[croon]

I run Claude Max daily, and tried letting Opus 4.8 write an ADR with known requirements.

After searching through codebase, git history, etc it spat out a surface level reasonable ADR, with the customary bloated text.

I started reading through it asking "Is this sentence needed?: '<sentence>'", whereby it acknowledges that no, it adds nothing and changes nothing not already served by other statements. I ask it to go through each sentence one by one asking the same question. It claims to do so, and give me two suggestions to remove in the entire document.

I then spend a few more minutes giving 10 additional sentences manually that it happily acknowledges are redundant.

I ask why those weren't removed in my previous prompt, and frankly I can't remember specifically what rationalization it gave, I assume because it's not memorable because there can be none, because it very obviously is not reasoning.

[mapontosevenths]

Compact the context and try again, or switch to the model with the 1 million token context. They all struggle after a hugge task like rying to make sense of a large codebase. Claude is especially poor at knowing when to compact on it's own.

[croon]

It has 1M context, and it's not a huge codebase, and the context is sub 10% for a thorough task. This is an LLM issue, not a model/harness issue.

I've run copilot/gemini/pi/opencode/etc for a long time, against all major providers. Don't get me wrong, I get good productivity out of it or I wouldn't use it, but it's very different from intelligence.