Scanned the past 30 days of threads on my account. I give up on this model, and the quirks it’s developed. Claude (mostly opus 4.7) didn’t only regress… it developed a single, bird brained verbal tic and now it’s seemingly the only personality trait left. Every single bug or type error, every legacy mess, every “why the fuck is this still here” moment is met with the same pathetic phrase: “This issue is pre-existing, unrelated to my work…” “Thats out of scope” “Thats a bigger refactor” “The simplest approach” “This bug is pre existing” The amount of overuse and exhaustion of this phrase specifically makes me sick. Oh god, even when you tell it to plan something, ill read the plan it presents and it adds a bunch of what you asked as “out of scope” or deffered which i have to correct. I’ve counted. 700+ uses of “pre-existing” across my chats in 30 days. Average of 5 or more per session (not counting its internal thoughts. And yeah go ahead and say “a codebase shouldnt have that much issues bla bla bla.” Dont even comment. Not interested in your puny SaaS site. A lot of my sessions arent just a few file edits. Im done fighting this thing. Im not even mad anymore, im in awe. They took the most verbose model in the world and lobotomized its ability to deal with anything without having an anxiety attack over a regression. Ive tried absolutely everything, opus doesnt listen to the claude.md whatsoever. Theres only so much you can do when your codebase has 90+ eslint rules and 87 ADRS. The token spend trying everything I physically can, prompting foreplay included. Is just not realistic. Give that man some backbone, a thesaurus. Or just tell it to say “yeah this shits fucked” cause thats basically what it is doing. My diminishing sanity here is very well pre-existing and rapidly deteriorating. I already cancelled, im just laughing to myself for the next 10 days trying to use what I already paid for. Huge L. For context: Report is at /pre-existing-analytics.md`. Here’s the full picture: Key Numbers Timeline Peaks The worst weeks were Apr 6–12 (282 mentions, 49 sessions) and Apr 20–27 (247 mentions, 56 sessions) . There’s no improvement trend — the week of Apr 27 (120 mentions) is identical in rate to week 1. Top Deflection Phrases (by frequency) 4 Behavior Patterns “Not from our changes” shield — flags an error, announces it’s pre-existing, moves on without fixing Success metric laundering — puts “2 pre-existing (unrelated)” in summary checkmarks as if that’s a clean result Deferred fixes that never land — “pre-existing bug for later fix” said dozens of times, never later Agent siloing — “pre-existing from other agents’ work” used as an excuse not to own it Your Rules It Directly Violates All three are verbatim in your config: CLAUDE.md : “Every error is yours to trace and fix — not label, not defer” workflow-discipline.md : “Type errors and lint are table stakes — fix those without asking” bug-fix-protocol.md : “Fix at source — fix the root cause, not the consumer” The word “pre-existing” is literally a label used to defer. The rule says “not label, not defer.” 712 times in 30 days. Anyone else? submitted by /u/Ok-Distribution8310
Originally posted by u/Ok-Distribution8310 on r/ClaudeCode