u/spigolt

I was mainly a Codex user, but with Opus 5.5 have largely switched to using Claude now.

There's just two things I find generally worse with Opus 5.5 vs Codex's Astra:

• the first is that even though I guess it's not as bad as Opus 5, it still often likes to explain things unnecessarily confusingly - like even if it's working on a codebase that I created, that I fully understand, so I should have no problem understanding what it says... yet it often manages to invent a bunch of new terms that I have no idea what it means in explaining things.... or explains a whole bunch of details but buries the important points in all it's convoluted explanations of unimportant things (which is sometimes a real problem when there's some serious issue buried in it's pages of unnecessary confusing explanations which it failed to highlight).... but anyways, I can mostly live with this - generally just asking it to explain more clearly and simply does the job.
• the second problem, which I'm interested if anyone has any suggestions regarding, that it just seems much worse at following my agent guidelines (e.g. the rules / guidelines that my CLAUDE.md contains.. well, technically my CLAUDE.md just contains @AGENTS.md, and my AGENTS.md contains all the instructions) - even though it's definitely aware of them (so it doesn't seem to be that I set them up so wrong that it's not supposed to be reading them), e.g. if I ask why it didn't apply a certain rule it always says it's aware of it, but just screwed up.... I just repeatedly see it making mistakes which it wouldn't if it was following the guidelines, like it just forgets to apply them, in a way Codex never does.

Any suggestions on how to get it to stick to the instructions better? I don't think I have a very large set of instructions even.

When 5.6 Sol came out, I set it up to run as a tester testing our app on an Android device. It happily ran for over a full day going through all the tests I described.

Now, I've asked it to test again, and also tried to give it a clear goal of what it needs to accomplish before stopping. However it repeatedly stops after about an hour after everytime I tell it to run/continue, even though it knows that it's still nowhere near the goal.

Anyone have any suggestions for how, when you really do want it to keep going until the goal is accomplished and not stop early, you can best ensure that?