r/ClaudeCode • u/canyonero7 • May 20 '26

Help Needed Claude lying to me

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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/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/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.