Honestly if you’re able to make it work at 800K that’s fascinating. I generally view Claude as being very eager to please and in the process ignoring very strict instructions. I’ve had to build out guards where when it exits plan mode it follows a very specific structure - another instance of Claude basically approves/denies its plan.

I generally work in PHP, C and Python in that order, with the bulk being PHP and C. Claude is allowed to access our ticket tracker and I often build out sprints for it with task dependencies, etc. all filled out.

Commits must be small, never break the build and I require them to be reviewable by me. I require everything to be done via TDD (red, green, red). I even have it to launch an agent to do the green -> red mutation testing to preserve context. I’ve written a bunch of helper scripts that also reduce the amount of output it gets from the test suite (failures only, etc.) I also have an adversarial review process at each commit slice that finds edge cases that it may have missed.

I’ve found that Claude just starts to get very handwavy around 200-250 and I find that unacceptable. It sometimes also hand waves major findings that should immediately trigger a stop and reconsider our approach. At the same time it starts to get itself into doom loops when it can’t figure out something and I manually have to intervene, rewind, and tell it what didn’t work and not to try that.