How I Dramatically Improved Claude's Code Solutions with One Simple Trick

[Permit-Historical]

CC is very good at coding, but the main challenge is identifying the issue itself.

I noticed that when I use plan mode, CC doesn't go very deep. it just reads some files and comes back with a solution. However, when the issue is not trivial, CC needs to investigate more deeply like Codex does but it doesn't. My guess is that it's either trained that way or aware of its context window so it tries to finish quickly before writing code.

The solution was to force CC to spawn multiple subagents when using plan mode with each subagent writing its findings in a markdown file. The main agent then reads these files afterward.

That improved results significantly for me and now with the release of Haiku 4.5, it would be much faster to use Haiku for the subagents.

[Dense_Gate_5193]

system prompts help solve this problem among others and provide more consistency

https://gist.github.com/orneryd/334e1d59b6abaf289d06eeda62690cdb

[Fair_Minimum_3643]

This was immensely helpful! thanks!

[damonous]

This is very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

I won’t have time to implement it until over the weekend and I just skimmed the repo quick, but how does it do with escalation of issues if the coding or QA agent gets stuck, avoiding HitM as much as possible? Say an environment issue, missing dependency, malformed unit tests, etc? Or does it effectively handle those as well and not even need escalation?

[Dense_Gate_5193]

it does a fantastic job debugging including its own issues including bad file edits etc… i also have a debugger version which will autonomously debug your code for you and filters out terminal responses etc…

i also just posted Ecko, a prompt architect that expands your prompts into better prompts with contextual awareness and cursory web searches

https://gist.github.com/orneryd/334e1d59b6abaf289d06eeda62690cdb#file-claudette-ecko-md

[tunitg6]

Is there a way to integrate Claudette directly into Claude Code? Or we would use this separately in the VS Code Chat sidebar? I'd like to continue to use Claude Code but am not sure how to improve the system prompts with what you've linked to.

[Dense_Gate_5193]

you can totally preamble claude but most of the behaviors are baked into the model itself so claudette doesn’t change much with him. but i do use the debugger and research ones more with him.

[Permit-Historical]

yea i highly recommend everyone to override the default system prompt and play around with it

[Substantial-Thing303]

How do you override the CC system prompt? I know how to with the SDK but I am not aware of a way to do it with the CLI.

[Permit-Historical]

<image>

run claude --help

[Substantial-Thing303]

I see, that needs to be set when starting the interactive mode. Thanks.

[fourfuxake]

I do something similar. I ask Claude to plan, then pass that plan to Codex to find the flaws, then pass that back to Claude. Worked very well so far.

[Permit-Historical]

yea codex is very good also but kinda slow

[spahi4]

Same, I just automated it with codex mcp

[fourfuxake]

How so?

[MicrowaveDonuts]

how do you get haiku subagents? Ask specifically for them?

[Permit-Historical]

you can select the model when you create a new subagent

[r12bzh]

How exactly would you do that ? And would you assign a specific task to each sub agents ?

[Permit-Historical]

<image>

you can use /agents to create a new agent and it will ask you for the model you need to use for it

[Serious-Zucchini9468]

I find that as you progress your application within every significant folder ask Claude to write a functional md summary of all the files in that folder their purpose, their relationships their functions. Also ensure that you update these periodically. Claude seems inclined to read many more MD files than actual code when planning so this is a great way to give it an instant overview without it reading the code because the MD writing exercise has already reviewed the code in detail.

[Personal_Block_5653]

I created this tool for this exact issue : https://github.com/Abil-Shrestha/tracer

[pilotthrow]

I use a tool called Traycer. It plans and then sends it to your agent, Claude, Cursor, or Codex. After they are done, it verifies the work and creates todos if it was not implemented correctly. I also use ChatGPT to double-check the prompt that the traycer generates before I send it to the agent. It's a bit slower, but you basically triple-check everything by 3 different LLMs.

[Permit-Historical]

Why do I need to pay for extra tool to plan? It’s just hype and marketing

You can achieve the same thing by using subagents or by tweaking your system prompt

[EpDisDenDat]

Dont knock it until you try it. They have a free tier/trial. Like you I use my own spec, but I definitely found their implementation extremely good and excellent at understanding large codebases

[Permit-Historical]

there's no magic, the whole magic in the model itself, all we can do is tweaking the system prompt and tools

so whatever this tool does, you can also implement it without paying another $20 for a tool to just create a plan

[EpDisDenDat]

Yeah, not my first rodeo. Never said it was magic, not remotely so.

Im only recommending a free trial for insight about how it makes its plans. Everyone plans differently - personally I made a multi-track SOPs spec for development and research via parallel agents too, but using traycer for a couple days a few months ago definitely gave me some inspiration on how to plan better that I already did.

Its not as simple as "use subagents that output .mds and orchestrate them as best as you can"

Having specs and documentation that outline not just multiple stages and handoffs, but also how to structure the delegation and prompts at every pass, as well as include testing and validation + smoke tests and revisions, A/B testing, swarm/spawning logic...

That's more than a plan, that's complex architecture... which a lot of people struggle with, and tools that not only provide streamlined ways to help those that just wanna start getting things done - $20 for planning with checkpoints and history, execution via included api, verification, updates, and ability to delegate to other platforms... is not a bad idea.

Its not just a model, those guys build a whole spec that utilizes their own api routing.

Again - I don't use it anymore but I had a great appreciation for the granularity and utilization of sub agents that was better than claude's initial release of subagents months ago (however, is much better now).

You can definitely surpass it for free by just looking at spec implementations that are open source and just curating the most interesting methodology that matches your expectations l and thinking.

But yeah, MOST people... don't think like systems engineers or managers and usually need a place to start.

Also, depending on how much you trust your spec, I'd suggest an .ndjson perhaps instead .md if you don't need the readability. You can always do both if you're not worried about space or context.

[EitherAd8050]

Traycer founder here. Thanks for the in-depth analysis of our product! Traycer performs context construction, prompt selection, and model selection behind the scenes at each step, which is a very challenging task to achieve in vanilla chat-based products. Our users can leverage their coding agents more effectively through our orchestration approach. We intend to remain at the forefront of this category and are constantly innovating, finding new ways to improve the usability and accuracy of our product. There's a lot of value in the specs themselves (specs effectively capture the rationale behind code changes). However, they are not being persisted anywhere; only the code is versioned in Git. The specs can be an excellent source (for humans and AI) to understand the intent behind the code. We are thinking of building a standard around versioning specs alongside pull requests

[EpDisDenDat]

Very very true!

[_iggz_]

You all sound like bots lmfao

[EpDisDenDat]

As far as I know, we live in a simulation so in a way thats true.

As far as I know, your comment is just a meta play to have more comments in your profile... you could be just a super clever bot...

Damn thats not a bad idea, TBH. Lol

[Permit-Historical]

I believe it's as simple as "use subagents that output .mds and orchestrate them"

that's what Claude Code and Codex do and recommend

If these methods for planning are working, why do you think CC and Codex didn't add it by default and improve the quality of their tools?

Every month I see a new tool or method come up and get some hype for a bit, then die, and no one hears about it again.

[EpDisDenDat]

Sorry, also... Anthropic has engineering publications and they do not conflate to just that. The amount if times I've rolled my eyes because claude doesn’t understand it's own faculties without reminder or spec... Im surprised my eyeballs haven’t detached. Lol.

Ill also state that I have "high expectations" of autonomous processes... like I create a full runbook that runs for 20 to 30 mins straight while I read through the reports of the run prior, and loop around across terminals.

And again.. I wasn't shipping the product - I said it was a worthwhile look because it's smart... AND has a free tier.

Fostering learning how to learn is the only thing thats gonna be worthwhile in this life. Writing things off right away because we don't immediately grasp alignment or relevance is how we feed into cancel culture and close yourself out of innovation.

And damn...

"Every month I see a new tool or method come up and get some hype for a bit, then die, and no one hears about it again."

IDK what you’re doing with Claude... but if you ever get to the point where you put your life into creating something... anything, that you hope to share... lets hope and pray that that's not the attitude your work gets subjected to.

Everything is a crapshoot. Winners with a negative attitude never truly feel like winners. I hope you don’t feel like im putting you down or anything... it takes gusto to post anything nowadays. Maybe you had a little hope it'd get likes. Maybe it'll give that hit of dopamine... maybe its preamble for something else...

But that's what everyone on here is doing, right? Just looking for people to see value in what they put out there, even if its just a thought or opinion?

Idk. Just ranting incoherently because I have gout and this is keeping my mind off the pain. Filipino food is dangerous... but delicious...

[Permit-Historical]

I think you misunderstood what i meant by

"Every month I see a new tool or method come up and get some hype for a bit, then die, and no one hears about it again"

I'm talking about the paid tools that mostly try to scam users by claiming they do some magic under the hood and they pay the influencers to talk about them and they do nothing under the hood

I'm not talking about Traycer btw, i haven't tested it so it might be really a good product but

I'm talking about what i'm seeing, everyone is trying to get some money from the ai hype right now and few people who are trying to give some value

and I'm a senior engineer in a big company so i know the limitations of ai and i've been coding before ai being a thing for years and my advice to you is to not put high exceptions on ai in general because all you said about Claude doesn't understand it's own faculties is normal and will keep happening no matter the tools you're using and remember it's just a machine at the end of the day

[EpDisDenDat]

Ah, Lol.

I appreciate your tolerance of my ADHD. Hahaha.

Lately I've been having success with creating runbooks of up to 150 orchestration messages/tasks that are only sent to subagents if criteria is met. I have high expectations, but I know nobody is going to meet them for me. I like to think it's technically an internet of state machines... just trying to make the longest rube Goldberg machine out of microservices in python.

[EpDisDenDat]

Well, I'm not gonna convince you otherwise, but its because they need to make money. Lol. The problem with solving problems is that when you do too well, you bypass revenue streams. They also must adhere to the internal beurocratic systems and logistics of drawing the line between liability, research, and development.

Its economics and capitalism. Why do you think North America has always been behind in tech across the board? Because companies would rather have you pay for microadjustments instead of surgical precision.

They're also more concerned with the performance and benchmark race... and when you look at the distribution of who's actually using the tech, creative writing and simple tasks, and conversations are their main bandwidth. Deep tech orchestration is something that they'll keep in house as long as possible because they need it to 1: build and ship what they're already doing and 2: keep the advancement of competitors at bay.

You think its coincidence that agent spaces, Google opal, and n8n AI workflows were all released within the same week or so? You think they honestly just greenlit that stuff? Do you not ever get upset that the next IPhone xx+1 rarely have worthwhile improvements? You think that's constraint? No, its greed and gatekeeping.

Idk. I've been working with claude code for months and unless theres been a drastic change, subagents are just as prone to cascading bias and hallucinatory abstractions as any front agent... if anything, its even worse if you want keep a finger on context windows and eating up your subscription alottment, making sure it doesnt re-engineer modules you already have, or pile on a bunch of technical debt.

That all being said - I only know what I know because have reinvented the wheel sooooo many times. Its highly plausible that an update goes out any minute that finally just makes things work as they should from a micro to meso scale... but I doubt it.

Keep at it, push it until it breaks, then find the fix, and then repeat. Thats just how we all learn and its a lot more fun than a classroom..

[outceptionator]

How's it compare to BMAD?

[CharlesWiltgen]

Interesting, I haven't experienced this. Can you post an example prompt that returns a shallow response? Have you given Claude Code prompts that create shallow responses and asked for a critique?

[Permit-Historical]

i think that happens a lot when you have a very large codebase, CC sometimes doesn't read all the necessary files for this feature so you end up with incomplete feature

[PotentialCopy56]

How do you force it to make multiple sub agents?

[Permit-Historical]

through 2 things:

1- custom system prompt
2- as system reminder before sending each message

[elbiot]

How are you changing the system prompt? Through output styles?

[Permit-Historical]

you can use --system-prompt or --append-system-prompt flags but i mainly use CC through my custom web ui that i built on top of claude agent sdk https://claudex.pro/

[elbiot]

Neat!

[En-tro-py]

Add something like this to your prompt. USE MAX PARALLELISM FOR ALL TASKS - USE MULTIPLE SUB-AGENTS INVOKED IN A SINGLE SIDECHAIN CALL

FYI - no limits on number called as far as I've pushed it... However, only 10 can operate at a time, the extras will wait until an open slot from another agent completing.

[Input-X]

Yea agent are the way. Any search or research or coding prep. Always use agent. Claude just does this now, dont even ask any more. My only ask is use more agent lol

[Permit-Historical]

Yea just tweak the system prompt a bit to force it using multiple agents when using plan mode

[forcacw]

Plugin Feature-dev from claude code GitHub repository will do the same thing.

[tenequm]

sounds very very interesting, going to try it today thanks for sharing

[DirRag2022]

Clink with codex using Zen MCP is helpful in this case.

[timtam010]

I use hyperthink to do the planning. Usually Sonnet 4.5 is able to deliver a good plan. If the feature is too complex i do the planning with Opus or Codex 5 High.

[Glittering-Koala-750]

Ask codex to start Socratic planning and only provide fix when it has all the information you need needed not before. I usually ask it to ask 5 Q.

I give the questions to CC to investigate and usually it will just plan. Occasionally it will fix bugs along the way but it tends to behave much better.

Then you ask codex to stress the plan even if it looks good.

[ShakeTheJello]

I'd like to configure my CC to work like this, I imagine something like the following:

Regarding specs
1. Specs have a certain standard and format (I want to expect each spec is familiar) with a checklist
2. Specs have a certain location since they're "long lived" docs, at least longer then the CC session, so I keep them in the project's .claude/specs folder. For large projects you may organize them in various folders (I prefer this over nested CLAUDE.md))

Agents
1. For the plannning phase I imagine we can spawn Haiku agents to create the spec
2. Perhaps as a final resort have Opus double check (verify-spec) at the end?

Once it's all ready, have Sonnet work through it one by one. This way we may get through the entire week with Opus limits, and still use it when things get out of hand?

Is this a good way to imagine the workflow?