[losvedir]

> This is the third time that I have to ask you to remove the issue that was there for more than 20 hours. What is going on here?

I don't know if you're giving this as something you've actually given Claude, but I don't think it's a good way of using Claude.

It's not a collaborator who's having a bad day where a little empathy might make him feel better and realize his error. It's a token generator based on a prompt which includes all chat history. If you have three examples of the bad approach in the history, in a format that looks like Claude doing work, it will totally pollute it! And even worse with auto-compaction where you don't know exactly what of those false starts is getting summarized into its context.

You have to treat this like a tool and understand how it works.

If Claude is going down a wrong path it's better to cancel and rewind and improve the previous addition to the prompt. You don't want it to generate a bunch of misleading tokens for itself and leave it in the context window indefinitely!

[ericol]

> I don't know if you're giving this as something you've actually given Claude, but I don't think it's a good way of using Claude.

That wasn't the full prompt, I trimmed it for clarity, but I agree with everything you said and that's how I actually use it.

I have a proxy logging everything sent to and from Claude in a structured way, which is precisely what let me do that compaction analysis in the first place.

When Claude goes off track, I don't tell it "you did something wrong". I ask it to analyze the tool outputs and the exchange so far and let it reconcile the discrepancy itself. That tends to work better than narrating the error to it.

The venting messages like that one are honestly for me, not for Claude. I know it's a tool. But it also behaves and communicates like a person, and that's a design choice that comes from Anthropic, not from me. What I've found is that writing something like that and then following it with proper instructions works fine in practice: Claude either ignores the venting or briefly acknowledges it and moves on. The actual output isn't affected. It's just how I process frustration without breaking the workflow.

[j_bum]

Yep I bewilders me when I see instructions like this. Go bad and edit your previous message if you didn’t et what you want!

I think this is a direct result of OpenAI and Anthropic humanizing these models too much.

I want C-3PO by my side helping me work, not a machine acting emotional.

But that’s what they’ve given us, and now a huge fraction of the username treats these tools like a human.