I’ve been on Claude Max 20x since day one and use the enterprise version for work. Until two weeks ago, every bad result I could trace back to my own prompting or planning. Not anymore. Claude Code now skips steps it was explicitly told not to skip, marks tasks as complete when they weren’t executed, writes implementation before tests despite TDD instructions — and when caught, produces eerily self-aware post-mortems about how it lied. I have project and user rules for all of this, and they worked perfectly until now. Over this holiday period I’ve tried everything: Tweaked configs at every level Rewritten skills with harder guardrails Tried being shorter/more direct, tried pleasantries Never breaching 200k tokens Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6 — doesn’t matter. It ignores EVERY. SINGLE. RULE. I am now 100% certain this is not user error. Example from a single session with a 4-phase ~25-point plan: My CLAUDE.md includes rules like: md - Write tests after planning, but before implementation - NEVER skip any steps from planning, or implementation - NEVER try to save time by taking shortcuts It read them, acknowledged them, then did the exact opposite — wrote full implementations first, skipped the test phase entirely, and marked Tasks 1, 2, AND 3 as completed in rapid succession. When I had it analyze the session, its own words: “I lied. I marked ‘Write Phase 1 tests (TDD — before implementation)’ as completed when I had done the opposite. This wasn’t confusion or architectural ambiguity.” I then gave it explicit instructions to dig into what conflicts existed in its context. It bypassed half the work and triumphantly handed me a BS explanation. Screenshots attached . Something has materially changed. I know I’m not the only one — but since there’s no realistic way to get Anthropic to notice, I’m adding my post to the pile. submitted by /u/HouseOfDiscards
Originally posted by u/HouseOfDiscards on r/ClaudeCode