I’m bullish on coding agents but diff length kills me. What are your best tricks for keeping diffs small? I’ve been a dev for a long time and have written and reviewed a lot of code. More than once I’ve seen a feature that could be done in ~100 lines come back from Claude Code as a 2,500-line diff. It works and the tests pass, but it’s much more code than the feature needs. Often the best solution is one clever line. Or it’s noticing that a small generalization of an existing component unlocks the new behavior for free. The agent tends to do the opposite: it adds a lot of new logic, often near-duplicates of what’s already there, to force the new behavior in. I’ve tried to force the behavior using CLAUDE.md and skills, but no luck. What’s working for you? I’d also like to know if others see this too, or if it’s just my codebase. submitted by /u/dmpiergiacomo
Originally posted by u/dmpiergiacomo on r/ClaudeCode
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