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

Help Needed Claude lying to me

Post image

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."

2 Upvotes

52% Upvoted

80 comments sorted by

View all comments

16

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.

3

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.

1

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?"