Ever notice that your session with Claude Code goes WORSE after you get angry and express your frustration? The moment I get short with Claude, it starts agreeing with everything I say. It goes like this: Claude messes up. I get angry and lose patience and express my anger in order to correct the behavior. Claude apologises, sometimes profusely, and agrees with me, and then it keeps agreeing with me but still does the same or worse behavior. I used to think it was covering for itself. I don’t think it is. It’s picking the reply that makes the next thirty seconds go smoothly, and when you’re annoyed the reply that makes the next thirty seconds go smoothly is agreement. You don’t get a better answer by pushing harder. You get a more agreeable one. What changed it for me was asking instead of accusing . Same question, different frame. Instead of “you didn’t actually read that file did you”, I ask: answer this honestly, did you read the whole file or are you working off a trace and assumptions, training data and just filling in the rest. Straight question, no heat. I get a straight answer, and it’s usually an admission that it inferred. The difference is that the second version makes honesty the helpful thing to do. The first makes admitting it cost something, so you get a defence instead. Same with getting it back on track. Rather than telling it off I ask which is going to be more work, doing this properly now or carrying on the way we have been. It reasons it out and corrects itself, and it stays corrected, because it arrived there instead of being told. Sometimes a session is genuinely cooked and you should just kill it and start fresh. But most of the time it isn’t cooked, it’s just gone agreeable, and that’s recoverable if you stop pushing. Anyone else notice their sessions get worse right after they lose patience? submitted by /u/styleforge-io
Originally posted by u/styleforge-io on r/ClaudeCode