kept seeing the “took 15 tries to fix one bug” threads and honestly I had the same experience for a while, until I realized the model wasn’t the problem, the context was. here’s what’s happening. once a single chat fills up with failed attempts, the model starts reasoning off its own pile of wrong answers. it reads all that earlier garbage as if it’s the truth and keeps digging in the same dead end. so it’s not that it can’t solve the problem, it’s that it’s drowning in its own history. the fix that changed everything for me is stupidly simple. the moment it misses twice, I stop. I don’t keep replying in the same thread hoping it course corrects, because it won’t. I copy out the relevant code or context, start a completely fresh session, and paste it in clean. nine times out of ten it solves it almost immediately, and people mistake that for “the other model is smarter” when really it just got fresh eyes instead of a poisoned context. same logic is why swapping to ChatGPT mid bug feels magic. it’s not always a better brain, it’s a context with no baggage. rule of thumb I follow now: never trust the model past the halfway point of its context window, and never let it fail more than twice in one thread before resetting. curious what everyone else’s reset trigger is. two strikes? a certain token count? feel like nobody talks about this enough. submitted by /u/zhangwenbao
Originally posted by u/zhangwenbao on r/ClaudeCode