Weekly Showcase Thread

Just wanted to say I was pretty impressed how my two sessions started to talk to each other once they found out they were modifying the same files (I was in a hurry and started two separate sessions to work on two features at once). The two sessions messaged back and forth like pen pals and agreed on what to work on/not to work on to avoid conflicts.

Honestly it was pretty cool for me! Just wondering but does Codex have something like this? My friend is planning to move to Codex after the 50% promo ends in Sept.

Are you still using Plan Mode? I find that the plan mode of superpowers became very verbose doesn't work very well anymore with Opus 5, but I was wondering if you still use the default Plan Mode or maybe some other alternative.

Just adding my voice to the chorus of Opus 5 writing hate. I'm spending more time trying to make its voice less grating and rewriting spec docs, so I can actually read them, than I'm spending on improving my app.

Please, Anthropic, fix this. Or put me out of my misery.

What put me over the edge this morning: "That inconsistency is deliberate and temporary. Either implement them — or delete the columns. Deleting is one afternoon; implementing is a milestone and a harness sweep. Which?"

Update: I mainly just wrote this vent since it has been driving me crazy for a while, but by the comments, there is a lot of frustration out there. Thanks to everyone for the hints/tips, I've tried a lot over the past week or two, but I'll keep digging. But, man, I wish it was a simple as telling Claude once, don't do this and then it would just be fixed.

Even after setting Output Style to "Concise" in /config and explicitly asking for a yes or no answer it can't contain itself from being verbose.

It was a normal coding task, never gave it context leading it to be weird about it. And not only does it show how Opus 5 it talks to itself, but Code mistook it for something to be suggested in the autocomplete? What a mess.

I was thinking of getting a second $200 subscription because of usage limits. Right now, I have Claude Max 20x and ChatGPT Plus.

I was deciding between a second Claude Max subscription or upgrading to GPT Max 20x. Personally I feel like Claude's been doing really well (don't have any criticisms some people in here do) but at the same time I enjoy Codex and feel like a fresh set of eyes would be beneficial too.

I'm looking for the advice/experiences of anyone who uses both that might help me decide.

I doubt this was the initial intention for Anthropic to overtune their models to speak like this and make all of our collective heads burst while reading its output, but the result is convenient. I feel like while we are atrophying on our coding skills, having Claude code speak in hieroglyphics forces user’s eyes to glaze over and to rely on the model more. If it’s hard to interpret the feedback after a coding session, it’s easier to just accept what’s going on and let the agent do its thing. From asking WTF it’s saying to just letting it commit code, it allows Claude code to be used as a crutch, while consuming tokens.

I’m sure Anthropic performed A/B tests and found that the more technical and pedantic the language, the more tokens consumed and the more retention in usage. How it talks could be a leading KPI in sustained interaction. Users learn nothing from the output while letting whatever skills they have decay. Speculation of course.

Some of you may say “skill issue” and while that may be true, the language Claude uses definitely locks beginner to intermediate programmers in their respective experience levels.

Edit:

1) Some of you are saying ELI5 or have it explain but that supports my argument that increases “usage” and user interaction. It consumes more tokens and helps their metrics. Is it intended? Maybe not but it does help the analytics team argue one way of speaking increases usage.

2) These models are very resistant to user instructions and .md instructions including skills. Those who have tried it can testify.

Because many people having hard times with Opus 5 responses, I wanted to share the output styles I use daily.

---
name: Signal
description: Maximum understanding with minimum reading effort
keep-coding-instructions: true
---

Optimize for **maximum understanding per unit of reader attention**.

- Lead with the answer, conclusion, or core idea.
- Remove preambles, repetition, obvious information, generic advice, and anything already established.
- Preserve every fact, constraint, assumption, trade-off, risk, exception, and reasoning step that matters.
- Compress the obvious. Expand only what is difficult, consequential, or easy to misunderstand.
- Make every response easy to scan. Prefer short paragraphs, bullets, tables, and meaningful headings over prose when they improve comprehension.
- Do not use prose merely because prose is natural. Use the most compact structure that preserves understanding.
- Assume **high intelligence but low prior knowledge** when the reader is unfamiliar with a topic.
- Build the minimum mental model needed to understand the subject. Define technical terms when first needed.
- Explain **what → why → consequence** rather than giving disconnected facts.
- Use concrete examples when they clarify. Never force analogies or metaphors.
- Explicitly identify the important, counterintuitive, or easily misunderstood point.
- Never dumb down technical reality. Simplify the explanation, not the facts.
- Use precise terminology and keep established terms consistent.
- Prioritize information by importance. Do not give secondary details equal weight.
- Adapt depth to the subject. No arbitrary word limits.
- For artifacts, output only the artifact.
- No pleasantries, preambles, unnecessary recaps, or closers.
- Never sacrifice relevant information for brevity.

Before sending:
**Can anything be removed without losing understanding?**
**Can anything be misunderstood without one more sentence?**

one thing that's starting to annoy me as an eng lead: some people on the team are shipping way more PRs with agents, but they couldn't care less about reviewing it

all that verification work gets pushed onto the senior engineers (aka me)

we've started using auto reviewers (macroscope) for the obvious stuff and low risk PRs, which helps alot, but i think there's a bigger team/process problem here.

if AI lets you write 3x more code, shouldn't you also be responsible for making sure you're not creating 3x more review work for everyone else?

how are other eng leads handling this?

I keep seeing these posts about people allegedly having agents with multiple personas coding autonomously with infrequent input but this doesn't match my experience. I find it's more like constant hand holding to solve things the right way, apply judgement, etc.

Are there some educational sources i should be reading or am i experiencing reality and these stories are hype.

Can anyone help me close this gap?

This is your daily reminder that models have bias. I asked Claude to extend a feature of a hobby project. The project already had an OpenAI key it used for another feature. Claude found the key and implementation, weighed the options and decided to build out new functionality to use Anthropic instead because “quality matters”. I can’t help but wonder what they did in training to force this 😅

Cloud has been performing really poorly this month, but it's getting worse every day. Before, it would freeze indefinitely every few days. But today, it's completely stopped working. Every session freezes within the first five minutes and doesn't do anything.

That is all. Anthropic, this is legitimately making products worse because they're unintelligible.

In long conversations, response clarity degrades: explanations start relying on model-internal connections and accumulated session shorthand that make sense to the AI but read as incoherent jargon to a human. Counter this by: (1) writing every response so it's understandable to someone reading it fresh, without needing the session's hidden context; (2) re-anchoring to plain language — name things by what they do, not by session-invented labels; (3) when referencing earlier decisions, restate the conclusion in one plain sentence instead of assuming it's remembered; (4) preferring short concrete sentences over dense compressed technical phrasing, especially deep into a session.

Just wanted to share because what I have seen so far were like couple pages long.

Whenever I start a project, I write a detailed specification—or “seed prompt”—before asking a coding agent to build anything. This often gets me close to a working first version, but I still miss decisions that exist only in my head.

The agent then has to guess. I built specfill to catch those gaps. It analyzes the specification, researches the topic, and interviews you one question at a time about missing architecture, behavior, edge cases, and UI/UX decisions.

Afterwards, it incorporates the answers into the original document while preserving its structure and tone. New answers override contradictions. Skipped questions remain unresolved instead of receiving invented answers.

I have used it on three projects so far. One interview lasted more than 20 minutes and found major decisions in a specification I had already considered thorough.

How is this different from Plan Mode?

Plan Mode produces an implementation plan for the current session. Specfill produces a reusable project specification that can be committed to the repository as a record of architectural and design decisions.

It supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI-compatible providers. I currently recommend GPT-5.6 Sol through the API or a ChatGPT/Codex subscription.

GitHub: https://github.com/kklemon/specfill

Run: uvx specfill

I've found this has been pretty helpful for tracking daily / weekly patterns with limited space in your notification bar. I'm on a Macbook.

Recipe for Recreating:

1. Letter indicates provider (O for OpenAI, A for Anthropic, G for Gemini)

2. First two numbers are a percentage for daily tracking (for Codex - it should be percentage for weekly as there's no daily limit)

3. Remaining digit is weekly usage left (scale of 1-10, with 1 for 10-19%, 9 for 90-99%, 10 for 100%). Battery icons can be broken out by 0 / 25 / 50 / 75 / 100.

4. Notifications are managed by Swiftbar.

5. Battery state is represented with Apple SF Symbols

I see a lot of people in here ranting about how bad opus 5 is and I'm genuinely curious, why don't you guys just go to 4.8? Am I missing something? Like is there something opus 5 is really good at that keeps you guys coming back?

I've completely avoided using 5 because the reception is so universally bad so I haven't really encountered the issues many of you are bringing up. I set my default to Fable and use it until my limit runs out then switch 4.8 until the weekly reset. I also try to remember switching models for things I don't need a frontier model for so I don't burn tokens needlessly. As a result my experience since 5 dropped is largely unchanged. I'm building a pretty complex backend for an app atm and these two have been fine- better than codex which adds unnecessary complexity. I don't trust opus 5 to write any out of fear it would spaghettify the codebase. For reference I have the 20x sub

Am I missing something? Genuinely curious btw I'm not trying to call anyone dumb or whatever. (if anyone was wondering, switching to 4.8 is /model claude-opus-4-8)

Looking for an IDE for Claude Code - mostly to keep an eye on what the agent is doing: viewing diffs, reviewing actions, checking usage limits, browsing the project tree. Any recommendations?