Realise that you are talking to some mathematics in a box. You can't get a rise out of it. It cannot feel guilt or remorse. Whatever emotional payoff one might want from "I asked for ONE button" cannot be had here. Meanwhile, not only are you being charged by the word, but every word you send that is not directly on the path to getting what you want done is just noise in the maths getting in your way.

So leave emotion at the door and make your words count. Voice your frustrations at the stress doll next to your monitor, sure, but spending tokens on them us just wasting time and money. Explicitly typing out your exasperation will not get you closer to whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. What can you type that will?

Laser focus: clearly, concisely explain what is wrong right now, and how you want it solved. Then do that again until all the moles have been whacked. If the AI is stuck in a sycophancy loop, start a new clean session. Do this frequently anyway: every turn in the same session charges for all preceding conversation again /and/ degrades the LLM's performance.

Efficient LLM interaction is context management. The golden rule: Nothing irrelevant in context.

Non-exhaustive consequences of following that rule:

* Each session handles one task, or at most, a few tightly coupled tasks.

* Emotions stay out of context; no showing frustration, no saying thanks (or at least wait until you're about to end the session)

* When possible, provide relevant files (or sections of files) instead of making the model search and read many irrelevant files.

* Keep CLAUDE.md short.

* Disable irrelevant tools.

* Revert history when the model makes mistakes. Don't make it read its mistake and fix it; fork the chat before the mistake and exclusively mention the correct action.

Attention is more limited than the context limits imply; stuff at the beginning of context stays high-attention for a while, stuff right at the end is always high-attention. If you're about to ask for something the model frequently forgets (eg, style), remind it that those instructions exist ("Following the style guidelines, implement feature X.")

This is a good resource https://howborisusesclaudecode.com/

My best takeaway from the site was: Every time you see Claude Code / Codex doing something you don't want, ask it to add to AGENTS.md. Specially if they churn a lot doing something, and eventually find a way. I ask it to store the way it made something work. It's a constant gardening of AGENTS.md and it has really working well.

A lot of the more sane people I work with have decided that it's futile to try and have stopped working with Opus (we can't use Fable at work due to data retention policies).

IndyDevDan on Youtube had a really good series for how to prompt models. It's an older series, but still quite relevant in my experience.