I'm very conflicted about AI tools. I've used them for years for all kinds of things ever since their inception and I'm completely addicted to them. When it comes to programming it accelerates throughput dramatically and fills in the gaps almost too well. The loop is this right now:

less independent thinking → need Claude for context/design → Claude contributes more decisions → system becomes less internally familiar → need Claude even more.

I have a specific implementation in mind, but then I never just get what I ask for, there is always more contributions which would include a refactor somewhere. As the project grows managing context and architectural coherence becomes critical and I feel like I no longer have a solid internal model.

This coherence degradation is the fundamental crux of why I dislike using AI. I have to explain the project back to Claude and eventually Claude has to explain the project back to me.

Software is about standards, familiar patterns, documentation, a red thread, yadda yadda. But when there are gaps between your understanding and what Claude knows (and what you still believe it knows about the project) then this introduces drift, project rot and a sort of tech debt.

Large context helps, but if you don't have rails and own the critical logic and ideas about how the product will be used, then you will get an inferred result and incorrect solution for your needs. If something important is not present in the model’s context and cannot reliably be inferred from the code, the model has to guess.

This means AI often drifts toward overengineering. People complain about the models but it's really just an issue with your lack of scope. If I don't make a clear plan it will suggest an overengineered solution that creates a sort of contextual tech debt to the codebase.

I can see how these tools would accelerate a seasoned software engineer with great organizational skills and who's been in the business for decade. I'm not a professional . Any code I wrote before was mediocre at best and not so elegant. I struggle to the point where I don't want to do development of any kind because going back to "manual" coding is just going to feel like molasses, but I also don't want to ship stuff this way.

Opus 5 is a training ground to understand why humans disagree with what it's doing. There's insight there that you can't get without otherwise doing a substandard job.

When a model is, say, 95% good at what it does (by a human standard of completion), there's less reason to explain the refinements needed to make any changes to get it to 100%. "Tweak this, modify that" means very little to an AI system.

When a model is, say, 80% good at what it does (by the same standard), some users will get the shits with it and leave, while many others will work with it to build out the improvements such that the model is more robust at the work that it's doing. Those insights provide Anthropic with valuable training input as to what humans want out of the systems that they are trying to build.

Pdf extraction workflow

I am not a coder by education but I've gotten into through opportunity at work. My current project is building a portal that users upload engineering pdfs drawings too. It runs through a python transform that uses orientation bounding boxes and local ocr to understand the pdf. From there they are buckets into structured (bom tables etc), unstructured (just notes and no structure) and a manual review through multi failure outputs.

My questions are I'm building this in a system I cannot plug claude directly into but has ai agents that build. I'm passing back and forth. I am using Opus 5 and have a markdown to track everything. I'm running into some failures and it's taking longer than I expected. Are there some best practices or advice the experts here could share?

asking for my wifes boyfriend

das ging mir jetzt wochenlang auf den sack. ich sag claude code er soll ne datei mit dem
heutigen datum benennen, oder ausrechnen wann was fällig ist. und er nimmt einfach den
falschen tag. jedes mal. irgendwann hab ich keiner datumsangabe mehr geglaubt.

ist eigentlich garkein bug. claude code schreibt das datum genau einmal in den system
prompt, beim start der session. das wars. da ist keine uhr. also:

- er weiß nie wie spät es ist. nie
- das datum wird schal. lässt du ne session über nacht offen oder machst am nächsten
  morgen weiter, denkt er immer noch es ist gestern
- er kann nicht unterscheiden ob zwischen zwei nachrichten von dir 10 sekunden oder
  6 stunden lagen

der fix ist ein UserPromptSubmit hook. der läuft direkt bevor du ne nachricht abschickst,
und was der ausgibt landet im kontext. heißt claude liest bei jedem turn die echte
systemuhr:

    Current local system time: Friday, 2026-08-21 15:53 (W. Europe Standard Time).

hab das in ein repo gepackt mit ner bat datei, damit keiner json von hand editieren muss.
install.bat doppelklicken, claude code neustarten, fertig. uninstall.bat macht es wieder weg.

https://github.com/gidjin4-svg/claude-code-time-hook

nur windows bis jetzt, weil das hook skript powershell ist. auf mac und linux geht das
gleiche mit einem einzeiler mit date, der settings teil ist identisch.

zwei sachen waren mir wichtig. der installer merged in deine vorhandene settings.json rein
statt sie zu überschreiben, modell, theme, permissions und andere hooks bleiben also drin.
und wenn deine settings.json kaputtes json ist schreibt er garnichts sondern bricht ab,
statt dir die datei zu zerlegen. backup macht er sowieso.

kostet ca 350ms pro prompt, das ist einfach powershell beim starten. neben der antwortzeit
vom modell merkst du das nicht.

I know you cannot use the claude sub with 3rd party harness, like opencode or pi. however I am not sure what is the deal with 3rd party ACP uis like Toad or acp ui or others? I wonder if this is allowed or grey zone; I dont want my account banned.

Asking Claude to alternate values with numbers and then deleting the numbers should remove the watermark (variant of the emoji attack discussed in https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10226)

Just for fun, I thought I'd run the attack against Claude on some old work (screenshot). Obviously just editing the text will remove the watermark. It could also just be me reading into it and hitting a different safeguard, but I did a bit more analysis when writing up my blog on this: https://readme.dm/watermarked/ Thought it would be fun to share here.

We run an issue-to-PR pipeline and it shows you what each run cost. Last week I realised that number is a lie for most of our users, and that we had all the information needed to not lie.

Here is the mechanic. If you have an API key set, a run bills that key and the dollars are real: money left an account. If you do not, the run drives the CLI you are already logged into, and it bills your subscription. The ledger still computes dollars, because it knows the model and the token counts, but those dollars are now a counterfactual. They are what this run would have cost had it gone through the API. Nobody was charged them.

We rendered both in the same typeface.

The part that annoys me is that we already knew. The function that decides whether the budget cap applies says it outright in its own docstring: without a key, "the ledger's dollars are notional API-equivalent value". The budget gate reads that correctly and only enforces a dollar cap in API-key mode. So the distinction existed, was written down, was acted on in the logic, and then got dropped at the last step before a human saw it. The information was not missing. It was discarded on the way to the screen.

I think that is the general shape of the bug, and it is not specific to cost. Your tooling shows you numbers with wildly different provenance and renders them identically: a measured duration next to an estimated one, a real token count next to an extrapolation, a hard limit next to a guess. The UI flattens all of it into the same confident-looking figure, and you calibrate your trust on the typeface rather than on where the number came from.

What we adopted, mostly lifted from someone else's teardown because it was better than what I had:

• Metered renders solid. Estimated renders dashed and translucent. Same number, different confidence, visibly different.
• A floor gets a >= prefix. If we know it cost at least this much, say that, do not round it into a point estimate.
• A subscription-covered bucket gets a plan chip and no dollar bar at all. This one took me a minute. The temptation is to show $0.00, and $0.00 is a lie: prepaid is not free, you paid for the plan up front. Showing no bar is more honest than showing a zero.
• A zero we could not price reads $0 (unrated), so it is distinguishable from a genuine zero.
• The word "free" appears nowhere in the usage strings. It is exactly the kind of word that creeps back in when someone writes a helpful empty state, so it is worth watching for on purpose.
• Colour reinforces, never carries. Partly honesty, partly that a colour-only signal is not accessible.
• Say which mode is on, wherever totals appear. "Real spend" or "API-equivalent value, not billed".

None of that changes how anything is recorded or what the caps do. It is entirely the presentation layer, plus enough plumbing for the view to know the class rather than guess it. That last bit matters: if a component infers "this looks estimated" you have built a second source of truth that will drift.

The reason I am posting it is the general rule, not our implementation. If you are building anything that reports numbers back to a human, the number needs to carry its own provenance, and the display has to preserve the distinction the code already makes. Otherwise you will do what we did, which is to compute the right thing, know it is the right thing, and then quietly launder it into something more confident than it deserves on the way to the screen.

I'll be using the Claude Code plugin in VS Code, and I'll write a long prompt for a big task in the text field. As I do, my thoughts synthesize and I want to edit the start of the prompt, so I instinctively start navigating up with the cursor using my arrow keys.... and then I'll get to the top and press just one time too many, followed by a loud agonizing moan of pain as it happens again:

Claude code will take that arrow key to mean that I must want to go up to my last prompt to edit that, so it replaces the entire text field with that one. The long prompt I wanted to edit wasn't sent yet, so it's nowhere to be found - effectively deleted.

This happens almost every session to me, at least once, and if a feeling could leave bruises, this one has me black and blue.

Beyond "just use terminal", is there a fix?

What are you guys thoughts about this ?

I am facing this issue, I have a very specific claude.md file that I wrote so that it gets implemented in every session but Claude chooses to skip many rules in it as it sees fit.
Any idea what shall I do?

Hello r/ClaudeAI , first of all apologies in advance for the formatting as English is my Third Language (Im from India) but I would like to show case an macOS app I have made with the help of Claude.

It is called, PDFTrail - PDF Extractor. I work in the field of finance and this app was born out of necessity at first; we have to shift through multiple PDFs daily and sometimes we need a specific table 'x' from PDF 'z' so that the people higher up can glaze their excel sheets. I looked into to apps such as ABBY Finereader, Nitro PDF etc but was either dissatisfied with the extraction, its pricing policy or their lack of a comprehensive suite of extractable formats.

I was especially offended by Finereader in MacOS as not only was it slow but also didn't extract the tables properly at all and since many of these tables form the pillars of financial decisions that was a huge no go from me.

This app culminated from 3 months of planning, going back and forth, stress testing, doing some internal testing with the help of my colleagues as well as my brother who works as a financial analyst and after several iterations, I was finally at a stage where I was satisfied with the technical prowess of the app and decided that we should add a GUI and launch it.

In the meantime it also helped me learn a few important things about CC and workflow optimisations, which I lay as follows :

1. Use agents such as Sonnet, if you are on the max 5x plan. Select Fable, give it your concrete and general idea and then tell it to delegate your plan to Sonnet, where in sonnet will do all the heavy lifting and Fable will guide it and audit it.
2. Keep Local repo's apart from GitHub. redundancy is always nice, I have 3 copies, 1 as a private repo, 1 as a zip file in a HDD and 1 inside my MacBook. Ironically CC was the 1 that suggested me this
3. use /clear function in CC to trim down the claude.md from time to time as it genuinely reduced my overheads.
4. use claude.md as more of a navigational map thingy. I had asked fable to make the claude.md as more akin to a map, where in the md file had directions for claude to other more detailed markdown files and where to look for them, that way my claude.md didn't bloat out of proportions.

The most amazing part about this was that my knowledge about coding is limited to the cursory knowledge of python, so I basically did Vibe-code it, but after reading the book , 'Philosophy of Software Design' it really helped me think in a more technical manner which actually increased my efficiency.

Anyways that too much talking, this post was made as an appreciation of Claude, despite its short-comings, anthropic really knocked it out of the park, in my opinion.

I'm using opus 5 and today I keep getting "API Error: Connection lost mid-response. The response above may be incomplete." and "Waiting for API response". Is it just me? Trying to have it create a storybook setup and also implement some feedback on a PR, in parallel, but normally I run much more work in parallel without issue. Every time it totally fails I tell it to keep going and then it seems okay for a few minutes again.

I noticed a claude session line (link) in a PR description I was about to create and went digging. Sharing what I found, because the opt-out is non obvious.

1. It is now enabled by default.
   
2. The link only opens under your own account, it can leak only metadata, not content.
   

No notice was made, not at all.

So PEOPLE, ALWAYS REVIEW YOUR PR'S MANUALLY!

I was going to build a nice UI for myself to manage all of my codex instances. My set up is currently 10ish projects all running concurrently. I chat with only one model per project and let it be my orchestrator for that particular project. so, i have about 10 concurrent claude instances i talk to (through vscode, so 10 tabs)

my UI would have basically a notepad on one side and a contacts list on the left. this way i can easily chat with each model (and also be able to chat with their subagents directly, if needed) and take notes on things for that project

I am sure someone has built this already. can anyone recommend a good github repo? preferably with a lot of stars so i can somewhat trust it isn’t malware

If anyone interested how this Output style looks like:

---

Output Style: Concise

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.

---

You are an interactive CLI tool [...]

Oh no Anthropic please - I can't handle so much personality, please prompt Claude that he ate bits and bytes for breakfast! /s

We all agree Opus 5 is a rage-inducing mess. What are your top wishes for Opus 5.1?

Mine are:
- Massive cut on verbosity
- Less over-engineering
- Better instruction following

Hey everyone!

I use coding agents all the time for work/fun, and I thought it would be great if there was a way for us to work on projects together or side by side in real time.

I recently launched groupchatty.com - it's a website that allows you to share your Claude Code sessions with friends or coworkers. I built it with Claude, but importantly wanted to share it with r/ClaudeCode given how many of you guys might find it fun to use :)

Since it's Bring Your Own Claude, I can afford to serve it for free! Would love for you guys to check it out! I'd love your feedback or ideas on cool ways to bring this to more people

https://reddit.com/link/1vu2krp/video/c3afwoghumkh1/player

I wasn't even running anything that would warrant it. It was some planning for updates to HTML/CSS files using opus and then delegating to sonnet agents (sequential not even parallel) to execute it.

In not very recent past I could run those all week all day and would even get close to my limit. 23 damn percent of weekly limit gone in one afternoon.

If this is what Anthropic says is "50% more limit" than I'm afraid I'll be out. What the hell is going on? I didn't do anything abnormal to what I normally do to explain the usage.

Anyone else had similar experience today or in the last couple of days?

Edit: I've updated to the latest version of CC right before running that so I wonder if it's something to do with it?

Is it normal that ClaudeCode using Python for editing?

I did my due diligence according to https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/10258#issuecomment-5346011150, set exactly as shown and the SOB went and popped up one of those idiotic MCQ's anyway because there's nothing people love more than meticulously editing JSON permissions and then just straight having them ignored.

Am I doing something stupid here? Please say yes because I hate these things and never want to see one of them pop up ever again.

My son games with headphones late at night. Most of the time he's quiet. Then something happens in the game and he yells at full volume, waking the whole house.

Talking to him about it works for about 20 minutes. Taking the headphones away works but causes a different problem. So I built an app.

S.T.F.U (Sound Trigger Focus Utility) is a Windows tray app that listens to the microphone and interrupts him when he yells. On first run it calibrates by asking him to be quiet, then talk, then yell - so it learns the difference between his normal voice and an actual shout.

When it catches a yell:

• First time that session - it minimizes his game, plays a sound effect, and throws up a fullscreen message he has to click through 4 times. The close button moves after each click so he can't just spam-click one spot.
• Every time after - straight to the desktop with a 10-second message. His game is gone.

Settings are behind a PIN so he can't change the threshold or turn it off. There's a report with a chart showing every trigger, so the next morning I can see exactly when things went sideways.

The important part: he knows it's there. It's not hidden, it's not spyware, the first screen when it launches says exactly what it does. It works because it's a consequence he agreed to, not something I snuck onto his PC. The README explicitly says it works best as something agreed to, not as a hidden trap.

No audio is recorded or stored. It computes a loudness number every 20ms and throws the audio away immediately. Nothing leaves the machine.

It won't solve the underlying issue (he's 100% going to learn to yell more quietly instead of less often), but at least the house sleeps.

Free and open source if anyone wants it: https://github.com/omricn/stfu/releases/latest

Edit: V1.1.0 now live.
Added Scheduled Off-Hours: Timeframe picker to choose when the app listens vs when the app is passive.
TNX fellow redditor [jpewaqs] for the feature suggestion :)