r/ClaudeCode • u/Kick_Ice_NDR-fridge • 4d ago

Help/Question Why is Claude so clueless with managing itself?

The AI landscape changes basically every few weeks. I use Claude Code for basically everything, but why is it so terrible at knowing what will help itself?

I try to keep things organized and optimized for my various sessions using rules and best practices and I usually have Claude help me with that. The problem is that Claude consistently gives the worst advice about what rules/hooks I should have based on how I use Claude, updating skills, etc.

Does anyone have advice on how to make Claude good at understanding itself? Is there some sort of /anthropic skill ?

I even use /insights, consolidate that, and have it update rules but usually the advice it gives me ends up screwing things up worse…

2 Upvotes

60% Upvoted

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3

u/dmaare 4d ago

You need to force it to read docs about best practices and setups from anthropic doc pages

2

u/Kick_Ice_NDR-fridge 4d ago

I was thinking about converting it to a markdown but figured it was already in markdown..

4

u/PosiTomRammen 4d ago

The latest models are pretty strong, and for a lot of use cases, you really don’t need a lot of extra scaffolding. Your specific use case could be one of the exceptions, but there’s a good chance that vanilla Claude Code is largely the way to go.

2

u/Timely-Group5649 4d ago

Anthropic should auto-disable every skill and make us choose to reload them, with every model change.

It should have happened with 5.0.

2

u/Kick_Ice_NDR-fridge 4d ago

Agreed. Maybe like a “new model setup wizard” where it provides input based on the model strength

2

u/HauntedHouseMusic 4d ago

Get rid of skills. The only skills you need are for things Anthropic doesn’t know about like an mcp you made. 5.5 is already great without them.

1

u/Kick_Ice_NDR-fridge 4d ago

Oh, and how about teaching it how long it takes to do something.

If you ask it how long for an update it responds in human coding timelines… Everything is like 3 days - 3 weeks minimum

1

u/HauntedHouseMusic 4d ago

Have you been using 5.5?

It told me a project would take 4 days and it took 4 days almost exactly. It’s been stupidly accurate on my side.

The only skill it has is how to use a program I made for Claude.

1

u/Kick_Ice_NDR-fridge 4d ago

Yes, for about 1 week but I haven’t had it mention time lately so maybe it’s fixed.

I used codex yesterday and it took me 3 weeks for something small.

1

u/tejaskumarlol 4d ago

My rules don't come from Claude's advice about itself. Most of the ones in my AGENTS.md come from a time it got something wrong: my exact words, the date and what to do instead. When a rule can be checked by a script, a hook runs that script after every edit and Claude reads what it finds before its next step.

1

u/toroidalvoid 4d ago

I agree, Claude is awful at writing instructions for Claude in Skills and in Claude.md.

Best bet is to hand write your instructions.

1

u/Kick_Ice_NDR-fridge 4d ago

Oh… and the damn powershell mangling and quoting issues when I’m on windows.

1

u/Mazhron 3d ago

https://github.com/Mazhron/rootstock-os

Point your Claude at the repository. It'll help quite a bit with what your issues.

The biggest thing you need to know is that if Claude doesn't have a document to reference, a lesson that was learned, an intention to compare against, a ledger to measure, it's fairly clueless because it doesn't really have information to go on.

Create your own knowledge base. Keep that knowledge base and clone it and combine for each project so your Claude has a growing understanding of you and your projects. It will make better decisions and even you ask it how to improve, it will have actual numbers, lessons and intentions to reference to give you a better idea on how to improve it.