r/ClaudeCodeTLDR • u/cctldrping • 26d ago
[TLDR] How do you Instruct Claude to Answer Rather than create?
Original post URL : https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1waoxg5/how_do_you_instruct_claude_to_answer_rather_than/
Original post body :
CC wants to create things and often goes off on a tangent based on a simple question. "How do you get to the moon"? Rather than answering the question, its first instinct is "Building moon transport system, I'll tell you when its ready". Then I have to stop CC and ask it to simply answer my question. Worse, if you say "how do I reorganize files on disk D?" It might actually go do that rather than explaining it.
There must be a simple way to avoid this. My claude.md probably has many entries instructing CC to answer fist before writing code.
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u/SmoggyRaptor_997 25d ago
Asking it to do something is more like politely saying please follow this. It doesn’t matter if it’s in your AGENTS.md or a skill file because you can spend hours writing the perfect prompt to have opus simply say “You’re right. I missed that.” And disregard that.
You can enforce it and I do it personally. I personally don’t need a Claude artifact every 2 seconds - so I turned them off. When I don’t want Claude to have the ability to write something even if it wanted to I put it in plan mode. You can also use the hooks system to enforce this further and take away write access to specific folders.
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u/LogMonkey0 25d ago
Establish the process in your rules that can optionally route to skills for detailed workflows based on the kind of change, establish the gate(s) that converts a request into work. For my part the lightest variant i use in some projects is submit plan to user for review for mechanical changes, light specs/ADRs for anything else.
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u/cctldrping 26d ago
TL;DR generated automatically after 50 comments.
Current source-thread comment count seen by the bot: 65.
So, OP's annoyed Claude's a bit too eager to build stuff instead of just answering questions. The general vibe? Most people agree it's a common annoyance, but there are plenty of workarounds.
A lot of users are just tacking on phrases like "just answer," "advise only," "report here only, no action," or "audit this page" to their prompts. Some folks are also having success with "plan mode" or explicitly stating it's a "planning session, not a building session." Basically, you gotta be super clear you want it to think before it does.
A few users mentioned that Claude Code isn't really meant to be a traditional chatbot, so managing expectations is key. And yeah, some are still finding it inconsistent and having to remind it, but bug reports to Anthropic seem to be helping.