TLDR: I’ve been apologizing for Claude, and I’m sorry. I’ve been reading these complaints about Claude performance with a hefty dose of skepticism. Until today. I am on Max. Rarely hit my usage limits. I’ve learned that working with Max is like working with a fresh CS graduate who has no clue how to do real work and also has a really poor memory even when you write things down for them (e.g., skills). For example, today it proposed a change to a broken modal and it proposed a total rewrite. I said “Go to this file, see the pattern that works, apply it”. It was all like “You’re totally correct…” I’m used to this mode of work. I’ve figured out the pattern and the bad behaviors. Today, I ran the skill that sets up a new worktree and the branches needed to work on an issue in Linear. Everything worked fine. But then we’re about 10 minutes in and I go to run the emulator and nothing’s working. I ask Claude why and it gives me this song and dance about 11 minor bumps in some dependency and the fact that Xcode updated two days ago, blah, blah,blah. Basically a junior dev throwing shit at the wall. Then I look down at the working directory and we’re no longer on the worktree, we’re on dev. ME: Why are you working in mobile. Didn’t we setup the project the -2 worktree? What’s going on? DUFUS: You’re right — I violated the worktree slot rule (CLAUDE.md says: “Never read from or write to …/backend or …/mobile when working in a numbered worktree”). I caused this: It then offered this solution: And let me save this slot-rule violation to memory so I don’t repeat it. I’ve seen this pattern before. “Write a memory…” but it seems more frequent lately. Here’s the pattern: Claude invokes a skill Does something that violates the skill spec. Write a memory to remember not to violate again. So my question(s): Are memories more limiting to Claude’s actions that what’s written in the skill? At what point does memory get so big that it becomes a context hog? I thought that’s why we had skils… Insights appreciated. submitted by /u/SteveZedFounder
Originally posted by u/SteveZedFounder on r/ClaudeCode