Just ran into something and this is purely anecdotal but it might help some of you out there. I work on many different projects, code bases and customers as part of my job. Which means I have a pretty sparse global claude.md file but each project usually has a pretty well-defined project-level claude.md file (and supporting references like coding standards, etc). I was working on a quick feature for a project I haven’t been in for about a month and it really felt like Opus 5 was on the struggle bus. It wasn’t doing anything inherently wrong just really felt like it was grepping around unnecessarily, it’s sort of internal monologue spent a lot of “Ah I see” and then “Nope I was wrong” back and forth. I don’t think I would have thought to do this if I hadn’t just watched Boris Cherny’s talk at Y Combinator just this morning. I stopped what it was doing and started a new session and I asked it to audit the existing claude.md for the project as well as the handful of skills that were in the project for any unnecessary instructions or if any instructions and supporting references could be written differently. After a few minutes it’s proposed changes removed about 40 lines from a 90 line claude.md , significantly trimmed several supporting documents about how the system is/should be built. It also told me two of my skills were “honestly unnecessary”. The skills are workflow and reporting related. I backed some things up, had it make the changes, started a new session and gave it the exact same copy/pasted prompt (very scientific of me). The previous attempt floundered for several minutes and this finished in about a minute. I think Opus 5 might really need less direction than before and some guardrails that were previously effective may actually have created problems. tl;dr Might be time to review the “setup that has always worked” as it might be introducing problems with Opus 5. submitted by /u/papabear556
Originally posted by u/papabear556 on r/ClaudeCode
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