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This is one of those bizarre "how did you even get that idea" mistakes that ironically replacing developers with AI slop farmers might actually improve on. If you ask Claude to set up a project with NPM and CI, it's not going to do weird shit like that.

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I asked Claude to set up a new NPM project and it configured the install task as “npm ci || npm install”, which is stupid. That was on Opus4.7 xhigh. When I pointed out that doing so defeats the purpose, it said “oh yeah of course.”

Turns out there is no equivalent to “npm ci” that doesn’t clear node_modules first, and you can’t call npm install to simulate NPM ci behavior (sans clean).

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