There has been some discussion about this topic lately, and I understand there is a lot of nuance, such as what projects you work on and over what scale and time frame… Below is my experience. Feel free to just not read it and post yours, that’s fine. TL;DR:
- I started spec driven, tried to keep it minimal
- My workflow got more and more complex over time, driven by models that needed detailed guidance and guardrails
- Opus/Sonnet 5 choked on my workflow, and communication with the agent became a bottleneck
- Opus/Sonnet 5.5 fixed it by communicating better and being more proactive
- I no longer see the need to massively simplify my workflow and will stick to small, gradual cleanup I have had a project going for months. Workflow files turned from AGENTS.md and a few rule files into a complex machinery of workflows. The spec-deiven stumbling stones. My problem right now isn’t token usage. I’m on a Max subscription and I can barely use it all, because I don’t have infinite time, and planning, testing and high level review are time-heavy, not token-heavy. No workflow and no AI can fix that for my type of project, which is fine. My main time sink caused by AI has always been communication. Agents want me to make decisions and point out problems. Some of them are serious, some are trivial, and some are stumbling stones in the form of too strictly formulated requirements or rules, sometimes coming from these being AI written. A classic example is AI producing lists of things, which are then interpreted as closed lists, or lists that have to be maintained, when there was no need for a list in the first place. This is the most common source of totally unnecessary drift and friction. All of thee problems have, at least until recently in the Claude 5.0/5.1 era, been amplified by cryptic communication. Agent hits a contradiction that would be easy to solve, or a real design problem, prints out some Claudish word salad, and I’m supposed to judge if I need to step in and make a decision or say “just fix it, duh”. How it is going? Things seem to have improved just by themselves recently. I haven’t changed my workflow. I am using 5.5 models now. What I’m seeing now, mostly, is the following: The agent says: “I made the following judgement calls”. So it proactively makes decisions that may break rules or have far reaching co sequences. And usually the decisions are sane. But the most important part is that it communicates them well now, in a way I usually immediately understand without having to ask basic questions. It also lists what it didn’t do, often because it would be borderline out of scope or break rules, not just randomly, and it does ask for permission sometimes before doing a job, but no longer about every small thing. When it asks, it is usually worth giving the question some thought, and I’ve burned my fingers (and some tokens) answering too quickly (no big deal, failing with AI is failing cheaply). So, the main improvement of the 5.5 models (I use both Sonnet and Opus) was communication clarity, and communicating the right things, exactly what I needed. And I no longer see the need to cut down massively on rules and workflow descriptions, other than, maybe, for saving tokens and speeding things up a bit. Claude can think out of the box now. Spec-driven development is “fixed” (for now). Oh, and a certain other model (that I won’t name, because it will alert the moderator bots) has gone the opposite way and become at least temporarily unusable. We’ll see when the pendulum swings back. submitted by /u/EC36339
Originally posted by u/EC36339 on r/ClaudeCode
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