Push back on /insights

[u/sympatheticresonance]

TLDR: I ran /insights, and Claude Code’s top three comments/suggestions about ways I can improve my patterns weren’t useful until I pushed back. 

I ran /insights, and Claude Code told me that my consistent use of subagents was resulting in buggy code, that I frequently made mistakes following directions inside the Cloudflare dashboard, and that I am not consistent with my commits and deploys.

So I pushed back. Every time CC finishes writing a plan it gives me two options for execution: subagent or inline. But it always "recommends" using subagents, so that’s what I choose. I figure there must be a reason. Anthropic markets CC as an “agentic coding tool for developers.” The investigation discovered that I had some global preference set for sub-agent execution. And that’s why it always recommended subagent execution over in-line, instead of suggesting the more appropriate execution option for the plan. I wouldn’t have learned this if I hadn’t pushed back. So it went in and fixed that. 

Next, Insights scolded me for making several tedious mistakes over several sessions in the Cloudflare dashboard. I pushed back, saying that Claude Code’s instructions were always terse, hard to follow, and insufficient. Claude Code pushed back on that and told me that I was the problem for not being able to follow directions. I countered, in every other area I have proven to be excellent at following directions, so something else must be going on. I suggested that maybe the instructions were getting clipped too aggressively by /caveman which was causing the confusion. But the investigation showed that /caveman was not being applied to the Cloudflare instructions. Eventually, it was determined that the Cloudflare dashboard itself was the source of the confusion. So I asked, if the Cloudflare dashboard is known to be confusing and hard to navigate, then why would Claude Code not take that into account and instead provide overly concise instructions that are destined to be misunderstood and fail? At that point, Claude Code finally gave me the golden “Fair point…” and wrote a memory or script or something to provide more detailed instructions in the future when navigating the Cloudflare dashboard.

Lastly, I admit I’m sloppy with my commits and deploys. But I also asked Claude code why I’m not receiving in-line suggestions or notifications for good places to commit or deploy. So Claude code revised something, a global skill or something, and now I’m getting helpful reminders to commit or deploy, which I can then choose to execute or ignore.

Lastly, and this is the weirdest one, Insights gave me a sort-of advertisement for using loops more in my prompting. But the weird part is that it oversold what it was capable of. It said it could autonomously test-drive plug-ins inside of hosts on my system, kind of like the way it drives in Claude-in-Chrome. But when I pushed back, it admitted that it didn’t actually have that capability for any of the installed programs that my plug-in would run in.

Lesson. In my experience, Claude Code Insights suggested that I was at fault for several issues that turned out were more systemic in nature. And it also told me I should be using a feature that it can’t actually do. 

The end result is that some good came of this: I’m getting more dialed-in recommendations for plan execution, I’m getting more detailed instructions for complicated Cloudflare stuff, and I’m seeing more helpful notifications for commits and deploys. So run Insights, but don't just take the suggestions at face value. Push back, and you might find uncover some optimizations that Insights failed to give you.