My current theory is that this reflects a weakness in Claude’s ability to see the “big picture”.

When writing code, I have to explicitly tell it how to structure things at a high level, or the result is sort of a flattened spaghetti. Similarly, when it’s explaining things, it’s not good at pulling out unifying concepts and explaining top-down as a smart human would do. It groups little things together but often doesn’t generalize or synthesize explanatory connections from them.

I’ve been experimenting with explicitly working through a sequence of outputs at different levels of detail, but I haven’t found a consistently successful method.