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epistasis | on: Getting the most out of Opus 5.5 in Claude and Claude Code
I really hate long tasks. Claude never gets things right, at least for me, and wastes tons of time when a simple question would have gotten me to the right result rather than several turns of correcting bad decisions in addition to the long amounts of wasted thinking time.

What sort of workloads do well with these long tasks? The big labs are optimizing for long run time on their own, but it seems like a terrible thing to optimize on unless you're trying to do something like prove a hard math theorem, which success is clearly defined and the route doesn't matter a ton.

Plan mode has been made increasingly useless. I need to discuss to iterate to get the desired design, explore options, because Claude never gets it right first try and I don't have enough knowledge of options to specify everything up front.

Ah well, the Chinese models will still work well, I guess.

istjohn | parent | next
Look up the grilling skill[0]. To make it even better, tell Claude to modify it to use the AskUserQuestion functionality. It's so much better than plan mode.

0. https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/blob/main/skills/produc...

ricardobeat | parent
Plan mode has become pointless since Opus 5 came out, they know when to switch between planning and execution now. But that iteration/discussion is still necessary unless you're building completely blind - the model cannot read your mind.

I've had it running 8h+ of non-stop optimizations, chasing a performance target, rewriting systems or building a series of prototypes for research. All it needs is a clear goal.