So I’ve gotten my app to substantial size where its functionality is too complex to be understood holistically by Claude: whereas in the beginning it understood the basic premise of the app completely, now it struggles to see the “big picture” and I seem to run into all sorts of bottlenecks because of this. Some can be solved by planning well the architecture and refactoring the project into neat, separatable modules, some can be solved by scoping the session to a specific feature, but some seem really vague to me because of how Claude ‘reasons’, here’s what I mean: I’ve been reading carefully the ‘thinking’ part of Claude’s workflow and I’ve noticed that the bigger the codebase got, the more often he uses the type of phrases you see in the title. There’s the whole “Actually, I think the user might mean…”, “Hmm, but looking at the code,…” and “I think the user’s correction is about my language” part where Claude is genuinely trying to comprehend what is happening, but then he inevitably runs into one of the “I’m overthinking this” phrases, which wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t notice that he does it RIGHT BEFORE getting to the core problem! I see that his reasoning is going the right direction, that he’s almost gotten to the point of seeing the core of the issue, within the context of what he’s currently thinking about, but then he just noncommittally gives up, saying that he’s over-complicating stuff. Why? Why is this happening? Is it because Claude tracks internally how fast the combinatorics of issues spike up with the routes he’s considering to reason through and decides that this path breeds too much complexity, or is it some language-matching pattern where the evaluation tells him that he’s gotten into an idea-space where words he considers diverse too much from the words utilized in the problem we’re currently trying to solve? I saw him do it many times: investigate an issue, almost get at the core of it, but then completely dismiss the chain of reasoning he just did to explore some simpler explanation that is indeed ‘easier’, but just not right. Has anyone here thought about similar problems before? Has anyone put measures in place to ensure Claude explores these possibilities thoroughly before committing to other options? What’re your experiences with this specific phenomenon? Claude’s anticommitism is very frustrating. submitted by /u/Spooky-Shark
Originally posted by u/Spooky-Shark on r/ClaudeCode