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I also share something of an "efficient market hypothesis" with regards to Claude Code. Given that Anthropic is basically a hothouse of geniuses recursively dogfooding their own product, the market pressure to make the vanilla setup be the one that performs best at writing code is incredibly high. I just treat CLAUDE.md like my first draft memo to a very smart remote colleague, let Claude do all its various quirks, and it works really well.

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The "efficient market" framing assumes Anthropic wants to minimize output, but they don't. They charge per token, so the defaults being verbose isn't a bug they haven't gotten around to fixing.

That said, most of this repo is solving the wrong problem. "Answer before reasoning" actively hurts quality, and the benchmark is basically meaningless. But the anti-sycophancy rules should just be default. "Great Question!" has never really helped anyone debug anything.

Gemini CLI is notorious for being verbose (or was, I haven't used it for a while), and many people don't want to use Gemini for that reason alone.

So the market kind of works in this instance.

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