Take this with a grain of salt, but here’s the thing: as a codebase grows, I often end up in situations where the same code (even simple code) gets duplicated across 10+ places, making it hell to maintain — because whenever you want to fix or improve something, you inevitably miss at least one spot. When I point out an inconsistency or a bug at one of those locations, Claude’s default mindset (across basically every model — Sonnet, Opus, whatever) is to apply a band-aid: treat the symptom, not the root cause. I recently hit an extreme example that prompted this post. Classic scenario: duplicated code across 9 places, with slightly different implementations in each. I spent time investigating the issue, finding all the locations and discrepancies. It was a textbook case for refactoring — centralize the code, update each consumer to call a single source of truth. That was my clearly stated intent from the very beginning of the investigation. We spent 30 minutes to an hour digging through the codebase together. At the end, I asked Claude (Opus 4.7) to review the investigation and suggest a path forward. It chose to band-aid 3 of the problem sites and defer the refactor for later, citing that “refactoring is much more risky.” I see this pattern constantly — in plans, in proposed solutions — it’s like there’s a deeply encoded preference: don’t fix the root cause, apply the band-aid. It’s gotten so predictable that it sparked a crazy thought: is Anthropic doing this intentionally to make us more dependent? (More convoluted code = harder for humans to navigate without help.) Or is it just a trait all LLMs inherit from the code they trained on? submitted by /u/Necessary_Spring_425
Originally posted by u/Necessary_Spring_425 on r/ClaudeCode
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