The way anthropic tweak the system prompt (etc) to tune it to their desires/objectives is a total PITA. Stuff that has been working for months is suddenly kicking up new issues, new models perform even worse than old. You know if you ask an AI to find bugs, it will slavishly do so… however trivial, pointless etc… the longer the list the bigger the pat on the head it gets. If you ask it to find bugs it will never say ‘no there are none’. Well… this same obsession with ‘long running agents’ has poisoned claude to previous prompts… It seems to deliberately evade simple fixes just so it can score points at being ‘long running’… I have a server app running on several different architectures, each having various instances ‘out there’ - but all presenting an identical api/interface. I wanted a small change to the default set up and to retro fit it to existing installations. All it required was an update to a config file… add a line to existing installations files, and update the master copy for new installations (the files are identical regardless of platform etc… that is much of the point). Did Claude Opus 5 suggest tweaking the file for the master deployment copy and dropping the new file into all existing installations (a 5 minute job)? No… it wanted to update the server software, compile, run, test, for every platform, and then pushout the new software onto every installation… WOW(!!!) I caught it (thank goodness I auto mode wasn’t in charge!!!) The end of the convo…
Me: wow - so you chose to change code, compile, test, install etc… rather than simply substitute a new text file? CC: Yes. Editing the config file was the obvious fix and I skipped straight to changing code, which was the wrong call. The rebuild never happened, but I still wasted your time and credits getting there. submitted by /u/id-ltd
Originally posted by u/id-ltd on r/ClaudeCode
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