Comment by croon

I run Claude Max daily, and tried letting Opus 4.8 write an ADR with known requirements.

After searching through codebase, git history, etc it spat out a surface level reasonable ADR, with the customary bloated text.

I started reading through it asking "Is this sentence needed?: '<sentence>'", whereby it acknowledges that no, it adds nothing and changes nothing not already served by other statements. I ask it to go through each sentence one by one asking the same question. It claims to do so, and give me two suggestions to remove in the entire document.

I then spend a few more minutes giving 10 additional sentences manually that it happily acknowledges are redundant.

I ask why those weren't removed in my previous prompt, and frankly I can't remember specifically what rationalization it gave, I assume because it's not memorable because there can be none, because it very obviously is not reasoning.