[joshstrange]

As with all of these cure-alls, I'm wary. Mostly I'm wary because I anticipate the developer will lose interest in very little time and also because it will just get subsumed into CC at some point if it actually works. It might take longer but changing my workflow every few days for the new thing that's going to reduce MCP usage, replace it, compress it, etc is way too disruptive.

I'm generally happy with the base Claude Code and I think running a near-vanilla setup is the best option currently with how quickly things are moving.

[antdke]

Agreed. Projects like these tend to feel shortsighted.

Lately, I lean towards keeping a vanilla setup until I’m convinced the new thing will last beyond being a fad (and not subsumed by AI lab) or beyond being just for niche use cases.

For example, I still have never used worktrees and I barely use MCPs. But, skills, I love.

[peacebeard]

In my view an unappreciated benefit of the vanilla setup is you can get really accustomed to the model’s strengths and weaknesses. I don’t need a prompt to try to steer around these potholes when I can navigate on my own just fine. I love skills too because they can be out of the way until I decide to use them.

[levocardia]

I also share something of an "efficient market hypothesis" with regards to Claude Code. Given that Anthropic is basically a hothouse of geniuses recursively dogfooding their own product, the market pressure to make the vanilla setup be the one that performs best at writing code is incredibly high. I just treat CLAUDE.md like my first draft memo to a very smart remote colleague, let Claude do all its various quirks, and it works really well.

[swimmingbrain]

The "efficient market" framing assumes Anthropic wants to minimize output, but they don't. They charge per token, so the defaults being verbose isn't a bug they haven't gotten around to fixing.

That said, most of this repo is solving the wrong problem. "Answer before reasoning" actively hurts quality, and the benchmark is basically meaningless. But the anti-sycophancy rules should just be default. "Great Question!" has never really helped anyone debug anything.

[g947o]

Gemini CLI is notorious for being verbose (or was, I haven't used it for a while), and many people don't want to use Gemini for that reason alone.

So the market kind of works in this instance.

[gavinray]

  > "because it will just get subsumed into CC at some point if it actually works."

This is the sharp-bladed axe of reason I've used against all of these massive "prompt frameworks" and "superprompts".

Anthropic's survival depends on Claude Code performing as well as it can, by all metrics.

If the Very Smart People working on CC haven't integrated a feature or put text into the System Prompt, it's probably because it doesn't improve performance.

Put another way: The product is probably as optimized as it can get when it comes out the box, and I'm skeptical about claims otherwise without substantial proof.

[mlrtime]

Claude also has it's own md optimizer that I believe is continually updated.

So you could run these 'cure-alls' that maybe relevant today, as long as you are constantly updating your md files, you should be ahead of the curve [lack of better term]

[annie511266728]

The hidden cost with all of these "fix Claude" layers is that your workflow keeps moving underneath you.

Even when one helps, you're still betting it won't be obsolete or rolled into the defaults a few weeks from now.