Comment by alt227
22 days ago
> when you want Claude to do reptitive, tedious tasks, you need to do more work to prevent it from getting "bored"
Is this sentance seriously about a computer? Have we gone so far that computers wont just do what we tell them to anymore?
Claude has outright told me "this is getting tedious" before proceeding to - directly against instructions - write a script to do the task instead of doing it "manually" (I'd told it not to because I needed more complex assessment than it could do with a script).
There are fairly straightforward fixes, such as either using subagents or script a loop and feed the model each item instead of a list of items, as prompt compliance tends to drop the more stuff is in the context, but, yes, they will "get bored" and look for shortcuts.
Another frequent one is deciding to sample instead of working through every item.
Yup - most models ignore specific initial instructions once you pass ~50% of usable context window, and revert to their defaults eg generating overtly descriptive yet useless docs / summaries