When doing my /worklog and /changelog commands, agents always tended to be overly verbose. I had plenty of “Do This” and “Don’t Do That” style examples but Claude ALWAYS tended to justify ridiculously long and complex run-on sentences to cram as much information into its worklog summaries or my client-facing changelog as possible. It drove me nuts, and no amount of tweaking the prompt seemed to work. Until one day, about a month ago, I had an idea to include this line: Ask yourself: “If each word cost $0.25, would I spend my budget on this sentence?” If not, cut it. This ONE change suddenly got main Claude agents and subagents to snap back into really tight, concise verbiage and easily digestible summaries. Something about “you have to pay money for each word you use” really seemed to get these agents to evaluate what they were writing in ways that the previous prompts had not. A month in, and my worklog.md and changelog.md is easily scannable, directly relevant, and doesn’t drone on. Just thought I’d share in case anyone else wants to try it! submitted by /u/callmejace
Originally posted by u/callmejace on r/ClaudeCode