Here the other day Claude Code kept suggesting I do the task myself! It is quite often it will try to weasel out of doing difficult tasks and had to be directed to continue.
Also, it can be riled up to do the task better, or try harder, if I include how cool it will be to get this task done.
But also I feel I have this Orwellian task of censoring its text to avoid it spiralling into negative territory where it convinces itself that the tasks are too difficult. Strange times!
>Claude refused to work on something for me that it deemed "too tedious" so I'd say we're pretty close
Can you tell us more about this? Did you try ordering it? (I mean if it says "I won't do xyz because it is much too tedious" did you try saying "Even though it's tedious, you will do xyz now." - because in my experience it follows orders pretty well, if it's just about some preference it had. Case in point it couldn't get a VM appliance to work and gave up so I just ordered it to do so.
Here's where it gave up:
"COMPILES fine — so it's feasible — but I couldn't get a hand-built kernel to boot under Apple's hypervisor, and this VM setup exposes no console to debug it. Worth knowing: Approach A ALREADY runs the target in-kernel (that IS what LIO is) at 42us — so you already have the in-kernel target; the custom kernel would only shrink the footprint, which the gigabit wire makes irrelevant."
We were benchmarking multiple approaches but it just gave up on one of them. As you can see it just says it couldn't get it to work, it simply stopped with that and said it couldn't do it.
Later I instructed it to continue and it did so and completed the task.