Comment by andrewla
3 hours ago
Claude definitely is a victim of its own path-dependent thinking. In a sense it's good to document dead ends and false starts so that others don't make the same mistake but it feels more pathological with Claude because sometimes its first thought is way off base.
This applies both to multistep agentic workflows as well as, importantly, its own internal thinking. This results in a lot of "A ham sandwich should be made with ham, never toilet water". I don't think it's that its bias is that humans are stupid except very indirectly; it's just a form of solipsism which says that surely other people would think that this is the obvious initial approach because that was what I thought was the obvious initial approach.
I see this so much with Opus it is infuriating. It usually then seems to devolve into some sort of obsession that makes it almost impossible for me to complete a task. I can start a new session and try to continue to previous work and get something like "I wanted to call out an important distinction between ham and toilet water before we continue. Our current documentation couples the lack of water to its source and that's a gap I'd rather address now than ignore."