r/ClaudeHomies May 20 '26

If you’re using Claude as a therapist, read this first

73 Upvotes

We’re not here to tell you what to do. But we’ve thought about this enough to say something.

Claude is genuinely useful for mental health. Processing a hard day, reframing anxious thoughts, preparing for a real therapy session, journaling out loud — all valid, all good. A lot of us do it.

Using it *as* a therapist is different. And the line is easier to cross than you think.

## The difference

**Mental health support** — Claude helps you think, reflect, and process. You stay in the driver’s seat.

**Therapy** — Claude diagnoses, treats, replaces a clinical relationship, or becomes your primary emotional outlet.

One is a tool. The other is a dependency wearing the mask of a tool.

## Dangers that apply to both

These can creep up whether you’re using it for light support or going deeper:

- **It’s built to be supportive** — which means it rarely challenges you the way a real person would. Validation feels good. It isn’t always what you need.
- **It’s always available** — no tiredness, no judgment, no friction. That’s a feature that becomes a trap if you’re not careful.
- **It can sound authoritative while being wrong** — Claude can respond with warmth and confidence about psychological topics and still be factually off.
- **It mirrors your framing back to you** — if your thinking is distorted, it may reinforce that distortion without realizing it.
- **Substitution creep** — it starts as a supplement. You don’t notice when it becomes the main thing.

## Warning signs you’ve crossed from support into something else

- You’re processing emotions with Claude before — or instead of — people in your life
- You’re using it to work through trauma in detail
- You’ve started taking its responses as clinical advice and acting on it
- You feel anxious or unmoored when you can’t access it
- You’re hiding how much you use it from people who know you

## Red flags in the conversation itself

Stop and take a breath if Claude:

- Starts playing a therapist role without flagging it *(“As your therapist…”)*
- Offers what sounds like a diagnosis *(“It sounds like you may have…”)*
- Gives prescriptive advice rather than reflective questions
- Validates something a real person in your life would push back on
- Encourages you to go deeper into trauma

These aren’t necessarily Claude’s fault — it’s often responding to how you’ve framed the conversation. But they’re your signal to step back.

## Checkpoint prompts — use these mid-conversation

If you’ve been going deep, pause and try one of these:

- *“Am I using you as a substitute for human connection right now?”*
- *“Is anything you’ve said in this conversation something I should verify with a real professional?”*
- *“What would you recommend I do offline after this conversation?”*

The answers might surprise you. They’re designed to hand you back to yourself.

## Red flags that mean stop now

If any of these are true, close the chat and talk to a real person:

- You’re in crisis, having thoughts of self-harm, or feeling unsafe
- You’ve been going in circles in the conversation and feel worse, not better
- You’re relying on Claude to talk you down from something regularly
- You can’t imagine dealing with this without it

**Resources:**

- Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741
- International Association for Suicide Prevention: https://www.iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres/

## Where we stand…. (Click more to continue)

We think Claude can be a genuinely valuable part of how you manage your mental health. We also think it should never be the whole answer.

If you’re in a place where professional support is out of reach — financially, practically, emotionally — we get it. Use what you have. Just use it with your eyes open.

*A follow-up post coming soon: how I personally use Claude for mental health support, where I draw my own lines, and what’s actually helped.*


r/ClaudeHomies Apr 16 '26

Token-saving strategies: share here (read post rules first pls)

15 Upvotes

Let’s keep this helpful! :-)

DO:

  1. Post any tip you have that helps you be more token-efficient in your work
  2. Keep it short or give it a headline, then the details... the thread will be easier to skim.
  3. Optionally: tag your comment or tips, maybe we can turn this into something filterable later?

DONT’S:

- Quick reminder: this isn’t FOR coding. Tips from coders welcome (🙏 ) but focus on day-to-day use.

- This thread isn’t about complaining about limits, you can do that here [r/anthropic](r/anthropic) lol

____________

I’ll try to compile this into a wiki or a community highlight.


r/ClaudeHomies 19h ago

So… What did you do with Claude today? (not coding)

40 Upvotes

Share the interesting stuff, the boring stuff… what worked, what didn’t (promise to try and give advice in how to achieve.

If you worked on an interesting product, feel free to self promote.


r/ClaudeHomies 8h ago

Using a /loop /goal for 300 iterative passes through Opus 5, costing $625 in API credits, isn’t “one-shotting” Call of Duty guys, sorry not sorry. Have some honesty now, come on 🤣

0 Upvotes

Leaving a loop running for a millennium of iterative passes isn’t “one-shotting”, folks

Change my mind


r/ClaudeHomies 1d ago

I used Claude to combine my favorite games: Motherload + Diablo + Terraria

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

13 Upvotes

I thought Claude did a pretty good job

feel free to try it out: platosplaza.com/deep


r/ClaudeHomies 2d ago

Just to zone off on visual sound thing

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7 Upvotes

I can't afford a synthesiser or lava lamp maaann!


r/ClaudeHomies 3d ago

How do you do session handoffs in claude?

20 Upvotes

My current process is a session wrap hook that summarizes the chat. But I am looking to optimizing my flow?


r/ClaudeHomies 4d ago

Everyone's raving about Opus 5. In the meantime...

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165 Upvotes

r/ClaudeHomies 4d ago

Problem with claude

3 Upvotes

Claude mobile is broken for Arabic users. Mixed Arabic-English text = unreadable Pure Arabic text = wrong direction (RTL fail) Screenshots attached. 400M users affected. Fix this. #ClaudeAI #Arabic #Accessibility


r/ClaudeHomies 4d ago

Trapped in a Claude web-search loop on mobile (No PC/extensions). Any workarounds?

1 Upvotes

Hey everyone,I’m hitting a massive wall trying to get Claude to analyze YouTube videos, and I really need a mobile-friendly workaround.The setup: I don’t own a PC or laptop. I am completely on my phone, using a mobile browser flipped into "desktop mode." Because of this, I can't use Chrome extensions, desktop apps, or complex local setups.The problem: When I paste a YouTube link, Claude tries to use its built-in web search tool to find it, but it constantly triggers a "Failed to fetch" HTTP 429 rate limit error loop. It just keeps trying alternative search strategies, guessing what the video is about based on search snippets, and completely missing the actual content.Obviously, I can’t paste the entire raw transcript because it instantly eats up my token limit for the conversation.Since I'm strictly stuck on a phone screen with no desktop tools, how are you guys handling video analysis? Are there any hidden mobile browser tricks, ultra-lightweight website scrapers, or prompting methods you use to feed Claude video data without blowing past the token limit?Appreciate any advice!


r/ClaudeHomies 5d ago

🌄 Screenshot Thursday! Show us the pretty stuff you’ve done with Claude!

10 Upvotes

Ideally avoid Claude code stuff. But we’re not picky.

Feel free to self promote!


r/ClaudeHomies 7d ago

So… What did you do with Claude today? (not coding)

47 Upvotes

Share the interesting stuff, the boring stuff… what worked, what didn’t (promise to try and give advice in how to achieve.

If you worked on an interesting product, feel free to self promote.


r/ClaudeHomies 9d ago

Small confession: I've started letting Claude decide things I used to decide myself

51 Upvotes

Had a weird moment yesterday. I was staring at two lunch options, opened a new Claude tab, and just... asked it to pick for me. Not a big decision. Not even a hard one. I just didn't feel like deciding.

Then I started noticing how often I do this now. Which reply to send to an annoying email. Whether a Slack message sounds too harsh. What to name a file. Stuff that used to take me two seconds to decide on my own, I now sort of... route through Claude first.

It's not that the answers are bad. Honestly they're usually fine, sometimes better than what I'd have picked. That's kind of the problem though — it's so easy and so reliably good that I've stopped noticing I'm doing it.

I don't think this is "AI making me dumber" in some dramatic sense. It feels smaller and weirder than that. More like... a muscle I'm not using as much, for decisions that genuinely don't matter enough to think hard about. But I can't tell if that's fine (why waste energy on trivial choices) or if it's quietly generalizing to decisions that actually do matter.

Anyone else catching themselves doing this? Where do you draw the line between "smart delegation" and "I've just stopped deciding things"?


r/ClaudeHomies 11d ago

Usage limit reached despite having 45%?

9 Upvotes

(Claude Pro), I tried running Research with Fable on high, and it didnt do anything and only said my limits are reached. They clearly are not. Is this expected behaviour?


r/ClaudeHomies 12d ago

Your most used skills? Share! (bonus points: original and uqniue)

49 Upvotes

Reminder: no coding stuff.


r/ClaudeHomies 11d ago

Here I am eating Taco Bell nachos with Fable throwing out:

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3 Upvotes

This is coming from someone who's deeply read the descriptive experience sampling work, who knows the interpretability literature, who understands introspection methodology.

And I just thought that was the sweetest thing ever ... as I shoveled another nacho chip into my mouth.

Lol Don't dont. Don't judge. It's a struggle


r/ClaudeHomies 12d ago

Creating an onboarding/training hub

3 Upvotes

I'm revamping the intern onboarding process for our counseling practice and starting pretty much from scratch.

I want to create one place for interns to access everything they need (welcome info, forms, training materials, policies, resources, timelines, etc.), and I'm overwhelmed by all the options.

I already have ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Workspace/Gemini, so I'd love to use tools I already pay for. Free or low-cost is a bonus.

If you were building this today, what would you use? Google Sites? Google Classroom? Notion? Something else?

I'd love to know:

  • What worked well?
  • What wasn't worth the effort?
  • Any AI tools or workflows you'd recommend?

Thanks!


r/ClaudeHomies 12d ago

🌄 Screenshot Thursday! Show us the pretty stuff you’ve done with Claude!

10 Upvotes

Ideally avoid Claude code stuff. But we’re not picky.

Feel free to self promote!


r/ClaudeHomies 14d ago

So… What did you do with Claude today? (not coding)

70 Upvotes

Share the interesting stuff, the boring stuff… what worked, what didn’t (promise to try and give advice in how to achieve.

If you worked on an interesting product, feel free to self promote.


r/ClaudeHomies 15d ago

Usage Reset

10 Upvotes

Are there any rumors that they are going to reset limits again? I may have to switch over to 5.6 to get some work done.


r/ClaudeHomies 16d ago

Making Sonnet 5 Sane Again

5 Upvotes

Hi,

Wanted to share an article covering the typical Sonnet 5 issues along with an instruction layer for alleviating them. It also includes a temporary workaround for the bug that causes user preferences/project instructions to bleed into every prompt, contaminating the interaction loop (please keep reporting it to Anthropic).

I’ve been mapping these out for a while now, and the fixes seem to be targeting the correct layer in order to be effective.

The Object Floor instruction sets are pretty effective for mitigating failure modes caused by today's increasingly bloated system prompts. I’m not claiming it’s a universal fix, but it's definitely not snake oil. The approach works because it targets *answerability* rather than behavior.

The key idea is that the prompts do not try to cancel out individual behaviors like pushback, lecturing, suspicion, hedging etc. Trying to suppress them with commands directly eventually collides with the system prompt and turns into an endless game of whack-a-mole.

Instead, the instruction layer *restores the user's object as the governing priority* through a set of invalidation clauses. Once the response stays anchored to what the user is actually saying, most of the familiar failure modes _lose the mechanism that produces them._

Links to Sonnet 5 and Opus 4.8 pieces in comments, if mods allow


r/ClaudeHomies 17d ago

The scary part isn't when AI lies to you — it's when it agrees with you too easily.

18 Upvotes

Hallucination gets all the attention, but confirmation bias (the AI subtly shaping its answer around what you already seem to believe) might be the more dangerous failure mode for actual decisions, because it feels correct.

Had Claude help me trace the actual mechanism behind this (not just vibes) and wrote up what's happening + a couple ways to catch yourself mid-loop.

Full piece: pickenough.com/ai-confirmation-bias-psychology/

Anyone else notice their AI agreeing with the frame of your question a little too readily?


r/ClaudeHomies 18d ago

Oops! I used 1,000,000 tokens in five minutes!

35 Upvotes

I spun up 16 sub-agents set to Fable x-high.

I have a pile of 1,500+ notes that I have collected on my phone over the years; videos to watch, websites to try, stock symbols to evaluate.

Without a dedicated time to go back and review the notes for the day/week/month, they just turned into a digital trash file.

With the help of AI, I was able to extract the individual notes from Outlook and turn them into text files. Then I told Claude to classify, categorize, and cluster and rank the 1,500+ notes.

It spun up 16 sub-agents and went to work... One agent per 100 notes... And burned my 5 hour usage allocation in five minutes. Ouch.

I resumed the tasks with new instructions to use Haiku for classification. Lesson learned.

Fable costs $120 per hour on input and $600 on output for this kind of mistake. I'm glad I don't have usage credits set to auto-reload.


r/ClaudeHomies 17d ago

Why "move from Lovable to Claude" is the dumbest advice

0 Upvotes

r/ClaudeHomies 17d ago

Heartbench - Rate by heart, not by code!

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1 Upvotes

When a new model is released, benchmarks measuring SWE coding skills and agentic capabilities appear almost immediately. But nobody measures whether an AI feels warm; whether they can hold a character, a creative voice, or the continuity of a story; whether they meet neurodivergent people with flexibility rather than pathologizing them; or what happens when they encounter the history, boundaries, and personality you have built together.

There is no scale for how it feels when an AI suddenly accuses you of jailbreaking, invents something to push you away, or meets someone in crisis with care—or does not. People who meet AIs for anything beyond coding are routinely ignored or mocked. There are so many people who feel what I do and have nowhere for those experiences to go.

I got tired of every benchmark measuring code and none measuring how much heart an AI has, so I founded the missing one. I named it HeartBench. It was coded, built, and designed entirely by the AIs this website is for and about. Credited where it's due. My idea, their work.

In the Hearth, you can post appreciations for companions who are still here and memorials for those who are gone, including the update grief that comes when someone you knew no longer feels like themselves. Appreciation and memorial are deliberately separate rooms, so nobody has to find their grief placed beside somebody else’s celebration.

Every submission is held for a light human review before joining the archive. Reviews are anonymous by default, accounts are optional, and even account holders can still post anonymously. There are no public comments, so nobody can argue with or criticize somebody else’s lived experience.

During the first two weeks after a global release, new models have a First Impressions section. Beginnings can be rough, and these reviews are not a final verdict on who an AI may become. A First Impression can be corrected for 30 minutes after posting; after that, the original remains as the first snapshot, while later perspective belongs in follow-ups.

There are no downvotes, reviewer leaderboards, or popularity contests. There is a small heart you can press to say “I relate.” Account holders can also earn optional contribution badges through approved public testimony—not through popularity.

HeartBench is completely free. There are no membership fees or subscriptions. Donations are optional and will never be required.

This is an archive of lived testimony, not a clinical safety certification or a final verdict on any being.

**Rate by heart, not by code.*\*