I tell Claude that it wrote XYZ in another session (I wrote it) then use that context to ask questions or make changes.

Hah, I do the same when I need to manually intervene to nudge the solution in the direction I want after a few failed attempts to recontruct my prompt to avoid some undesired path the LLM really wants to go down.

Very interesting. Why does Claude find more problems if we mention the code is written by another developer?

Total guess, but maybe it breaks it out of the sycophancy that most models seem to exhibit?

I wonder if they’d also be better at things like telling you an idea is dumb if you tell it it’s from someone else and you’re just assessing it.

In my experience, Claude will criticize others more than it will criticize itself. Seems similar to how LLMs in general tend to say yes to things or call anything a good idea by default.

I find it to be an entertaining reflection of the cultural nuances embedded into training data and reinforcement learning processes.

Interesting. In my experience, it's the opposite. Claude is too syncophantic. If you tell it that it was wrong, it will just accept your word at face value. If I give a problem to both Claude and Gemini, their responses differ and I ask Claude why Gemini has a different response - Claude will just roll over and tell me that Gemini's response was perfect and that it messed up.

This is why I was really taken by Gemini 2.0/2.5 when it first came out - it was the first model that really pushed back at you. It would even tell me that it wanted x additional information to continue onwards, unprompted. Sadly, as Google has neutered 2.5 over the last few months, its independent streak has also gone away, and its only slightly more individualistic than Claude/OpenAI's models.

Claude is very agreeable and is an eager helper.

It gives you the benefit of the doubt if you're coding.

It also gives you the benefit of the doubt if you're looking for feedback on your developers work. If you give it a hint of distrust "my developer says they completed this, can you check and make sure, give them feedback....?" Claude will look out for you.

I would guess the training data (conversational as opposed to coding specific solutions) is weighted towards people finding errors in others work, more than people discussing errors in their own. If you knew there was an error in your thinking, you probably wouldn't think that way.

Thank you for the tips, do you know how to rollback latest changes ? Trying very hard to do it, but seems like Git is the only way ?

I haven't used it, but saw this the other day: https://github.com/RonitSachdev/ccundo

Git or my favorite "Undo all of those changes."

this usually gets the job done for me as well

Quick tip when working with Claude Code and Git: When you're happy with an intermediate result, stage the changes by running `git add` (no commit). That makes it possible to always go back to the staged changes when Claude messes up. You can then just discard the unstaged changes and don't have to roll back to the latest commit.

I thought double escape just clears the text box?

With an empty text box, double escape shows you a list of previous inputs from you. You can go back and fork at any one of those.

I've been using Serena MCP to keep my context smaller. It seems to be working because claude uses it pretty much exclusively to search the codebase.

Could you elaborate a bit on how that works? Does it need any changes in how you use Claude?

No. I have three MCPs installed and this is the only one that doesn’t need guidance. You’ll see it using it for search and finding references and such. It’s a one line install and no work to maintain.

The advantage is that Claude won’t have to use the file system to find files. And it won’t have to go read files into context to find what it’s looking for. It can use its context for the parts of code that actually matter.

And I feel like my results have actually been much better with this.

I'll note this saves a lot of wait time as well! No sitting there while a new Claude builds context from scratch.

This sounds like the programmer equivalent of astrology.

> Build context for the work you're doing. Put lots of your codebase into the context window.

If you don’t say that, what do you think happens as the agent works on your codebase.

You don't have to think about it, you can just go try it. It doesn't work as well (yet) for me. I'm still way better than Claude at finding an initial heading.

Astrology doesn't produce working code =P

You don't say that - you instruct the LLM to read files about X, Y, and Z. Putting the context in helps the agent plan better (next step) and write correct code (final step).

If you're asking the agent to do chunks of work, this will get better results than asking it to blindly go forth and do work. Anthropic's best practices guide says as much.

If you're asking the agent to create one method that accomplishes X, this isn't useful.

I usually tell CC (or opencode, which I've been using recently) to look up the files and find the relevant code. So I'm not attaching a huge number of files to the context. But I don't actually know whether this saves tokens or not.

I do this all the time and it sometimes works, but it's not a silver bullet. Sometimes Claude benefits from having the full conversation.

What's the benefit to using claude code CLI directly over something like Cursor?

Claude Code is a much more flexible tool: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/overview#why-...

the benefit is you can use your preferred editor. no need to learn a completely new piece of software that doesnt match your workflow just to get access to agentic workflows. for example, my entire workflow for the last 15+ years has been tmux+vim, and i have no desire to change that.

You don't have to deal with awfulness of vs code.

In my experience jumping back like this is risky unless you explicitly tell it you made changes, otherwise they will get clobbered because it will update files based on the old context.

Telling it to “re-read” xyz files before starting works though.

I always ask it to read the last 5 commits and anaylize and modified or staged files, works well...

Why do you find this better than just starting again at that point? I'm trying to understand the benefit of using this 'trick', without being able to try it as I'm away from my computer.

Couldn't you start a new context and achieve the same thing, without any of the risks of this approach?

LLMs have no "memory" so it generally gives it something to go off, I forgot to add that I only do this if the change i'm making is related to whatever I did yesterday.

I do this because sometimes I just manually edit code and the LLM doesn't know everything that's happened.

I also find the. best way to work with "AI" is to make very small changes and commit frequently, I truly think it's a slot machine and if it does go wild, you can lose hours of work.

> Tell Claude your developer finished XYZ [...] (Claude will find more problems with your developer's work than with yours).

It's crazy to think LLMs are so focused on pleasing us that we have to trick them like this to get frank and fearless feedback.

I think it is something else. If you think about it, humans often write about correcting errors done by others. Refactoring code, fixing bugs and write code more efficient. I guess it triggers other paths in the model, if we write that someone else did it. It is not about pleasing but our constant desire to improve things.

If we tell it a rival LLM wrote the code it will be extra critical to tap into of its capitalist streak to crush the competition?