I even have a specific, non-negotiable phase in the process where model MUST interview me, and create an interview file with everything captured. Plan file it produces must always include this file as an artifact and interview takes the highest precedence.

Otherwise, the intent gets lost somewhere in the chat transcript.

I've recently started adding something along the lines of "if you can't find or don't know something, don't assume. Ask me." It's helped cut down on me having to tell it to undo or redo things a fair amount. I also have used something like, "Other agents have made mistakes with this. You have to explain what you think we're doing so I can approve." It's kind of stupid to have to do this, but it really increases the quality of the output when you make it explain, correct mistakes, and iterate until it tells you the right outcome before it operates.

Edit: forgot "don't assume"

Dammit that’s why I could never get it to not try to one shot answers, it’s in the god damn system prompt… and it explains why no amount of user "system" prompt could fix this behavior.

Having to "unprompt" behaviour I want that Anthropic thinks I don't want is getting out of hand. My system prompts always try to get Claude to clarify _more_.

I usually need to remind it 5 times to do the opposite - because it makes decisions that I don't like or that are harmful to the project—so if it lands in Claude Code too, I have hard times ahead.

I try to explicitly request Claude to ask me follow-up questions, especially multiple-choice ones (it explains possible paths nicely), but if I don't, or when it decides to ignore the instructions (which happens a lot), the results are either bad... or plain dangerous.

> I've tried stuff like these in my prompts, and the results are never good

I've found that Google AI Mode & Gemini are pretty good at "figuring it out". My queries are oft times just keywords.

well, clarifying means burning more tokens...

Seriously, when you're conversing with a person would you prefer they start rambling on their own interpretation or would you prefer they ask you to clarify? The latter seems pretty natural and obvious.

Edit: That said, it's entirely possible that large and sophisticated LLMs can invent some pretty bizarre but technically possible interpretations, so maybe this is to curb that tendency.

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