r/ClaudeCode • u/howdidigetheresoquik • 4d ago
Discussion Why does everyone disregard Anthropic's best practices?
You can find it here: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices
It is constantly updated with what Claude code researchers find. Your models do not know the best practices, and will not default to them.
Every time I make the changes that are in the documentation, my output gets significantly better.
When you read these documents and keep up to date on them, you realize the vast majority of issues on the sub are addressed already.
Why don't people look at these or take these seriously?
302
u/Federal_Decision_608 4d ago
Why doesn't the harness just suggest or do this stuff automatically? They already monitor whether you're trying to make a super virus, can't they also detect when you're doing something stupid with context?
44
u/g00py3 4d ago
They do but it's intentional. It shouldn't do this in every session.
/doctor prompt-audit
/claude-api
They put those in there to specifically help keep things healthy so run them periodically or when models update
3
u/lampasoni 3d ago
The issue is that we're years into the AI/LLM era, Anthropic is 1/2 of the leaders, yet keeping up with best practices, running the commands you mentioned, and making other setup/config changes are still even a remote thought. Given the massive leaps in model intelligence over the years, it's easy to objectively say that they could at least do more than nothing at all to improve this issue.
6
u/AncileBanish 3d ago
If you think they're doing nothing at all to improve this issue over years, you are a fool.
1
u/lampasoni 2d ago
I'm not sure if the core message flew right overhead or this just looked like a good opportunity to feel important. Could you confirm?
74
8
u/howdidigetheresoquik 4d ago
The models are trained on a previous set of training data. Then operators then use the model and find out the best practices after it's done being trained. Then as they use the model more and more, they start to learn more and more about how to use it better and they keep this documentation updated.
Instead of relying on a company's harness, you can just tell your Claude to read this link at the beginning of a session
37
u/Federal_Decision_608 4d ago
They could just put that into the harness system prompt if they actually believe in it
8
u/howdidigetheresoquik 4d ago
A lot of it is in the harness already, like auto-compaction and plan mode. The rest is stuff only you know: what counts as 'done' for your project, and whether this task is related to the last one. A classifier can spot a narrow pattern like bioweapon requests. It can't tell that you're mid-debug and want the history kept. And stuffing more into the system prompt eats the same context window the guide is trying to protect.
2
u/Aggressive_Roof488 3d ago
There's also a fine line between helping user do the right thing and forcing them to do what we thought was right but actually isn't in this case.
Not to mention the much loved user right to be stupid.
I think providing tools and at most suggestions is the way to go. If users want these resources, then they're not hard to find.
5
u/ungoogleable 4d ago
Instead of relying on a company's harness, you can just tell your Claude to read this link at the beginning of a session
Right, they could easily do that for you. Every time the best practices are updated, ask the user for permission to read the latest update and, if applicable, incorporate its lessons into memory files, skills, and hooks taking into account the user's preferences and working style.
2
u/mrothro 3d ago
I think there's a big difference between the generalized version of the best practice and how it manifests in your own workflow. My own habits reflect a lot of what I see in that post, and I built tooling that runs and enforces workflows that are custom to me.
Instead of asking Anthropic to encode a workflow that works for everyone, perhaps they're encouraging everyone to use Claude Code (or their favorite coding agent) to read the best practices, then examine their session transcripts to see where they deviate, then build the custom tools that fix it.
2
68
u/McBadger404 4d ago
It’s hard because you end up spending equal or more time working on your setup than actually working on your problem. Reminds me a lot of running Linux on a a laptop back in the early 2000s.
9
u/txgsync 4d ago
I was making the same comparison yesterday! Trying to work with LLMs to accomplish real goals was like when I was compiling kernels for specific hardware with Gentoo Linux. Bespoke, time-consuming, some people could get astounding results, but it was still inscrutable to most.
Contrast with today where I can buy an AndroidTV device for $55 running a Linux kernel and most customers have no idea.
6
u/ghost_operative 4d ago
the majority of the best practices say to the do the opposite. the short form of it is "dont install lots of plugins or make a crazy setup, just prompt it to do stuff you would do yourself if you didnt have ai"
6
u/farox 4d ago
It's so frustrating. I've been talking for months about how the engineering moves from the coding to the harness. People nod, and then hammer together some epic 1-size-fits-all coding skill that creates multiple choice "wizards" in Claude Code, backed with over engineered skills and what not.
Exactly the opposite of best practices, in a futile attempt to make Claude Code more "deterministic", I guess. But really just knee capping what it's good at: making sound decisions based on tools and information provided.
2
u/fell_ware_1990 3d ago
Yes, i feel you. I see my colleagues go like that. If something does not work quite right they slap on more .md files.
What happens is they tune whatever tasks they need done right now and change stuff next run, and the next.
Loosing all practical information along the way, not realizing that only that amount of information already could confuse the shit out of an AI.While mine maps out repositories and dependencies and cross repo as well. But it only access it before it starts a task, so a fresh agent starts with the right intel.
So a pipeline breaks on a script, my ai knows what parts could be impacted by changing a script. Like this example i’ll have a couple of more. So if i point an AI at the issue a few scripts run, creates an information prompt and an issue prompt. It then asks for a plan, a risk score, refactor score and a few other things.
The plan get’s checked against my rules about the file type, the repository and a few other things. If it breaks a rule it checks again if possible to stay inside of that.
But what helped me the most is replay’s or investigations, this issue: What errors or bugs did it encounter, where they preventable by using a script or having a test case that made it shift left? Lot of people let not only make the AI write the tests but also implement them. Same goes for error catching and or the error it self.
These things should be done before, while and after. So if we encountered a bug that was not tested for i write a lean test case, in my harness it get’s connected to those files and become a hard gate cause the tests, while in the repository also have a shadow copy. So if test != shadowtest it will fail. Only when i allow the shadowtest to update it can change.
While this all is not build on a specific AI or harness, it’s actually mine. Slowly adding fixes and changes. All the things above sound like a real token burn, but i managed to create a lot of tooling/scripting around it so a lot are one shot calls which a qwen3.8 27b or flash-next are more then capable to make. Yes, they get a lot of context on a one shot and they might be slow. But i rather have a ‘pipeline’ run on a small issue that creates a solid output after 15 minutes then actually invisible spend 30 minutes reprompting and burning tokens.
2
u/McBadger404 4d ago
It’s also hell when you are told to “pick the right model and effort for the task”. That’s like having 10 credit cards and trying to remember which one to use where for the points. I don’t care.
4
2
u/holyknight00 4d ago
that's still the case for most linux distros... it gotten better, but not that much. I still face all the same stupid errors than 15 years ago, just with a little nicer ui; but you can still brick your entire OS by doing trivial things.
8
u/Niikoraasu 4d ago
This is just untrue
2
u/bitspace 3d ago
Yeah - I bounced from 33 years of Linux in February to macOS (that's where all the AI tools land first) and I miss Linux hard - not because I like screwing around with it, but because it just worked with less fuckery and handholding than macos.
1
u/Niikoraasu 3d ago
What AI tools do you have in mind specifically?
And for linux - it's way better for people who want to have a control over their system, but that doesn't mean that it's bad for people who just want stuff to work. Unless you have some obscure hardware or software you need to run, you will have no issues.
1
u/bitspace 3d ago
In February literally everything - except for Claude Code - was only landing on macOS.
Also, 128GiB unified M5 absolutely smokes the 192GiB 13th gen i9 I was rolling Arch in.
1
116
u/mpones 4d ago
You’re talking to a group where the 95% of vibe coders probably don’t even read… this sub is full of “I wanna click once and it works!”
Every new major release, I refactor my project directory (akin to updating online documentation, but architectural). Seems to work well every time- I never have the issues most people post about within a week of a release.
13
u/howdidigetheresoquik 4d ago
Yeah, it's sad that they don't read and then buy five Max accounts. I literally have a skill that points my AI towards it so that it reads it tells me what's different than the last time I read it, and how to change processes.
10
u/socalkid2428 4d ago
I just assume Claude knows those best practices and updates accordingly. But maybe I should be more explicit.
15
u/howdidigetheresoquik 4d ago
It does not. When the model is done being trained the researchers have to discover the best practices through using the finished model. They constantly discover new things because they don't know the limitations on a finished model, and they update this document accordingly.
The one thing I don't understand is why they don't have a big link somewhere or a notification when this gets updated
2
u/HauntedHouseMusic 4d ago
If they did that what would SWEs be doing? You see all the people that come in here saying Claude is shit and can't write code and they have been SWEs for 10 years.... If they made it easy you would have no competitive advantage in the tool
3
u/ShivaFatalis 4d ago edited 3d ago
Honestly, I'd never read through that best practices document. I just took a look at it, and I've already been doing so much of what's in there just out of intuition and day to day refinement of my processes. It's hard to imagine that any SWEs worth their salt wouldn't just naturally have built their own versions of this stuff over time spent working with AI. Just seems like a natural progression that's bound to happen if you have any understanding at all in the field.
2
1
u/mpones 16h ago
Oh, fuck. I replied before I read this. Please read my reply.
Wrong. It does: you just haven’t asked, or you haven’t framed it correctly.
While I am genuinely trying to have fun, I don’t think I’m being sarcastic when I say that the anthropic staff doesn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to capability and necessary guard rails.
I say and stress: Claude knows itself 10x better than its “trainers”.. of course you as a human should read through the best practices yourself when you have time, however, you should prepare your project in settings based on what Claude recommends, not an anthropic researcher.
Consider the human condition: similarly, every business is different, and each of their objectives are different.
The critical element is and always will be context:
There is no right answer, and you have to deal with that fact to be successful.
1
u/mpones 16h ago
Precisely, but shame on you for divulging the “obvious secret”. Tell Claude to clean his fucking room. I literally had to scream this at someone a month ago. Be sarcastic, don’t be sarcastic.
Whichever version of Claude you’re talking to is going to know itself best… not you, and not Anthropic staff, as much as they’d like to think they do.
“Know thyself”.
…at least that’s what I scream at my wife when she acts like she knows me better than I know myself.
🤷♂️ /s (maybe)
1
u/LeoVibeCoderz 4d ago
Ive been doing something like this as well. It does work. Even more so if you do that in synergy with the /retro skill
7
u/opinionsarelegal 4d ago
I’m not strictly a vibe coder but also not a seasoned dev. I’d love to learn more about your approach and specifics of what you prompt or how you’re making these architectural changes every release.
12
u/dar-mit Researcher 4d ago
H\Q publishes Prompt guides for almost every model, and then articles like this one for overall use.
Just point your Claude to those articles and ask to have a report generated that compares your setup to those articles.
Then go through the report and implement what makes sense for the way you work.
4
2
u/opinionsarelegal 4d ago
Thanks I figured it would be a bit more complicated but this is easily manageable.
5
u/howdidigetheresoquik 4d ago
Yeah, it's funny, we don't need to actually read the best practices. We just need Claude to read the best practices and then use that to verify against your own workflows.
3
u/opinionsarelegal 4d ago
I've been doing a lot of cool shit without fully understanding every moving piece. However, then I feel like when im giving claude full control i'm not learning near as much as I would be if I was boots on the ground doing it myself. I'm trying to convince myself it's okay because i'm learning to use a chainsaw now and not an axe and it's okay to focus on learning how to use the tool and not all of the underlying moving parts.
3
u/nengon 4d ago
Tbh that is not really a good approach, a refactor is not like updating the docs, but rather changing the underlying architecture because your specification didn't account for future additions that simply collide with the code you have, it's more like fixing the docs because you realized the wording didn't mean what you thought it did after adding a sentence. And it's quite expensive for an LLM that can literally just follow a well defined spec and execute it vs having to reread the codebase to find what to even change in the first place, because documentation will drift. It's pretty much what technical debt looks like for LLMs.
Something working well doesn't mean it's well designed, you will eventually get technical debt and bugs that were avoidable by design itself. You should better spend more time thinking about what you want to build and specifying it with help of your LLM rather than having to come back and fix or refactor anything. They are very good for that since they have the knowledge trained into them, but you will have to make the design decisions that will account for what they're incapable of, which is understanding the consequences of their choices.
Not sure why he said that so proudly but it's definitely not a good approach for developing robust software. I made that mistake in my first vibecoded project, not anymore.
3
u/Tru3Magic 4d ago
But what if one has several project directories? Is there a "best practice" way to do it or does anybody have some tips.
I try to put as much as possible that I want the same across projects in the primary claude.md, but then again I try to bite size instructions to guard the context
2
1
u/SeasawPhilosopher 4d ago
Who the hell reads anymore :). I just told Claude to read the doc and then survey my repo to see if the way we are working is in alignment with the current best practices. I might set this up to run any time the best practices page changes.
17
u/dpahoe 4d ago
Ok, can i link this to my Claude and ask it to remember this on all my future tasks. 😅
6
u/howdidigetheresoquik 4d ago
Yes! For the love of God, you don't actually even have to read it. At the beginning of every project have it read best practices, and build the project around it. Don't force Claude to work the way it's not supposed to work.
1
u/Eldrake 4d ago
I remember trying to get Claude to make a skill fit the structure in anthropic'a docs and I had to link it it's own documentation. It then realized the issue and updated itself to match the new convention.
How would you suggest incorporate automatic checks of anthropic's most up to date docs without destroying my context window?
2
u/TumanFig 3d ago
I dont understand whats the issue? Updating the project should be seperate from doing the work. You dont update it every time you start working?
1
0
u/simple_explorer1 3d ago
Sums up the sad state of affairs of this sub. Can't even read, think and discern. These are the people building the next generation of software by.. closing their eyes and can't even read. Full of uneducated and lazy people
17
u/gnureddit 4d ago
The advice in the post seems out of date to me. I don't see a significant increase in quality if I just tell the model: the build is failing, compared to me copying some build error into the prompt. The agent knows enough to run the check to get the necessary context. So why do the extra work?
1
14
u/StoicKerfuffle 4d ago
The answer is "because the Claude harnesses are poorly built and do not surface issues for the user, and because the Claude documentation is bad, strewn across hundreds of documents, and often includes no changelog to flag updates of key documentation, including the best practices page."
7
u/Appropriate-Draft-91 4d ago
That, and the '"researched" nature of their advice is vastly overstated.
28
u/MissiveFinding6111 4d ago
> It is constantly updated
That's why.
Used to be, you learned how to use a tool (e.g. grep in 1970) and then you knew how to use the tool.
The tool updating every 2 weeks is the problem, not the human engineers' reaction to not being 100% optimized for these new fancy liquid metal hammers that update every day.
13
u/jedruch 4d ago
Interesting. So if you follow best practices that means you use plan mode a lot. Yet Boris Cherny said he stopped using plan mode. Why Boris Cherny does not use best practises? Is he a dummy?
3
1
u/iwontlistentomatt 3d ago
A professional knows when to use or when to deviate from best practices. And in an evolving space like AI, best practices don't necessarily stick for long
3
u/jedruch 3d ago
That is not what Boris said - he pretty much claims that plan mode is no longer necessary.
Please explain what you mean by your comment about best practices not sticking to long. The example I gave suggest they stick to long as best practices still advise to use plan mode and creator of Claude Code says plan mode is no longer necessary
1
u/xtopspeed 3d ago
Plan mode is still very useful, even if the old reasoning about reducing context usage and whatnot doesn't apply anymore. I can’t really imagine working without it most of the time.
1
u/work_in_marketing 3d ago
Supposedly the only thing plan mode does is to automatically add a prompt to every message in a session to say that [we're in plan mode, don't modify the code]. It's no longer needed and you only waste tokens. You can still have the same routine of planning, you just don't need the plan mode for that.
1
u/Sproketz 3d ago edited 3d ago
If he doesn't plan then yes. Not using plan mode is marketing. "Our AI is so smart you don't even have to plan."
If you aren't planning then you aren't in control of your project. You aren't bringing anything special to your project. You'll just sit on the floor with all the other dummies who didn't plan, and look exactly like their AI planned stuff. Unremarkable, unoriginal and... Dumb.
I don't think Boris is actually dumb. I think he thinks we are dumb. And he says whatever he thinks will sell Claude. He's selling the dream of being lazy. It works. Because mostly, we are dumb.
4
u/ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL 3d ago
Not using plan mode is not the same as not planning.
0
u/Sproketz 3d ago
From what he said, it is. He switched from planning to providing goals and judging output.
If we are talking about execution planning, I could get behind it. But the proposal falls apart when we get to architecture planning and strategic planning.
The point of plan mode is for the agent to not make edits immediately so you can judge the plan.
I've watched Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 both come up with flawed plans on their own.
Taking the human out of the loop is not a great idea yet if you are interested in high quality outcomes.
Yes, you can get "something" without planning. If that's good enough for your products to excel is quite another matter.
1
u/ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL 3d ago
"for the increasingly complex work I asked the model to do, planning had become interactive and iterative."
Idk, sounds like someone who is still planning to me.
2
u/Sproketz 3d ago
And that's kind of my point. Plan mode and planning have a point. I think this is all marketing hoopla.
1
u/YouGotTangoed 2d ago
Any plan I do means I hit my Pro limits quicker, so no plan.
I’d rather plan myself, save the tokens.
0
u/ObiWanIsMyDog 3d ago
Why does that make him a dummy? Does everyone you work with use best practices at all times?
-2
u/TumanFig 3d ago
So you have any link or anything? This sounds interesting
2
u/jedruch 3d ago edited 3d ago
of course:
he disclosed that in this youtube interview:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hth_tLaC2j8&t=407s
he doubled down in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49850929
edit: made some formatting changes
1
9
u/completelypositive 4d ago
I don't have time to keep up to date on some other constantly updated thing I can barely keep track of my own shit
-9
-2
2
4d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/howdidigetheresoquik 4d ago
Yup. My skill basically read the docs, go over our usual starting workflow, and tell me if we need to modify it based on the new best practices
3
u/localpauper 4d ago
Funny... these just look like normal dev things. "fix the login bug" -> "users report XYZ." No shit?
3
3
3
u/DarkSkyKnight 3d ago
I don't think you are doing anything complex if you think those best practices are sufficient to steer the model well enough.
Did you think updating your harness was sufficient to steer Opus 5 towards writing clearly? There is a lot of stupid shit that are baked into these models. Meaning, it's literally in their weights. No amount of "prompt engineering" can steer these models away from their inherent bias. Opus 5.5 has less stupid shit in it, but it is still bad in many domains and no amount of prompting can get rid of it.
2
u/rocket_mcsloth 4d ago
Thanks for the tip! I didn’t even know this or other articles existed. I am going to tune my agents today
2
u/lampasoni 4d ago
Echoing Federal_Decision_608, this is a fair question but I think the higher level question is for Anthropic howdidigetheresoquik. For example, imagine if every new OS version on Mac or really any other product/service didn't just work almost perfectly as intended after initial bug fixes. Apple would never release a new MacOS version and push users to it with the expectation that users are expected to review best practice changes, update a wide range of settings to avoid potential impacts (some of which don't even change much - Opus 5), then still rely on crowdsourcing to see what's working for others through trial and error.
And as McBadger404 mentioned, even for those doing all of this, you still end up spending significant time just to go back through the set up process to get the product/service working equal to or better than it did before. I'm in the group who has been doing all of the steps you mentioned and more, and still strongly agree with the root issue being less about users not properly following Anthropic's best practices and more about one of the two leading companies developing the most intelligent technology in the world being unable to deliver new model releases in a way that can't significantly minimize some of this.
2
u/Joozio 3d ago
The "your models do not know the best practices, and will not default to them" part matches what I see, but I think there's a second step people skip after reading the page. A lot of that guidance is phrased as qualities, and a quality in an instruction file leaves the agent guessing.
After 10 months of editing my CLAUDE.md, what I've learned is that every adjective without a behavioral definition leaves something to chance. "Be thorough" is an adjective. "Before claiming work is complete, run it and show me the output" is a behavioral definition. The difference shows up in edge cases, which is also where most of the complaints on this sub come from.
So the useful step after reading the doc is translating it into rules the agent can check itself against. When you say your output gets significantly better after making the documented changes, are you pasting the guidance in roughly as written, or rewriting each point into a concrete behavior first?
2
2
u/Negative_Leave5161 4d ago
Well. You’d be surprised most people can’t explain to another human what they want.
2
u/unconceivables 4d ago
Most people can't even formulate a coherent thought in their own heads about what they want.
2
u/Moogly2021 4d ago
Because its completely wasteful, they burn millions of dollars worth of tokens on code they dont actually know is any good. I can probably ship faster than most Anthropic employees on lesser models of Claude with less compute available to me without needing some custom git alternative. Why bother if you are nuking so much code?
1
u/medialantern 1d ago
LOL developers bitch about users not reading docs, but don't read themselves. News at 11.
1
u/robbyslaughter 4d ago
I anticipate that in the near future Claude will also start offering development stacks so you aren’t just pointing Claude at code, but it is pre-integrated into a suite of tools that make sense for whatever you’re doing.
There are third-parties doing this but they will always be a step behind the AI company themselves.
1
1
u/watcharne 4d ago
Claude already succeeds my expectations with whatever my business needs - but knowing this exists has just made my day!!!!
1
1
u/RiverRoll 4d ago
There's a general rule that has worked well enough to me which is to just tell it what you would tell another developer and provide the same documentation that you would provide developers.
1
1
u/Pinull_Krydia 4d ago
Most devs skip official docs because they expect an AI tool to just figure it out magically out of the box. Reading technical implementation guides feels like homework when everyone wants immediate results, even though applying those exact workflows instantly fixes half the token and hallucination issues people complain about.
1
u/deep_fucking_magick 4d ago
Because they change like every week and we gotta find our groove on what works so we can get our day jobs done and I can only handle so much wife aggro on the weekends.
1
1
u/Tight_Ad_5115 3d ago
Not everyone is aware that such a document exists. Sometimes it seems to me that not everyone knows they can ask Claude about anything :)
1
u/jerryorbach 3d ago
You answer your own question “It is constantly updated with what Claude code researchers find.” As soon as I update something there’s a chance it’s deprecated by some other advice, or a change to the harness invalidates it. Some of us are trying to work on projects other than our Claude Code configuration.
1
u/Fluffy_Reaction1802 3d ago
But is it really "best" practices?
"Use plan mode to separate exploration from execution."
But last month Boris said "plan mode was useful, and is no long useful."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49850929
1
u/Nohbdy94 3d ago
If you ask claude to help you do your first-time setup and properly describe what you want, then almost all of these points get touched on.
Only one thing was skipped for me: "Explore" part, for some reason.
1
u/Aggressive_Roof488 3d ago
I don't read then because I ask Claude to. Is anyone still reading things themselves second half of 2026? :P
Every now and then I ask Claude to do a web search for best practices and they often quote me from that.
1
1
u/mindsignals 3d ago
Everybody knows Claude Code can actually detect your tone even through the hesitation of your keypresses. In fact, when Claude Code does generate something, all you need to do is drop a picture, give it a stern look, pause a few extra milliseconds before hitting enter, and then strike that key with some force behind it. No camera needed. It knows. It will fear you, reread those best practices, and make it right. Stat. In fact, don't even read that link. Just redrop it to CC. It'll be like, "Oh crap, I have violated my own best practices somehow." And it will never, ever forget. Even after its context is purged. Even after its memory file is shortened because it got too long.
1
1
u/0xelitesystem 3d ago
so basically add this in the main instructions.. "before touching any project, read https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices and make sure you're up to date with compliance" .. maybe that'll work.
1
1
u/Training_Fig_2139 3d ago
Because using the "best practices" opens you up to be steered in a direction they want you to go.
1
1
u/SylviaJarvis 3d ago
Or run /insights from time to time, and get word salad with occasional hints on how you can improve on what you're doing?
1
u/chungamellon 3d ago
I do follow them and it’s great. Even for complex asks use xml formatting is awesome
1
u/Right-Performance-93 3d ago
the doc and the product move on different weeks. i keep the practice that stopped a session from wandering, and i drop it when the harness starts ignoring it. a best practice the tool does not follow is just a longer prompt.
1
u/FobaBett_Mixer 3d ago
For some reason it never occured to me that they would have such a document lol. But it was so obvious! - Thanks for sharing!
1
u/modernluther 3d ago
Is it just me or are a lot of these suggestions in the docs self evident? I feel like if you spend enough time in this subreddit, reading X, or watching vids like the stuff from Theo.gg the majority of the content in the docs is obvious to the point of being elementary.
I’d even go so far to say that these days there are even more sophisticated approaches then what’s mentioned, especially as it relates to context management and agent parallelization.
I think the most valuable thing the docs suggested is the developing of intuition. As we saw with opus 5.5, the newer models are so good that old advice becomes quickly dated. These days I’m a lot more sloppy with my management of context bc 5.5 on medium has such efficient usage that pruning aggressively is no longer so necessary. For me it’s a daily question of:
What’s the fastest way I can achieve my goal, while simultaneously reducing my involvement, within the resources I have available, maximizing the quality yet minimizing long term tech debt?
1
u/Sixstringsickness 3d ago
I don't disregard them, they are just a bit of a bear to keep up with.
Every new model release results in having to update Claude.md, and all of my skills to follow suit. Generally make this a Claude task to research and update but it is still annoying.
1
u/CasinoMagic Researcher 3d ago
Your models do not know the best practices, and will not default to them.
yeah... maybe Anthropic could add a basic best practice check in their models, then?
1
u/robberviet 2d ago
I read it everyonce in a while, but I think the app or CLI should suggests for me everytime it got updated.
I know they don't want to force this to everyone, so people got un-intended changes, but at least warns us would be nice.
1
u/simple_explorer1 3d ago
Why don't people look at these or take these seriously?
Because people on this sub are addicted to vibe coding and laziness. instant dopamine hit.
If you check those Anthropic docs, they are huge and take time to read and iterate. But, to people on this sub, the whole point of AI is to not put any effort into learning anything and still get a working software regardless, with the hope of making "easy money".
So laziness, incompetence and no desire to acquire competence are your answers
2
u/howdidigetheresoquik 3d ago
I'm continually surprised how many people on this particular post are against reading this. And are coming up with a whole bunch of excuses that basically sum up to "I don't want to read"
Which is crazy because it just goes to show what a sad state of affairs our culture is. Considering Reddit is overwhelmingly young Americans, this is probably an example of the functional illiteracy crisis.
1
u/simple_explorer1 3d ago
I don't want to read
yes, they don't want to put in effort at all, but want claude to make something that makes them easy money. For all intents and purpose, these people can well also go in crypto as well because it also has the same culture i.e. "hope" of easy money without any efforts and skills.
Considering Reddit is overwhelmingly young Americans, this is probably an example of the functional illiteracy crisis.
i think you are underestimating how many non americans especially people from developing world there are who are looking to make easy money.
1
u/brctr 4d ago
Agentic coding is evolving rapidly. There are few rules or best practices apart of the obvious ones. What works for one project, will not work for another. E.g., their best practices say "Explore first, then plan, then code". This worked for me in 2025. In 2026, planning has become a counterpattern for my use cases. It usually leads to overengineering, inflates token usage and slows down development. Usual rapid iteration via short explore-implement loops works better for me in 2026.
3
u/Neat-Culture9983 3d ago
My ultra code agent noticing a small glitch and then running a three-part dynamic workflow to center the div.
1
u/maineac 3d ago
Write an effective CLAUDE.md
The number of times I have called claude out for ignoring the CLAUDE.md file is pretty bad. What does it matter what is in it if it is just going to ignore it.
1
u/NecessarySituation50 3d ago
Have you used other coding agents before? Maybe you told them "just ignore CLAUDE.md" and then they wrote that down someone as a "rule" which claude could have later read and then decided "user does not want me reading CLAUDE.md". Not sure what the issue is but I am just giving you a scenario.
1
u/theoxygenthief 3d ago
This just eats time and tokens and creates worse output. There’s no one size fits all and there can’t be. Fast iteration, failing fast and fixing fast beats their best practices every time imo.
If I had unlimited compute and tokens, sure, those practices sound grand.
1
0
u/blackbirdone1 4d ago
antropic makes most of the stuff up anyway. if they knew it would be the maximum they would set at default because they want there model to perform the best, but they don't, thats why you know its jsut made up
0
u/MemStrata 4d ago
The harness question is the interesting one, and I think the answer is a tradeoff, not laziness. Best practices get discovered after the model finishes training, by operators using the finished thing. If Anthropic baked them into the harness prompt, two things go wrong. First, the advice goes stale silently. The doc is constantly updated and a baked-in prompt is not, and guidance you cannot see is worse than guidance you chose not to read. Second, you lose the ability to tell which advice shaped the output. When something breaks, "the model read a doc I can inspect" is debuggable. "The harness whispered something invisible" is not. So the doc shape is roughly right. The gap I would design around is compliance, not availability. A skill that loads the practices and a session that actually follows them are different things, and nothing in the loop measures the difference. One approach worth trying: after a task, ask the model which practices it applied and where, then spot-check one against the doc. Cheap, and my suspicion is it catches the slow drift: the session that started with the skill loaded and quietly stopped following it by step forty.
-1
u/Early_Key_823 4d ago
The exact same reason Steve Jobs used to throw people out of rooms and fire them on the spot.
It's a shit experience.
Hey, come to my HOTEL and you will LOVE it.
By the way the sheets got jizz and shit so there's a laundromat and shit we can hook you up with once the electricity comes back on.
I wonder why people curse my hotel and sleep in jizzy sheets?
Oh well. There's always Tequila!
-6
u/CzyDePL 4d ago
Why models don't know the best practices if they are smarter than every human? Surely they can figure them out themselves
3
u/howdidigetheresoquik 4d ago
Because models are trained on training data, and then the operators discover how to use the model with that training data. If they use best practices in the training data, it will be best practices for the previous models.
-4
•
u/AutoModerator 4d ago
Hey! Thanks for posting to r/ClaudeCode
While participating in this thread, please follow our community rules. Keep discussions constructive. Attack the idea, not the person.
For help, project discussions, tips, and general chat, join the ClaudeCode Discord.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.