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I even have a specific, non-negotiable phase in the process where model MUST interview me, and create an interview file with everything captured. Plan file it produces must always include this file as an artifact and interview takes the highest precedence.

Otherwise, the intent gets lost somewhere in the chat transcript.

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The raw Q&A is essential. I think Q & Q works so we'll because it reveals how the model is "thinking" about what you're working on, which allows for correction and guidance upfront.
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I've recently started adding something along the lines of "if you can't find or don't know something, don't assume. Ask me." It's helped cut down on me having to tell it to undo or redo things a fair amount. I also have used something like, "Other agents have made mistakes with this. You have to explain what you think we're doing so I can approve." It's kind of stupid to have to do this, but it really increases the quality of the output when you make it explain, correct mistakes, and iterate until it tells you the right outcome before it operates.

Edit: forgot "don't assume"

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Dammit that’s why I could never get it to not try to one shot answers, it’s in the god damn system prompt… and it explains why no amount of user "system" prompt could fix this behavior.
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Having to "unprompt" behaviour I want that Anthropic thinks I don't want is getting out of hand. My system prompts always try to get Claude to clarify _more_.
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I usually need to remind it 5 times to do the opposite - because it makes decisions that I don't like or that are harmful to the project—so if it lands in Claude Code too, I have hard times ahead.

I try to explicitly request Claude to ask me follow-up questions, especially multiple-choice ones (it explains possible paths nicely), but if I don't, or when it decides to ignore the instructions (which happens a lot), the results are either bad... or plain dangerous.

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it is a big problem that many I know face every day. sometimes we are just wondering are we the dumb ones since the demo shows everything just works.
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> I've tried stuff like these in my prompts, and the results are never good

I've found that Google AI Mode & Gemini are pretty good at "figuring it out". My queries are oft times just keywords.

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well, clarifying means burning more tokens...
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Seriously, when you're conversing with a person would you prefer they start rambling on their own interpretation or would you prefer they ask you to clarify? The latter seems pretty natural and obvious.

Edit: That said, it's entirely possible that large and sophisticated LLMs can invent some pretty bizarre but technically possible interpretations, so maybe this is to curb that tendency.

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> The latter seems pretty natural and obvious.

To me too, if something is ambigious or unclear when I'm getting something to do from someone, I need to ask them to clarify, anything else be borderline insane in my world.

But I know so many people whose approach is basically "Well, you didn't clearly state/say X so clearly that was up to me to interpret however I wanted, usually the easiest/shortest way for me", which is exactly how LLMs seem to take prompts with ambigiouity too, unless you strongly prompt them to not "reasonable attempt now without asking questions".

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I have a fun little agent in my tmux agent orchestration system - Socratic agent that has no access to codebase, can't read any files, can only send/receive messages to/from the controlling agent and can only ask questions.

When I task my primary agent with anything, it has to launch the Socratic agent, give it an overview of what are we working on, what our goals are and what it plans to do.

This works better than any thinking tokens for me so far. It usually gets the model to write almost perfectly balanced plan that is neither over, nor under engineered.

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Sounds pretty neat! Is there an written agent.md for that you could share for that?
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When you’re staffing work to a junior, though, often it’s the opposite.
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So you are saying they are trying for the whole Artificial Intern vibe ?
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—So what would theoretically happen if we flipped that big red switch?

—Claude Code: FLIPS THE SWITCH, does not answer the question.

Claude does that in React, constantly starting a wrong refactor. I’ve been using Claude for 4 weeks only, but for the last 10 days I’m getting anger issues at the new nerfing.

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Yeah this happens to me all the time! I have a separate session for discussing and only apply edits in worktrees / subagents to clearly separate discuss from work and it still does it
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