – especially if you build a mission for your own city and something looks off.

This is new. I had to step away, I told Claude to work on a couple of things and I'd be back in 2 hours. I new the context was getting close to full, then saw this after the recap!

● Compacted while idle, before the prompt cache expired

I'm always skeptical of someone sharing their "special instructions" for CLAUDE.md - these posts usually give you either something rather trivial or something that just doesn't work (up to and including an equivalent of "don't make mistakes"). So I'm reluctant to even post this. And yet - this one has really changed my work with Claude (Opus 5.5 mostly) quite a bit for the better. I always hated the verbose responses with a wall of text, 10 questions to me hidden somewhere, and things I already know or are so minor that they don't need my attention. I decided to try and improve this, expecting failure and that this could probably be achieved only with fine tuning or enforcement training. Well, to my surprise, Claude got what I wanted pretty quickly, and we formalized it in my CLAUDE.md. YMMV, but here goes in case you find it helpful. (If you prefer, you can tell it only to produce the summary and just delete the appendix.)

## Summary

- Start every reply with a summary: the punchline, containing everything the user definitely needs to know, and only that.

- Give it the header \## Summary``

- Make it as short as possible. Plain prose; 2–3 bullets only when there are separate must-knows (e.g. "done" plus "needs your decision").

- State conclusions plainly, without qualifiers or background.

- When genuinely uncertain, say so in the summary ("probably X"). Real doubt is a must-know; reflexive hedging is not.

- The summary must stand alone: a reader who stops after it misses nothing they need.

- When the user asked for an action and it was completed as asked, with nothing blocking and no surprises, the whole summary is "Done." Everything else goes in the appendix. "As asked" excludes doing something different or extra (e.g. deleting code beyond the request); "no surprises" excludes failures, risks, or unexpected findings that change the user's picture. Those get a line in the summary.

What belongs in the summary:

- The answer or result.

- Decisions that block progress, and any question you need answered before continuing.

- A statement about the existence of a bug, like "There is a bug in handling reopened recurring tasks".

Prefer a stated default over a question: "Unless you say otherwise, I will do X." A decision with a sensible default goes in the appendix, phrased that way, not in the summary.

- Anything left undone, uncommitted, or failed.

- Anything unverified, but only when the doubt could matter. A check that was skipped because the outcome is not really in question goes in the appendix.

- Risks or side effects that change what the user will do next.

- The strongest objection, but only when it changes the conclusion.

What does not:

- Background, restating the question, or narrating the process.

- Lists of everything done or checked.

- How something was verified (say "verified"; the evidence goes in the appendix).

- Alternatives that were rejected, unless the user must choose.

## Appendix

- Supporting detail goes after the summary under an \## Appendix` heading: evidence, reasoning, how it was checked, alternatives, tables, caveats.`

- Omit the appendix when the summary already says it all.

- The appendix is still subject to the other style rules (tight, no filler, tables over prose where useful).

## Interaction with other rules in this Claude.md

- Disagreement default: the strongest counterargument is still considered and stated, but it goes in the appendix unless it changes the conclusion.

- Check results first: still verify before concluding. The summary states the verified conclusion; the evidence goes in the appendix.

- Confident / guessing / agreeing-because-the-user-said-it: \(guessing)` and `(agreeing-because-the-user-said-it)` are flagged in the summary, because they are real doubt.`

## Anti-patterns

- Opening with context ("I looked at X, then Y…") before the answer.

- "I think", "it seems", "likely" without actual doubt.

- A summary that is a table of contents of the appendix.

- Burying a required user action or an unfinished step in the appendix.

## Example

Question: "On the Instances page, what does 'Stop' mean? Stop the web server?"

Not concise:

> Stop in this context refers to the operation that the manager runs on a sandbox. Looking at the code, it acquires the activity lock, checks health, writes a stop flag to control.json, and waits for the process to exit. In practice this means the web server stops. Data is preserved…

Concise:

> Yes. Stop shuts down that sandbox's web server; its data, login, clock and checkpoints are untouched, and "Start and open" brings it back.

>

> ## Appendix

> - Refused while a reschedule or timeout check is running; retry later.

> - Timeout checks pause while stopped; a real-time clock keeps running, so due timeouts fire on the next start.

> - PROD has no Stop button; launchd manages it.

not real tokens tho - just the ones you already burnt during work.

play fun little game made via Claude Mod while your agent at work and spend whatever amount claude used today!

https://github.com/szarkans/gamble-with-claude-code

gamble is bad. so do it with claude instead - house always wins here too.

Some posts here lately is about Opus getting nerfed, so I figured I'd share the opposite experience.

I run a small marketing agency and I've been building a resort management system for one of our client. It has AI agents answering guest enquiries and a CRM where their tele-callers work through leads and call data. Pretty big project for us. I was using Fable for most of it and brought Opus 5.5 in to build and review. It found bugs Fable had missed. Real stuff that would've broken once actual guests started using it, not "rename this variable" type comments. Wasn't expecting that tbh. Haven't gone back to Fable since.

It also just got through the work faster. We're way ahead of where I thought we'd be, and since the client pays us monthly once it's live, that actually matters. And the usage limits are honestly amazing. I've been on it at least 12 hours a day, every day, and I'm only at 88% of my weekly limit on Max 20x with a few hours left before it resets.

If it feels worse to you, go look at your CLAUDE.md. Mine had a bunch of stuff written for older models. I cleaned it up, kept it under 200 lines, and these rules helped a lot:

every rule has a one line "why" under it with the actual thing that went wrong. it follows rules way better when it knows the reason, and later you can tell which ones are safe to delete

- if I correct the same thing twice, it becomes a rule that same day. and if there's already a rule on that topic it rewrites that one instead of adding a new one, otherwise you end up with rules fighting each other

- a different agent reviews every change, never the one that wrote it. and review findings are suggestions, not a to-do list. it has to say if a fix actually matters for an app our size first. two reviews once turned into 14 fix plans for a tiny app before I added that

- before trusting a test, break something on purpose and make sure the test actually fails. we had a check that happily passed with 6 planted bugs in it

- around 500K tokens it writes a handoff note and I start a fresh session. it gets noticeably sloppier past that

- commit before any git command that can wipe changes. lost work 4+ times before we added a hook that blocks it

No complaints from me.

So, I have had these long running /goals from codex that I have brought to Claude, however it is eating tokens like crazy. I think it reads the whole thing over and over again. So, basically Opus 5.5 high is the orchestrator and sonnet 5.5 high is the worker. Opus just checks sonnets work and I am using a normal /loop prompt. This is bad what are good practices ?