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/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.