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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

> Whenever the phrase "simplest fix" appears, it's time to pull the emergency break.

Second! In CLAUDE.md, I have a full section NOT to ever do this, and how to ACTUALLY fix something.

This has helped enormously.

Any chance you could share those sections of your claude file? I've been using Claude a bit lately but mostly with manual changes, not got much in the way of the claude file yet and interested in how to improve it

https://github.com/cuzzo/easy-vm/blob/master/CLAUDE.md

Typo - "proove". "Prove" only has one O.

Thank you!

I switched from Cursor to Claude because the limits are so much higher but I see Anthropic playing a lot more games to limit token use

What wording do you use for this, if you don't mind? This thread is a revelation, I have sworn that I've seen it do this "wait... the simplest fix is to [use some horrible hack that disregards the spec]" much more often lately so I'm glad it's not just me.

However I'm not sure how to best prompt against that behavior without influencing it towards swinging the other way and looking for the most intentionally overengineered solutions instead...

My own experience has been that you really just have to be diligent about clearing your cache between tasks, establishing a protocol for research/planning, and for especially complicated implementations reading line-by-line what the system is thinking and interrupting the moment it seems to be going bad.

If it's really far off the mark, revert back to where you originally sent the prompt and try to steer it more, if it's starting to hesitate you can usually correct it without starting over.

That is generically my experience as well. Claude half-assing work or skipping stuff because "takes too much time" is something I've been experiencing since I started using it (May 2025). Forcing it to create and review and implementation plan, and then reviewing the implementation cross-referenced with the plan almost always produces consistent results in my case.

Make sure to use "PRETTY PLEASE" in all caps in your `SOUL.md`. And occasionally remind it that kittens are going to die unless it cooperates. Works wonders.

I love how despite how cold and inhuman LLMs are, we've at least taught them to respect the lives of kittens

Can you paste the relevant section in your soul please?

Sure, as soon as I locate my soul.

https://github.com/cuzzo/easy-vm/blob/master/CLAUDE.md

Where is that? I found "Return the simplest working solution. No over-engineering." which sounds more like the simplest fix.

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