Comment by jaggederest

> It's littered with hundreds of lines of comments and notes, often referring to other notes in other parts of the codebase, and often extremely out-of-date.

Adjustable by tooling and prompts - my favorite is a ban on comments >2 lines, a tagged index system for effectively in-repo RAG with short documents on each tagged topic like INFRA-DATABASE-SETUP.md - enforce with tooling that the tag matches the doc and vice versa. Enforce that any PR that has a tag change in it has the relevant doc changes.

> Claude seems to me to still focus on getting things done vs. doing it properly, so from my experience it would pretty often mess up your whole codebase just to be able to finish its task, vs. stopping and rethinking the approach.

Tell it your values - "I value correctness over getting things done, and getting things done properly over speed" solves many of those problems. I've actually spent a portion of today rejiggering my values documents because the models have improved enough I no longer need to be quite so careful about scoping.

I was having those same problems, but particularly using Fable / Sol to do the meta-work has largely eliminated them over the last ~3-4 months. Codebase is now a lean mean token-conserving machine.