> Claude is writing code to accomplish the tasks she asks for

Is this typical behavior with LLMs not just Claude, but you can discourage from doing so by explicitly stating not to use tool or only use knowledge either in the system prompt or user prompt.

LLMs are trained to use tool if they can't solve a problem rather than guessing/hallucinating.

A dumb example is asking to count. As the range grow it'll attempt to write a script or use commands like seq to generate the numbers.