[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.