You're right, but Johnny rightly also identified the issue where Claude creates complex trash code to work around user-provided constraints while not actually changing approach at all (see the part about tool denial workarounds).

I think Anthropic optimized for appended system prompt character count, and measured it in isolation - at least in the project's beginning stages, if it's not still in the code. I assume the inefficiencies have come from the agent working with and around that requirement, backfiring horribly in the spaghetti you see now. Not only is the resulting trash control flow less likely to be caught as a problem by agents, especially compared to checking a character count occasionally, but it's more likely the agent will treat the trash code as an accepted pattern it should replicate.

Claude will also not trace a control flow to any kind of depth unless asked, and if you ask, and it encounters more than one or two levels of recursion or abstraction, it will choke. Probably because it's so inefficient, but then they're getting the inefficient tool to add more to itself and... there's no way to recover from that loop without human refactoring. I assume that's a taboo at Anthropic too.

A type of fix I was imagining would be something like an extra call like "after editing, evaluate changes against this large collection of terrible choices that should not occur, for example, the agent's current internal code". That would obviously increase the short term token consumption, context window overhead, and make an Anthropic project manager break out in a cold sweat. But it would reduce the gradient of the project death spiral by providing more robust code for future agents to copy paste that can be more cheaply evaluated, and require fewer user prompts overall to rectify obvious bad code.

They would never go for that type of long game, because they'd have to do some combination of:

1. listening to all the users complain that they ran out of tokens too soon while creating the millionth token dashboard project, or,
2. increase the limits for users at company cost, or,
3. increase prices, or,
4. sacrifice feature development velocity by getting humans to fix the mess / implement no-or-low-agent client-side tooling for common checks.

They should just set it all on fire, the abomination can't salvage the abomination.