Hi guys! Been using Claude for a bit and I kept running into the same thing: I’d ask for something simple and get back a solution that felt way overkill for what I actually needed. Example from this week: I wanted to dedupe articles I scrape from a few sources. In my head it’s a quick job: send a batch to an LLM and ask “are these the same topic?”, or use some fuzzy matching lib, move on. What I got was a whole thing about embedding services, vector stores, making sure no duplicate ever surfaces again. I have, like, 500 articles, not 5 million. This kept happening so I started messing around with ways to keep it more grounded to save my time. Stuff that actually helped: Give it a “good enough” bar upfront. “~500 articles, fine if some slip through, want this done in an hour” gets a totally different answer than just “help me dedupe articles.” If you don’t say it, it assumes high stakes and goes big. Tell it what mode you’re in. “Just brainstorming, react to this” vs “I want to ship this today” should land differently. In brainstorm mode it’ll poke holes in your idea. In build mode it should just help you build the thing. Ask for the dumb version first. Literally: “what’s the dumbest thing that could work?” then I’ll write sth like “okay where would this break for my case?” Works way better than hoping it lands at the right complexity on the first try. Stick it in your system prompt. Something like: “default to the simplest thing that works for what I described. don’t suggest more complex stuff unless I ask or unless the simple version clearly won’t work for my use case.” Saves you repeating it every time. Just call it out. If it still goes too big after you’ve given context, say “this is too much for what I need.” It corrects fast. You don’t need a spec, a one-liner usually does it. Let me know if you have more tips like that. I think it’s often about making up my mind first, then giving instructions. I switched mentally from Claude being the “powerful AI” to Claude being the “outlier junior dev”. submitted by /u/radosuave
Originally posted by u/radosuave on r/ClaudeCode
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