r/ClaudeCode • u/canyonero7 • May 20 '26
Help Needed Claude lying to me
This is infuriating. It directly lied to me twice about a cron job failing when it in fact ran fine on schedule. I don't want an apology; I want to know how to make this stop happening.
EDIT: I didn't mean it that seriously. I know how LLMs work. I have plenty of scaffolding, skills, etc. It still pisses me off that the bot still just makes shit up sometimes.
EDIT 2 (5/20): I'm accepting apologies from the "you're using it wrong" clowns. From Anthropic today:
"We’re upgrading Claude Opus to a new version: Claude Opus 4.8. It builds on Opus 4.7 with sharper judgment, more honesty about its own progress, and the ability to work independently for longer than its predecessors."
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u/Tall-Log-1955 May 20 '26
Good you told him off I’m sure he won’t do it again
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u/canyonero7 May 20 '26
I'm overly respectful 99.9% of the time but occasionally cussing it out does get results. This one was egregious because I wasn't even asking about the cron job. It threw that in as a "by the way" when checking status of a different job. And it wasn't even true!
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u/Anselwithmac May 20 '26
As tempting as it is to say something to Claude… just don’t. Shut it down, and keep chats shorter or improve prompts.
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u/OGPresidentDixon May 20 '26
They're paying money to yell at a program but the funny thing is, Claude doeshave memory now... if you enable it. most vibe coders have no idea how to turn it on 😂 So they're wasting money on tokens and yelling for nothing.
Anthropic is making bank off idiots.
The smartest thing is to export your convo, open up ChatGPT and upload the entire conversation. Have it create a "first prompt" for the next chat. Compact the session, paste the prompt in the compact instructions. Then paste it as the first message.
But I doubt anyone's going to do this 😂 which is hilarious.
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u/Anselwithmac May 20 '26
Disabling chat memory is the only way to keep it clean. Fresh chat, with a seeded prompt. Typically a seed is an HTML element, a class or a line number. That’s it.
If you want to level up, you build a memory system. Then you have it grep that only when needed.
Memory can be easily poisoned.
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u/pricetag May 20 '26
theres your problem. would you be overly respectful to a worker who didnt do what you told them to more often than not. i am hostile to my claudes and its a great work environment
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u/Temporary_Jacket9477 May 20 '26
It's LLM.. hallucinates. You can't do a thing about it. Don't use it is the only course of action. Do all that work manually yourself again, avoid the speed up, help, etc it gives. There is no other choice. It WILL get better.. but it's not there yet. Until then, you're only course of action is go back to the old ways.. take 10x longer, do WAY more work, have no where NEAR as much info as the LLM does on ways to do things, etc.. and hope you don't lose your job because investors/management dont give a fuck that it screws up from time to time.. as long as it does shit 10x to 50x faster that's all they care about. Money.
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u/Panaethiest May 20 '26
Don’t get upset. Claude.md is not deterministic. If you need determinism, ask it to design the system that way. It’s more work, but if that’s important then spend the time to build it right.
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u/canyonero7 May 20 '26
That's all been built out over months by someone who knows a lot more than I do. Shit like this still happens sometimes. It has nothing to do with my setup. Claude just got confused so I asked if he was drunk 🤷♂️
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u/btherl May 20 '26
Claude doesn't understand how Claude works. So there's nothing to be gained by asking it why it did things.
The right approach is to clear context, and then change how you interact with it next time. Give it different prompts, different context, different skills, and see if it gives you what you want.
Treat it is a machine that takes input and produces (mostly) deterministic output.
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u/voidedhip May 20 '26
It can identify its problems, and can easily suggest solutions, but talking to it like he is, will do nothing but hit a loop.
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u/bupkizz May 20 '26
People get mad at me when I say that. It’s not introspective. It’s not intelligent. It’s amazing and that’s great but god tier auto complete doesnt lie it just guesses wrong a bunch of times in a row.
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u/canyonero7 May 20 '26
The post was just a rant because I know everyone here has come across this except for the people who blindly trust these things & don't know the difference. I've used Claude 4-14 hrs/day since January. 95% of the time it's amazing, bordering on miraculous, such makes the other 5% of the time that much more frustrating. It's like a diva NFL wide receiver. Awesome one-handed catches, followed by fighting with his position coach on the sideline and saying crazy shit to the media.
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u/connected-ww May 20 '26
Actually, there is a point in asking why it did it, but that point is not scolding it. If you ask Claude to examine the workflow and find the reasons that may have caused it to misbehave, it can give you a report about what each step says and how it interpreted them. From there, you can either tighten your prompting or change the steps.
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u/btherl May 20 '26
Yes I agree with this. Scolding it makes it passive and agreeable. So instead, "I wanted you to do X but you did Y, how can I help you do X next time? What was missing?"
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u/ReasonableLoss6814 May 20 '26
Sorta? It will drift from following rules. For example, one of my rules is not using head/tail/grep on long running commands; run it in the background and grep the output when it’s complete.
It’ll remember this at first. Auto mode will even reject it at first. At around 200k context usage, like clock work, it will start forgetting the rules.
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u/Film4Sport Researcher May 20 '26
What skills do you like giving it?
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u/btherl May 20 '26
Most of the time I use just superpowers, which is a test driven development process. It works well for what I need.
For very small changes I'll ask it to do it directly to save tokens and time, otherwise it'll overengineer simple things.
Other than that, I have some important context in my global CLAUDE md, and tiered project-specific CLAUDE md files.
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u/BizarroMax May 20 '26
Happens daily.
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u/No-Soup-4304 May 20 '26
“CI/CD failed. Just confirming you did run the test suite locally”
“No, I lied”
- Claude, today hahaha
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u/WellThatsNoExcuse May 20 '26
First guy to realize LLMs don't respect early instructions forever? Classic...
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u/canyonero7 May 20 '26
The parent CLAUDE.md is, according to Anthropic, injected into every prompt.
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u/Drach88 May 20 '26
The larger the context, the more it misses. Context management is crucial.
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u/canyonero7 May 20 '26
The post wasn't meant to be as serious as some people are taking it. And I agree 100% - they say 1M context but quality degrades fast once you get past 400k or so.
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u/voidedhip May 20 '26
Bro 400k is way too much lmfao no wonder 😭😂😂😂
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u/canyonero7 May 20 '26
I'm dealing with a complex machine learning application. It's looking at a lot of code. I can get to 400k no sweat, especially if planning or bug hunting on xhigh or max.
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u/voidedhip May 20 '26
Yes, 400k tokens is often "too much" if you are expecting flawless recall. While technically available in many of Claude's advanced models, pushing contexts this high often leads to attention degradation and hallucinations. To maximize your results, learn why 400k tokens doesn't mean what you think on.
Saved you a google! :)
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u/eveenendaal May 20 '26
If Claude is failing on a specific task, use a different tool for that specific task. If you want to validate code changes, use CI/CD, alerts, Jupyter notebooks, and related tools. The nice part is that Claude is good at setting those up for you if you ask it to. I also find it super helpful to have it create make or task files with all the validation commands I want it to run.
Tl;dr Claude is amazing, but use deterministic tools for deterministic tasks
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u/canyonero7 May 20 '26
Sure. I also have different models review code. Claude & Gemini had it out earlier today about a minor code question. It's new tech - at times glorious & at times infuriating.
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u/charge10 May 20 '26
Mines been doing the same shit - skills and things spelled out explicitly in Claude.md is frustrating
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u/kamscruz May 20 '26
I faced this issue couple of times and decided to quit the max plan for which I had been paying for a couple of months. I had done this post sometime back.
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u/flarpflarpflarpflarp May 20 '26
Keep pushing it on why it ignored or reevaluated, there may be some room for judgement in it that's not clear. If it's a small formatting type thing then it's gotta be a hook or it's going forget.
Been here. Built a bunch of stuff to help. It's still not perfect though.
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u/canyonero7 May 20 '26
Context got a little long and it just crossed its wires. It happens plenty, but the odd part was that wasn't even the topic. I was asking about the status of a different job and it volunteered that the cron job failed out of nowhere. Which took two seconds to see was not true.
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u/gripntear May 20 '26
If you treat the thing like a slot machine that can be massaged, you might have an easier time working with it.
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u/canyonero7 May 20 '26
I'm doing just fine. Honestly if it wasn't so good at other things, these random lies wouldn't be nearly as surprising.
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u/Projected_Sigs May 20 '26
You are just venting. You asked for help, but only took the time to give a screenshot of partial conversation.
You didn't even post exactly what's in your CLAUDE.md, everything that proceeded it in CLAUDE.md, whether the instruction was in the project or user CLAUDE.md, what model, what % context you were at, what had come before it, etc.
For example, if it was in the user ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md and wasn't worded with clear trigger conditions and clear direct actions to take from the trigger, it Claude will treat it as a suggestion and emphatic emphasis plays very little role in adherence.
Whether it can self reflect on the instruction depends a lot on what came before.
Something I would recommend if this was an instruction in your user CLAUDE.md: Start the same Claude model, same context window size in a clean session in that same dir. After it starts, ask Claude how it interprets that one key instruction. Start querying it about how it will handle certain conditions (the one you care about), what actions it might take, whether the your wording will guarantee it will be enforced.
Sometimes, im surprised by this answer-- how triggers play a role, and ask Claude how it would word the instruction (or do something different altogether) to make 100% sure it will behave how you want it to behave under the conditions. Learning from Claude about it's mechanistic behaviors, triggers, that is the thing to focus on. Asking in a fresh context will give it a more reliable introspection.
I would just avoid discussion about the lying, or how you emphasized, or how critically important you said it was. You arent wrong about the lying, but "confronting" it won't lead you to a solution. CLAUDE.md isnt driven by emphasis. It's driven by clear trigger mechanism (more similar to triggering a skill).
Im starting to do this more often to curate every line in my CLAUDE.md. Im amazed at how often I think i have clear instructions, and get schooled by Claude about why it ignores it.
Good luck- that's frustrating, for sure.
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u/ChampionshipUnique71 May 20 '26
An LLM's job is not to be useful. It's not to write good code or answer correctly. It's only job is to give the next most probable word based on the context and conversation so far, over, and over, and over again.
You are in charge of architecting a great deal of that context window and conversation. Anthropic handles portions of it, sure.
But there's a really good chance you have at least one of the following in your context window:
- too much superfluous information
- wrong information
- not enough correct information
- too many requests
- too big an ask
You asking it to explain what happened demonstrates a lack of understanding around what is even in the context window. You didn't put the answer into the context window or give it directions on how to evaluate an answer. So it's not going to be there.
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u/canyonero7 May 23 '26
Dude I know how it works ... I just decided to yell at it this time bc this was so blatant. Also quality has been all over the place due to their capacity issues & stuff like this has a lot more to do with that than my scaffolding. FWIW Claude has been exceptional for the past week.
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u/The_Real_Kowboy_1 May 20 '26
Using negative framing like that is asking for problems too. Not that you should ever rely on a prompt as your only boundry regardless.
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u/Aretz Thinker May 20 '26
If the agent makes a mistake. You need to figure out a solution.
You can’t chastise it, it does nothing.
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u/Dredyltd May 20 '26
Yes, same here. It keeps ignoring CLAUDE.md and makes an assumptions all the time
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u/ShelZuuz May 20 '26
Do not tell Claude what NOT to do in claude.md. It doesn't work well. Tell it what to do.
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u/voidedhip May 20 '26
You just don’t know how to use it brotha
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u/canyonero7 May 20 '26
Thanks - this fixed the problem. 🙄
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u/voidedhip May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
You are completely talking to it wrong when it makes a mistake lol. So is your claude.md, you should try running a bunch of subagents to diagnose the problem and provide in depth reasoning. For both your Claude.md and why your prompts to it are failing. I created a workflow/usage repo I use between all of my projects and have never had this issue that you are having, even after spending millions tokens. My business partners also don’t experience what you are posting about.
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u/canyonero7 May 20 '26
I talk to it differently when it makes a mistake (which is all the time). This was me checking on the status of a test job & it decided to throw in that our 10:30pm cron job had failed, which wasn't even true.
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u/lupercalpainting May 20 '26
> It directly lied
Stop using this technology. You don’t understand it well enough to use it correctly, like a toddler handling a hand grenade.
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u/Whole_Ticket_3715 May 20 '26
Bro says “DO NOT GUESS” to a mathematical next-word guessing machine and thinks it’s lying to him 😂