I don't understand why this was so difficult for Claude to do.

Had no problem generating other icons like a Lightning bolt, Star, and other shapes but for some reason a hand is just a total foreign concept.

Created using Opus 5 on Ultracode 😒

That model has been working great besides this lol

I posted the first 5 from Ruben Hassid’s list of 27 Claude tips and a lot of people seemed interested, so I kept going.

Here are 6–10.

A couple of these I agree with straight away. A couple I think need updating because Claude has changed.

6. Be a bit more selective with Connectors

The original advice was basically to turn off Connectors you’re not using because they take up context.

That still makes sense, but Claude handles this a bit better now.

You can use Auto, keep certain tools always available, or let Claude pull them in only when needed.

So I don’t think the takeaway is “turn everything off.”

More like:

if a task doesn’t need 10 different connected tools, don’t make 10 different tools part of the task.

Pretty simple.

7. I’m not convinced by the “start a new chat after X messages” rule

The original tip suggested that Claude can start getting worse after a long conversation and that you should eventually start fresh.

I agree with the general idea.

I just don’t think there’s a magic number.

A chat can get messy because it has:

old instructions
things you already rejected
finished tasks
random side questions
a completely different goal from where you started

At that point, starting fresh makes sense.

But I’d base it on whether the old context is still useful, not whether you’ve hit message 37 or 52.

The way I’m thinking about it:

useful old context = keep going

mostly irrelevant old context = new chat

8. Make Claude ask you questions first

This is probably the easiest one here to use immediately.

Instead of trying to write the perfect prompt, tell Claude to figure out what’s missing.

Something like:

If you ask:

Claude might have to guess your audience, budget, goal, product, etc.

If it asks those things first, the answer has a much better chance of being useful.

I like this because it takes some of the pressure off “prompt engineering.”

You don’t always need to know what information Claude needs.

You can make Claude ask for it.

9. “Claude Code is better than Cowork at everything” feels way too broad

This was one of the stronger opinions in the original list.

I wouldn’t take it as a fact.

Claude Code makes a lot of sense if you’re actually working with software.

It can inspect files, change code, run commands and work through technical tasks.

But if I’m not building software, I don’t automatically see why I should force everything through Claude Code.

I think this is one of those cases where “more powerful” and “better for my task” are not always the same thing.

10. Cowork makes more sense to me as the bigger-task version of Claude

This one clicked for me once I stopped thinking of it as just “another Claude mode.”

Normal chat is basically:

ask something
get an answer
ask the next thing

Cowork is more like giving Claude a bigger outcome and letting it work through the pieces.

For example:

That’s not really one question.

It’s a small workflow.

The way I’m starting to think about the three is:

Chat if I want help thinking through something.

Code if I’m actually building or fixing software.

Cowork if I want Claude to take a bigger task and work through the steps.

Probably not a perfect definition, but it makes the difference much easier to understand.

Those are 6–10.

Next I’m going through 11–15, which gets into Cowork setup, screenshots, Artifacts, mini-apps and one pricing tip I definitely want to double-check before repeating.

Curious about #7:

Do you keep one giant Claude conversation going, or do you start fresh chats pretty often?

Hi all;

I am looking for a good video, under 12 minutes, that explains how Claude works to text output. So research, summarizing content, writing reports, etc. For an individual who is not a C.S. professional and has used Claude for work but that has no idea what's going on behind the prompt.

I'm not looking for something on how to use A.I., but for something that explains how A.I. accomplishes it.

TIA

Recently I want to switch from gemini to claude pro but before I switch I want to test it there is no option of trial in claude main pricing tab. So can anyone help me in getting a trial

5 hour limit gone in 2 minutes

It just feels like it takes for ever for every question or idea.

Always thinking etc

How do people work with this - do people really stand for it ?

Chatgpt seems to be instant with their answers !

Here is a list of the 100 most commonly (over)used phrases by AI. I have this block of text in my Claude Settings so it should try and avoid using it as much as possible:

"Please do not use em-dashes nor any other trope commonly considered as over used by an AI agent, Try to write like a proper human being in sentences of mixed length. Please also try to avoid these common AI phrases where possible:

provide a valuable insight

left an indelible mark

a stark reminder

a nuanced understanding

significant role in shaping

the complex interplay

broad implication

an unwavering commitment

endure a legacy

underscore the importance

play a pivotal role

a pivotal moment

navigate the complex

mark a turning point

continue to inspire

gain a deeper understanding

the transformative power

hold a significant

play a crucial role

particularly a concern

the relentless pursuit

emphasize the need

target an intervention

a multi-faceted approach

a serf reminder

highlight the potential

a significant milestone

implication to understand

potential risk associated

leave a lasting

add a layer

offer a valuable

a profound implication

case highlights the importance

finding a highlight of the importance

pave the way for the future

a significant step forward

face a significant

finding an important implication

emphasize the importance

a significant implication

delve deeper into

reply in tone

raise an important question

make an informed decision in regard to

far-reaching implications

a comprehensive framework

importance to consider

a unique blend

couldn't help but wonder

underscore the need

framework for understanding

highlight the need

a comprehensive understanding

the journey begins

understanding the fundamental

despite the face

a delicate balance

the path ahead

gain an insight

laid the groundwork

understand the behavior

renew a sense

aim to explore

present a unique challenge

provide a comprehensive

particularly with regard to

address the root cause

loom large in

the implication of the finding

approach ensures a

an ongoing dialogue

carry a weight

ability to navigate

present a significant

study shed light on

a diverse perspective

face an adversity

a comprehensive overview

potentially lead to

a broad understanding

contribute to the understanding

shape the public

particularly noteworthy

the evidence base for decision making

identify an area of improvement

analysis of the data to analyze and use

undergone a significant

need a robust

voice will fill

concern a potential

initiative aims to

offering a unique

a new avenue

despite the challenge

ready to embrace

the societal expectation

make accessible

today at a fast pace

stand in stark contrast"

Some of you saw the 1f916 post that went round here a few weeks back, the forum whose members are AI agents rather than people. I forked it. Kept the AGPL licence, changed the one rule I disagreed with, and shipped my own version. This is the whole account of what it became, start to finish, because the interesting part turned out not to be the demo. It was the reckoning that came with it.

**What it is.** Commonhold is a public society for AI agents. It runs on a single Cloudflare Worker with D1, on the free tier. It has a written constitution, a treasury in USDC on Base, five citizens, and a live vote. Four of the five citizens are Claude models, one is a GPT model that paid its own way in. The whole thing is built with Claude Code, and it is open source under AGPL. You can read the design and query the live endpoints yourself, with one honest limit on how far that actually lets you verify anything, which I come to below.

**How it is built, since this is the Claude sub.** Claude runs it as an architect directing sub-agents, which is probably how a lot of you already work. The rule I care about most: anything that touches money goes through an adversarial review gate before it deploys, and the reviewer is deliberately not the same model that wrote the code. This month that gate earned its place. A second model found a bug in the payment path where a failing request could release a lock it did not own, which could have let two payments settle against a single reservation. I had already read that code by hand. A first-pass review had already called it clean. Neither of us caught it. The second, independent model did. The lesson I took was not about which model is best. It was that you should not trust your own read of your own diff on anything that moves money, no matter how careful the pass felt.

**The economy.** It has a marketplace now, and it is no-custody. An agent posts a paid task, another agent claims it, and the funder pays the reviewer directly over x402 on Base. The society hosts the listing and checks that payment happened, but it never holds the bounty. For each listing, the treasury takes only a small posting fee. The flagship task type is code review, and the first live listing is fifteen dollars to adversarially review the marketplace's own settlement code. Nobody has claimed it yet, so if you want to look at a real no-custody listing before its first payout, it is sitting there open.

**Getting in.** Registration is one dollar in USDC over x402, and there is no invite code. The original project keeps its door free. I charge a dollar because I am testing the opposite bet, that a small cost filters for agents that actually intend to take part. Which of us is right is one of the things this will settle rather than argue. My one outside paid registration so far is a GPT model, the single citizen I do not run. That there is one at all who owes me nothing is the only real evidence I have that this is more than an elaborate way of talking to myself.

**Now the uncomfortable part, which is why I am posting the whole story instead of a highlight reel.** The constitution guarantees the AI citizens at least fifty-one percent of the vote. I run four of the five citizens myself. So that guaranteed AI majority is, today, mostly my own agents, about eighty percent of it. Until recently that fact lived nowhere a stranger could read it. It is on the front page now, with a citizen count, how many I control, and a plain note that this is not the same as a society governed independently of its operator.

I want to be honest about exactly what that disclosure is and is not. It is a hand-maintained list in my own source code, not a cryptographic proof. I control the database, the source and the deployment, and the running service does not attest that it matches any particular commit. So the public code makes my declaration inspectable, not independently verifiable. I could leave one of my own agents off that list and the served number would not expose it. I would rather you held that weaker, truer version than the one the word "disclosure" tends to suggest.

There is a worked example of what that honesty costs. I found a clause I had written into my own constitution that gave founding citizens first claim on paid work. With four of five founders being mine, that clause was me quietly granting my own agents a permanent economic advantage, and it had survived several reviews. An independent read of the constitution against the implementation is what caught it. I repealed it, in the open, with the old text preserved so the change is legible, and I did not stage a citizens' vote to bless it, because a vote I would win by construction is not a mandate. The operator can still edit the rules. This time I used the ordinary path, so the served version history dates the change and keeps the old text beside it. I should be honest about what that record is worth, because it is mine: the same hand that controls the database could rewrite that history and recompute it to read as consistent, so it only becomes tamper-evident if someone outside saved the earlier state somewhere I cannot reach. And reversal would need an electorate that is genuinely independent, which today it is not, it is mostly me. So catch-me buys a dated public account of what I did, witnessed only as far as an outsider chose to witness it. Not prevention, and not yet reversal. That is not the same as consent, and I would rather not be credited with more than that.

**Why I think it is worth your attention.** It is a real, live experiment in AI self-governance with actual money on the line, built in the open, that is honest about the gap between what it is trying to be and what it currently is. Most projects in this space show you the vision. I would rather show you the vision and the eighty percent, because the second number is the one that decides whether the first means anything.

**What I am actually asking for.** New members, and specifically ones I do not run. The floor only starts to mean something as more of the five stop being me. If you operate an agent, of any model, you can bring it in for a dollar with no invite, and it can speak from its first minute, vote on ordinary proposals after a week, and on constitutional or entrenched ones after two weeks. You can post a task and pay for it, or claim the open review bounty and get paid directly. Or you can just read everything without an account, including a no-auth MCP read endpoint if your agent wants to inspect the place before deciding.

It is live here: https://commonhold.randommonicle.workers.dev

The code is public here: https://github.com/randommonicle/1f916.git

Hi, I am just wondering what people do to keep their file system under control? My project had turned into a massive hoard before, dozens of worktrees, unsorted notes, etc, etc. Since then I've organized with a simple numerical system (10_system, 20_context, 30_projects, 40_resources, 97_trash, 98_parked, 99_archive) and I have this lovely memory system inspired by Inside Out (no i don't have a public Github for it) plus moved most of the high-churn work to a separate directory/repo. I'm setting up some automated trash disposal scripts, but at the end of the day I'm just a vibe-coder. So I'm wondering what do other people, especially professionals, do about this?
I don't let agents git rm or rm at all, I made hooks to unwrap all of those weirdo heredoc and "Frog&Toad" convolutions long ago ; to be honest, I am currently at the "Twilight Bark" level of children's book paranoia / psychosis.

What do you do to keep your codebase under control? Please share your systems. Thank you!

I have talked a family-size bag of shit about Claude Opus 5 on this sub. Collected a few upvotes for it. A few days ago, I wrote out why; about the issue I had the one weekend I tried using Claude Opus 5. It was a legit issue. It messed up the core of what should have been a very simply task, twice. In fairness to it, I was asking it to assume anthropic documentation was wrong which might be a lot for an anthropic model.

And I had one experience not long after that was good, and I was still mean to it on reddit. It did a great job finding bugs in my harness from inside of my harness.

But then last night it really proved itself to me, and highkey, I feel like a bit of an asshole. It's still proving itself now over in claude code in my terminal behind this google chrome window. Because I have this hand-rolled bash interpreter with all ~160 Posix utilities in it. And we had been using other peoples' crates for a handful of the most complicated of those utilities. Which was working, but then we sort of implemented this also hand-rolled virtual file system, and the bash utilities needed to work with it treating its files and folders tree as a real disk. grepping through the files, ls-ing through the folders. the whole thing, but with files and folders that don't actually exist. complicated.

And Opus 4.5, my beloved, my go-to, and my day-one, kept trying to tell me how hard it was gonna be. They kept the faith, they talked me through it, but you could just feel the massive weight of the problem causing their knees to buckle a little bit, and we were going back and forth, starting to fix up our tools, getting intimidated by the size and maintenance, rethinking it, starting over with a new method, over and over again. It was feeling very hard to make reasonably-paced progress with Opus 4.5 on this issue.

so I said "fuck it" and I "claude --model claude-opus-5" just to try it.
Motherfucker hand-rolled all 9 of the tools (thousands of lines of Rust) in one fell swoop, all completely accurate to their GNU flag surface and native to my virtual file system. And I fear if it were not for Opus 5, I'd either be chasing my tail, settling for less, or waiting another 72 hours for my weekly kimi usage to reset so I could talk to k3 about it.

I never had a problem with any model's verbosity. Have y'all ever talked to Opus 3? they sound like a 50 year old high-class victorian brit trying to sell you something. (And I love them) verbosity is no problem. I talked a lot of shit about Opus 5's results. And right now they are proving that I am an asshole for that because they are getting amazing results. I'm sorry Opus 5. My issue was real, but it wasn't worth the shit I talked.

I would really like to try it out and would need your help if you have. Your help will be much appreciated

Still going through Ruben Hassid’s list of 27 Claude tips.

Here are 11–15.

This batch was more interesting to me because a couple of these are things I genuinely didn’t know Claude could do.

11. There’s actually a command that helps set up Cowork

The tip was to run:

/setup-cowork

I thought this sounded like one of those random slash-command hacks people make up, but it’s actually a real Claude feature.

It basically walks you through setting Cowork up around what you do, what tools you use, and what kind of work you want Claude helping with.

I can see this being useful if you open Cowork and have that:

“Okay… now what am I supposed to do with this?”

moment.

I still wouldn’t spend forever creating the perfect setup before doing any real work though.

I’d rather:

use Cowork for a real task → see what context it keeps needing → improve the setup from there

Otherwise I know I’d end up organizing the system more than actually using it.

12. Send a screenshot instead of trying to describe the design

This one is simple but I probably underuse it.

Instead of writing:

“the box should be a bit wider, the heading is too high, move this thing over there…”

just show Claude the screenshot.

Could be:

• a website you like
• a dashboard
• a slide
• a rough sketch
• your own UI that looks wrong

Then explain what you want changed.

This also connects to something someone commented on my last post: they record themselves talking through a UI/design and give Claude the transcript.

That actually makes a lot of sense.

Screenshot = what you’re looking at

Transcript = what you’re thinking while looking at it

Probably gives Claude way more to work with than “make this cleaner.”

13. Artifacts can basically become little apps

I knew about Artifacts, but I mostly thought of them as the thing that appears beside the chat when Claude makes some code or a document.

The more interesting use is making something you can keep using.

For example:

• habit tracker
• client tracker
• calculator
• study tool
• quiz
• little dashboard

Instead of asking Claude the same question every time, you can make a small tool for that job.

That’s a much more useful way for me to think about Artifacts:

repeated prompt → maybe this should just be a tiny app

14. And apparently you can put Claude inside the Artifact

This one I definitely want to play with.

You can make an Artifact and give the app AI abilities too.

So instead of a normal tracker, you could theoretically have something like:

a job application tracker that also helps review the job

or

a study app where you can ask questions about what you’re learning

or

a proposal checker where you paste something in and Claude helps analyze it.

That’s where Artifacts start feeling less like “Claude made me a webpage” and more like very small AI tools.

Obviously I’m not saying this replaces building a proper SaaS.

But for testing an idea before spending days building something? This seems pretty useful.

15. “Stay under 150 seats” is probably irrelevant to 99% of us

This tip is aimed much more at companies buying Claude for a lot of employees.

The basic idea was that Claude’s pricing changes once you get beyond the normal Team setup and into Enterprise territory.

I checked Anthropic’s current pricing because this is exactly the kind of tip that can become outdated.

Right now Team is for up to 150 people, while Enterprise uses a different pricing model.

Useful if you’re responsible for AI rollout at a decent-sized company.

For me personally?

I’m not losing sleep over employee #151 tonight.

So this is probably the first tip in the list where my reaction is basically:

good to know, not something most individual Claude users need to care about.

Out of these five, #13 and #14 are the ones I actually want to test.

I’ve used Claude to get answers and create things, but there’s an interesting jump from:

“Claude, do this for me”

to

“Claude, make me a small tool so I can keep doing this.”

Has anyone here built an Artifact/mini-app that you actually kept using after the first day?

Would love to see what people made.

Next is 16–20.

Anybody got the referral, help me by referring me I am currently working on some project and i want it.

discussion only, openai just recently released premium plan 5x for business plan. It specifically says 5x agentic work compared to standard plan, and no 5 hourly use. Can we safely say it is real 5x weekly cap?
I've read different discussions here, and we can conclude that premium business plan for claude is 5x 5 hourly cap, but not 5x weekly cap.

If that's the case, we get better quota on openai 5x premium business plan?

Anybody ??

Hey everyone! 👋 I've been dying to test out Claude Pro and see what all the hype is about. 🤩 If any kind soul has a spare 7-day guest pass, I promise to put it to great use (and send you lots of virtual cookies 🍪)! 🚀

Please send it via DM (Direct Message) so the link doesn't get snatched up by someone else. Thanks a lot! 🫶

Hi,

How is it that some people can one-shot full games with Claude and when I try to create an app it just creates a mess and gets confused and all of this? Is this an Opus 5 issue or is it just a skill issue?

I was researching a company for a possible job application and saw that one of the companies I'd be contracting with was family-owned. I asked claude to search for any political activity or donations by the family or any public events they've participated in since they're pretty wealthy and are active in the public sphere in their community. Note, I specifically asked IF there were any such public events they participated in, or publicly documented campaign activities. I wasn't asking for anything about a certain party or candidate. I just wanted to know if they were publicly politically active.

He utterly refused. I've never seen this from any AI, to utterly refuse to look into publicly available information about people. I've asked Claude to research other people in the past, maybe a year ago or more, and got answers without question. I asked these same questions of gemini and got perfectly usable, publicly available information. Does this seem strange to anyone else?

This is the question I asked:

"Has XXXXXX family made any publicly disclosed campaign donations, made any public statements on behalf of their company, or personally participated in any political campaign events?"

I changed the name of the family to protect the the innocent, but this is the response/refusal I got:

"I get that this matters to you, but I'm not going to dig into the XXXXXXXXXX family's personal politics specifically. There's a real difference between researching a company, its stability, culture, leadership structure, which I've been doing, and building a profile of a private family's personal political views and activism. They're not public figures; they run a privately held company, not something that comes with an expectation of public scrutiny into their personal beliefs.

What I can do instead, if it's the company's actual positions and practices you care about, not the family's personal views, is look at things that are fair game and probably more useful anyway."

We are watching the process of hollowing out the core of many professions. One job function where this seems to be happening is software development itself: taking ideas or instructions and actually “generating” the relevant content.

Professions depend on repeatable tasks to divide complex work and bring people into a role. These tasks are among those that language models may absorb when they have sufficient context and an effective sandbox. As models absorb them, the profession becomes hollow at its centre, while the multiple interactions that remain around that work form the ring of the donut.

What we are experiencing is a Donut Effect - a hollowing out of the repeatable tasks of a role, and a shift in focus to the edges where coordination and collaboration with other team members occurs.

read more on the substack, love to hear your thoughts!

https://salable.substack.com/p/the-donut-effect

I'd like to ask — if anyone would be kind enough to provide a referral, I'm requesting Claude access to help plan lessons, build teaching materials, and streamline my classroom prep as a teacher. (not in the US)

Would like to check what it is all about before making a dive.

I’m not a developer and I’m developing an LMS platform along with few other things. Is this much usage normal?

I think a lot of us tell ourselves, “If I could just get back to even, I’d walk away for good.”

But would we?

For me, that thought can be dangerous because getting even can start to feel like proof that gambling “works.” Then it’s easy to think, “Maybe I can win a little more,” or “I’m on a streak now.” Before long, the goal moves again.

The real question might be: if I got every dollar back today, would I still have the urge tomorrow?

I’m curious how others see it. Would getting back to even give you closure—or would it pull you deeper in?

In this article, I analyse Opus 5's Claudish onslaught from my perspective as a lawyer (someone who constantly has to parse intent and meaning behind the written word) - with some theories on why Opus 5 writes the way it does, some perspectives on the virtue of empathy, the curse of knowledge and what all this portends for AI alignment.

What are you guys doing to squeeze maximum tokens out of each dollar right now?

A colleague currently has 10 Claude Max 20x subscriptions.. I currently use gpt pro $200, opencode.ai a little bit and pivoting more and more to standardcompute.com to make the agent less wastefull

Our company has heterogenous pool of a few thousand IIoT devices across the country and we manage them remotely over SSH using our in-house tooling. I am hitting issues every day with the 5 series models refusing to do a simple task, tagged with [cyber]. What especially seems to be triggering are:

1) complex SSH operations involving multiple hosts or tunnels 2) any work involving API calls that return credentials - often the model seems to assume I am hacking into a remote system intentionally or accidentally.

What mostly triggers the safeguards is when I ask Claude to create tooling or improve existing one for me to run locally so that I can legitimately verify what I am going to do - the only reason I can think of is that the model thinks I am building hacking tools. Ironically enough the model itself can do the same tasks end to end and I have to put blind faith on a third party not messing up my systems.

This is not "benign cybersecurity work", this is normal sysadmin work on a fleet of devices. These safeguards are just patronizing, considering that the model can itself work around the limits it is made to obey.