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Claude 4.8 is being advertised as tackling the kinds of "hide stuff from the user" behaviour that Ryan Greenblatt complained about in Current AIs Seem Pretty Misaligned To Me. Unfortunately it is now extremely annoying about requiring user confirmation for everything. This has come at a pretty significant cost to overall agency, which is uhh the whole point of Claude Code.
I just set a Claude Code instance off to build a big codebase change (after it insisted I read what should have been Claude-internal spec document end-to-end (I did not)) and came back to find that it had given up after a minute because it wanted to ask me whether it should use subagents or not!
Generally I find it absolutely spamming me with questions, as if to hedge against ever doing something I dislike. I obviously can prompt with "Don't ask any more questions" but then we're back to where we started with Opus 4.7, and possibly even worse, if it takes that statement too literally.
I worry that Anthropic have just tuned the threshold at which Claude asks questions, rather than actually improving its ability to discriminate between important and unimportant questions.
FWIW it looks like a bunch of this is from the system prompt. I tried asking Opus 4.8 in Claude Code about this, and it quoted me the following line from its system prompt.
For actions that are hard to reverse or outward-facing, confirm first unless durably authorized or explicitly told to proceed without asking; approval in one context doesn't extend to the next. Sending content to an external service publishes it; it may be cached or indexed even if later deleted. Before deleting or overwriting, look at the target — if what you find contradicts how it wa
Claude Code after not being able to get an A100 on runpod, considering getting an H100:
"Your CLAUDE.md says that wallclock time is a priority and GPUs are cheap, but the cost is a real fork so I'd better ask before starting one up."