[tetraodonpuffer]

you can tell it how to do things, but sometimes it still goes out on its own, I have some variant of "do not deviate from the plan" and yet sometimes if you look while it's coding it will "ah, this is too hard as per the plan, let me take this shortcut" or "this previous test fails, but it's not an issue with my code I just wrote, so let's just 'fix' the test"

For simple scripts and simple self contained problems fully agenting in yolo mostly works, but as soon as it's an existing codebase or plans get more complex I find I have to handhold claude a lot more and if I leave it to its own devices I find things later. I have found also that having it update the plan with what it did AND afterwards review the plan it will find deviations still in the codebase.

Like the other day I had in the plan to refactor something due to data model changes, specifying very clearly this was an intentional breaking change (greenfield project under development), and it left behind all the existing code to preserve backwards compatibility, and actually it had many code contortions to make that happen, so much so I had to redo the whole thing.

Sometimes it does feel that Anthropic turns up/down the intelligence (I always run opus in high reasoning) but sometimes it seems it's just the nature of things, it is not deterministic, and sometimes it will just go off and do what it thinks it's best whether or not you prompt it not to (if you ask it later why it did that it will apologize with some variation of well it made sense at the time)