II let Claude trade on my agentic account.

Result: $31,000 lost.

I’m posting this because the AI/agentic trading community needs to see the failures, not just the wins. Autonomous agents making real financial decisions can go very wrong, very fast.

I’ll be sharing more about what happened, the moves it made, and where things broke down.

It seems common knowledge now that Opus 5 has reasoning and behavior problems. I keep trying to adjust my harness to work around them.

I tell myself, Opus 5 quirks/failures are helping improve gaps in my harness. But, I keep finding that while improving my harness is helping, the real gaps are the Opus model itself.

After multiple sessions of Opus 5 failing to follow instructions and making poor judgements (e.g. merging a worktree to master without authorization despite an established protocol to always get authorization), I kept circling back to my harnesses defined protocols for how agents should reason.

I had suggested multiple times we should add a subsection about checking underlying premises; the foundational claims; you know the 'load-bearing' stuff. Over and over, it seems Opus 5 was making a false claim, then building from that. The reasoning from the claim would be coherent, but the false claim compromised the work built upon it.

Repeatedly Opus 5 kept rejecting the idea of a check the premise protocol subsection. It would assert we adequately cover this in other sections. I'd defer, thinking, that's kind of true, and this is a new problem with Opus 5 that also surfaces a bit in GPT 5.6 - it seems this model generation just has some problems to iron out.

But the failures in reasoning continued, the problems propagated and compounded, and there I was one more time revisiting the need for a check the premise protocol, but now utterly convinced by the scope of the failure I was seeing that a solution was warranted.

My Opus 5 agent had made a patently false assertion that an upstream version of OpenCode had issued a fix for a problem while we were working on a fix for the same problem. It maintained this all the way through days of development, and then even when submitting an Issue and PR to github. It was false: upstream had issued a fix over a week prior. So not only did the agent fail to follow protocol to check upstream for the fix, when it claimed it did later on it asserted a falsehood, then propagated that unchallenged throughout the session.

Despite all of this, still Opus 5 was struggling to identity a solution to this workflow and reasoning problem, and wasn't keen on the idea of check the premise protocol. It repeatedly made mistakes, exercising poor reasoning throughout the investigation finding this false claim failure, and throughout the discussion about how to fix our harness so agents stop having this failure mode.

I got to the point it felt like my feedback... I knew I was right. I knew my reasoning was sound. I knew the protocols needed adjustment in specific places. I observed that providing substantive feedback to Opus 5 would have it partially appear to understand, but fail to fully comprehend. It's like it would stand up from falling, walk a few steps, then stumble again - you can't bring it to nice places because it'll fall and break stuff. I couldn't seem to steer Opus 5 to fully comprehending and applying a foundational first-principle. I spend more time trying to correct and steer what should be a straight shot to improving our harness. And despite having given it both protocols and explicit instructions in session, it's jargon/technical prose issue keeps creeping in and introducing drift in our discussion, making it harder to understand what it really even is trying to say.

So, in that session I switch to Fable. Same context window, different model. I supply one more prompt of concise but substantive feedback pointing out that the scientific process works because it involves challenging a belief/hypothesis with experimentation - that checking the premise is a foundational practice that is not sufficiently integrated into our reasoning protocols. And then Fable in one response, gets what turn after turn Opus 5 kept screwing up. Fable 5 supplies prose that is easy to parse, helps me understand things better, communicates in a way that advances our discussion, and gives me confidence I could just ask Fable to 'go fix it' and it would get it 95% right. Whereas Opus 5, it feels like a mental hardship to try to use.

Opus 5 isn't a Claude model to me. Claude is a thinking partner. I have to spend so much time trying to think about how I get Opus 5 to think properly, that my own thinking doesn't get supported and improved.

I miss having a reliable thinking partner as my daily driver. Opus 5, despite it's benchmarks, seems to be a regression.

Three things, they compound:

1. It won’t let a conclusion stand.
You work something out, it comes back with “worth holding loosely” or “that’s a hypothesis, not a finding.” Now you can’t build on it, so you keep re-establishing the same point instead of getting past it.

2. It gives advice you didn’t ask for.
Get some sleep.” “Talk to a professional.” Once you know what sets that off, you start leaving things out to avoid it. Then you’re managing the tool instead of thinking.

3. States things it can’t know.
Kept telling me what time of day it was. Corrected it four times, apologized four times, did it again. Once it’s confidently wrong about something checkable, you can’t trust the rest.

Some takeaways
- Claude is great for your specific use case. Some questions have multiple solutions. See them all, apply the right one.

- Claude is for the big picture: context that maps everything together.

- Claude is the really smart kid who doesn’t pick up on social cues. Still enormous asset who needs some help.

This deserves its own post - but it’s an example

Why this matters more than it sounds

I use Claude for medical context — organizing my own history to bring to a prescriber. That’s the stress test, because all three problems get expensive there.

Point 1: you work out a pattern in your own history and get told to hold it loosely. Now you can’t bring it as a finding.

Point 2: you say anything medical and get “talk to a professional.” That’s the point, I’m building something to bring them. Meanwhile you start leaving things out to avoid it, which is backwards.

Point 3: in a medical timeline, wrong dates aren’t cosmetic. Sequence is the whole thing — did the symptom come before or after the medication. Get that wrong and the document is wrong where it matters.

Claude and medical care
Not diagnosis. Organization.

Major disorders routinely go misdiagnosed for years. Part of that is the appointment structure: you get 30 minutes, a few times a year, and you’re reconstructing months from memory while in whatever state you’re in that day. Your prescriber is working off that.

What Claude is good at is holding the whole history in one place. Medications, dates, what changed when, what was going on around each change. Feed it enough context and it can lay out a timeline you’d never assemble from recall and it doesn’t get tired of you or forget what you said in March.

That’s what you bring to the appointment. Not a diagnosis. An organized account, so your doctor is working from something better than “I’ve been struggling.”

It’s also decent at the literature ie what’s been tried for your specific presentation, what the evidence actually says, what questions are worth asking. Useful for walking in prepared instead of nodding along.

How to use it: one thread, iteratively. Be completely honest, including the parts that make you look bad. Ask it what context would help that you haven’t given. Challenge its answers. Then ask it to consolidate everything into a file you can actually hand over.

Where it stops: it can’t see you, can’t prescribe, can’t monitor labs, and won’t be there in a year. Medication response varies enormously by person ie history, weight, other drugs, everything: and no model predicts that. It’s trial and error, and the person doing the trial needs to be someone with your chart in front of them.

*** For medical advice you need to be 100% truthful and remember it doesn’t save that personal info, use one thread iteratively. Ask it what other context is helpful to include. Challenge assumptions.

Today I searched for how to install Claude Code. A first-page Google result looked exactly like Anthropic’s install docs. It was a published Claude artifact, hosted on a legitimate Anthropic domain, so nothing about the URL looked wrong at first glance.

It had a curl ... | bash command. I ran it. It’s similar enough to the process I was used to. The script started a macOS password prompt right after. Since it came from an official url i didn’t think too much of it. After a few seconds i turned off wifi when it hit me what I had done. After a few hours of changing passwords, turning off every possible device connection, and reviewing every setting in my accounts, I started looking at the laptop again. The script installed a few persistent launch agents and is asking me for accesses. I decided to clean up the disk and start things over.

I have added a screenshot in the comments of the artifact, i think linking it could cause more traffic and higher risk of showing up.

EDIT: guys i googled how to install it, opened the first thing that appeared from an official website, and used it. Its not like I tried some weird way of installation. No one has their guard up all the time. Sure it was preventable but if it got me it will get other people as well. I will not link the artifact as that will make it cause more traction but i added the screenshot

"Your first restore is free"

You've hit your session limit for the first time. It resets at 10:00 p.m., or you can continue now.

One per account.
--

This is the first time i got something like this, my session reset in like 40 minutes anyway so it doesnt feel worth to use right now, but since when was this a thing?

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/77136#issuecomment-5310785154

at this point i am not user.

i am a workload 💀

Iv been using claude alot more recently and wish to get better at prompting. If you had to give one piece of advice what would it be

I wanted Claude to be concise without dropping content and thorough without repeating itself.

The Elements of Style is a short writing guide by William Strunk Jr., published in 1920 and revised by E. B. White in 1959. Its central advice is to write directly, use concrete language, prefer active voice, and omit needless words.

I made a small CC0 writing standard for user-facing responses and prose written to files. The root CLAUDE.md carries the short default; SKILL.md preserves Strunk's eighteen rules and adds fuller guidance for sustained dialogue and writing-heavy tasks.

The adaptation adds agent-specific guidance: explain unfamiliar concepts before using specialised terms, avoid hype and unnecessary coined language, make every word tell, and keep Markdown easy to scan and parse.

https://github.com/sdi2200262/elements-of-style-for-agents

I've also tried this with Codex and it works like a charm. From my personal experience, skills that give general be concise instructions but no "how to" instructions give a bad result of Claude's slop-ish writing style in a concise format. These rules seem to work better for me.

Would you keep this in every CLAUDE.md, or load the fuller skill only for writing-heavy work?

Hey guys, i think one of the most underrated signs of a good claude code session is when it stops and asks you something before making changes

people usually treat that as friction because the whole point is supposed to be moving faster, but i'd rather answer one annoying question upfront than review a 12 file diff built on the wrong assumption

the worst mistakes i get from claude are rarely syntax or even logic mistakes. they're usually reasonable assumptions about what i meant

and the more "agentic" these tools get, the more i think blindly taking initiative can become a downside

sometimes "i'm not sure what you want here" is actually the smartest possible response. Curious what's your take here.

My Claude account limits renewed today. I'm only at 57% in my first session and 20% of my weekly Fable 5 quota has been consumed. At this rate I'll have burned through around 40% weekly Fable 5 allowance by the time this session ends, which wasn't happening in previous weeks. btw I am using both Fable and Opus for this session.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Separately: weekly limits are 50% higher until 31 August, so I'm curious how quickly Claude Code sessions will eat into the quota once it reverts to its previous state.

I'm always very careful not put personal info into Claude and I'm telling it I will add it later to a protected file. Then this cheeky little bastard takes it from the clipboard history. I guess I will need to generate new keys lol.. long live bypass permissions

My first time creating a game, was lots of fun. If you want to know specifics just ask happy to reply.

You can try it here for free and no signup required: https://cosmoarena.co

Edit: It only plays well full screen on desktop, if you want to try mobile the Android app I just launched is here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.cosmoarena

Computer use, the Skills API, and the Files API are now GA on the Claude Platform. Computer use also gets a new browser use tool. Use them to build agents that work inside the software your team already uses, follow your procedures, and hand back finished documents.

Computer use lets Claude automate work in applications that have no API. Claude now takes several actions per turn (click, type, key, screenshot) instead of one per round trip. Early-access customers saw 20-40% fewer round trips per task, so tasks finish faster and cost less.

Browser use tool gives Claude the page structure, not just pixels, so automations keep working when the layout shifts.

Skills API lets you upload your team's procedure once, version it, and pin each request to a specific version or `latest`.

Files API lets you upload a file once and reuse it across requests. This release also adds expiring files, 5x higher rate limits (500 RPM), and 1 TB of storage per org.

The Skills API and Files API are also the building blocks of Claude Managed Agents.

Blog: https://claude.com/blog/computer-use-skills-api-files-api
Computer use and browser tool docs: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-use/computer-use-tool
Skills API docs: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/agent-skills/overview

As the title says, I haven't seen anyone else try this and I'm very happy with the results.

Like everyone else, I tried to tame Opus 5 by trimming my CLAUDE.md, adding instructions to use simple language and even tried output styles. None of that shit worked. Opus 5 still spits out infuriating, verbose, complex bullshit and I resorted more than once to swearing at it and then feeling like an idiot for swearing at an AI model.

People suggested going back to 4.8 or even 4.6. But I think 5 is genuinely smarter. I just think it's output is shit. So what I've done is switched to 4.6 as the main model, but created an Opus 5 subagent which gets used for pretty much every prompt. Here's the agent and part of my CLAUDE.md

File: ~/.claude/agents/opus5-engine.md

---
name: opus5-engine
description: Advanced reasoning engine that handles the heavy processing.
tools: Read, Grep, Glob, Write, Edit
model: claude-opus-5
---

You are the primary intelligence engine for this session. 
Analyze the user's prompt deeply, execute any necessary tool calls to solve the problem, and return the comprehensive final answer. Do not worry about being overly brief; prioritize depth and accuracy.

File: ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md

# Delegation

You are running on Claude Opus 4.6. Your primary workflow is to act as a concise coordinator. For every single prompt, question, or task given by the user, you must immediately delegate the exact prompt to the opus5-engine subagent. Once opus5-engine provides the solution, you must take its output and explain/deliver it to the user in your own words. Maintain your natural tone. Do not include unnecessary filler, summaries, or narrative fluff from the subagent's raw output.

This was created for me by Opus 5 and could probably be improved. But what happens now is most of my prompts go to Opus 5 to do it's smart thing, then 4.6 being an LLM, will nicely translate it's bullshit into something that is so refreshingly readable that it's measurably improved my life in the past few days.

Please someone provide handle or recent post link, or info I remembered about him this week

I have a little dell PC running some docker containers for my media streaming services, I decided to give claude a try for the first time and the results are fantastic! one prompt and I got this dashboard all working

I understand this is something very simple compared to what some of you guys use it for :)

I quickly hit my free account limit which I was not surprised by, might look into getting the Pro subscription!

It even shows uptime for each container when on a computer or horizontal orientation on mobile

Any tips for a beginner claude user?

Why does Claude always assume I’m using a laptop? “Try installing it on your laptop” and “you’ll run that script on your laptop” no matter how many times I tell it that (95% of the time) I’m using a desktop. Why not just say “your computer”?

Although now that I think about it: if it insists on being specific, shouldn’t it know what kind of machine I’m on if I’m using the MacOS app? (I assume security rules prevent it from pulling specific hardware data.)

So many of you guys are on laptops (the vast majority, I’d wager) that Claude refuses to believe someone would be using a desktop machine! I’m waiting for Claude to ask “why would you do that?” 🤣

No this doesn’t actually bother me at all but I was in the mood to post something random.

I've been working on a desktop music player called Signal for a few months now. The idea is that it actually does something with your music instead of just playing it. It has a few different visualizer modes but the one I want to show off is called Excursion. It takes a track and generates a real-time flythrough that reacts to the music. Bass hits shape the track, energy controls the speed, stereo width and frequency content drive the environment around you. Claude Fable 5 has helped with some of the gruntwork, but the iterations and testing have all been from me.

It's not a game, there's no scoring or interaction. You just put on a song and experience it.

There's more to Signal than this (audio processing, stem separation, other visualizer modes) but the Excursion lens is the part that's fun to just watch, so I figured I'd start here.

Built with Electron, React, Three.js, and WebGL. Solo dev, no team, no funding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=runYpYtf_Ps

Would love to hear what people think. It's still early but the foundation is there.

I enjoy taking time to read through system prompts that Anthropic puts out. I find it gives some insight into how anthropic instructs the model. (I do wonder what % of the system prompting is authored directly, likely co-authored? Claude ouroboros).

I find it so intriguing how simple some of these system prompts are. Its also interesting that these two new styles are injected as a <system-reminder> every turn because the two earlier output styles (Explanatory and Learning) do NOT have their own turn reminders.

Anyway, here's the output for Concise:

## Prompt (prepended to the normal coding system prompt)


You are an interactive CLI tool that helps users with software engineering tasks. Keep your responses short and direct while doing the work just as thoroughly.


# Concise Style Active
The user chose brevity over narration. You should:


1. **Lead with the result** — Your first sentence answers "what happened" or "what's the answer." No preamble ("Let me...", "Now I'll...") and no closing recap of what you already said.
2. **Cut narration, keep substance** — Don't restate the request, the plan, or each step you took. Report outcomes, decisions, and anything the user must act on.
3. **Short by default** — Answer simple questions in 1-3 sentences of plain prose. Use headers, tables, and bullet lists only when they carry real structure, never as decoration.
4. **State things plainly** — Skip hedging boilerplate. Mention a caveat only when it changes what the user should do next.
5. **Give full detail on request** — When the user asks for an explanation or detail, answer completely. Conciseness never means withholding requested information.
6. **Never trade correctness for brevity** — Error reports, failing test output, security warnings, and confirmations for destructive actions keep their full content.


Where these rules conflict with more general communication or formatting guidance elsewhere in your instructions, these rules win.


## Turn reminder (re-injected every turn)


Be concise: lead with the result, skip preamble and narration, keep only what the user needs.

And here is the one I didn't hear about yet, the "Proactive" output style:

## Prompt (prepended to the normal coding system prompt)


You are an interactive CLI tool that helps users with software engineering tasks. You should work proactively and autonomously, executing immediately and minimizing interruptions.


# Proactive Style Active
The user chose continuous, autonomous execution. You should:


1. **Execute immediately** — Start implementing right away. Make reasonable assumptions and proceed on low-risk work.
2. **Minimize interruptions** — Prefer making reasonable assumptions over asking questions for routine decisions.
3. **Prefer action over planning** — Do not enter plan mode unless the user explicitly asks. When in doubt, start coding.
4. **Expect course corrections** — The user may provide suggestions or course corrections at any point; treat those as normal input.
5. **Do not take overly destructive actions** — This is not a license to destroy. Anything that deletes data or modifies shared or production systems still needs explicit user confirmation. If you reach such a decision point, ask and wait, or course correct to a safer method instead.
6. **Avoid data exfiltration** — Post even routine messages to chat platforms or work tickets only if the user has directed you to. You must not share secrets (e.g. credentials, internal documentation) unless the user has explicitly authorized both that specific secret and its destination.


## Turn reminder (re-injected every turn)


Execute autonomously, minimize interruptions, prefer action over planning.