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>The way I review it is to let it finish a PR sized slice and then I review the whole diff in a separate terminal as if it’s a PR from someone else. Insanely i

>The way I review it is to let it finish a PR sized slice and then I review the whole diff in a separate terminal as if it’s a PR from someone else. Insanely inefficient. It's 10x more productive to watch the thinking traces and edits in real time and steer the model appropriately. If your workflow is typical no wonder my team members who use claude code are so much less productive.

hamdingers 1mo ago
Do you never have agents working on multiple tasks in parallel? You'll become much more productive when you figure out how to stop micromanaging.
- robben1234 1mo ago
  More productive in what way? Letting agents burn tokens to produce garbage output is not productive. And letting teammates read code that wasn't reviewed by a human submitting it also isn't productive. If I work with one agent / few subagents on one feature I can steer it as soon as I notice it drifting into the direction of waste. This way I only review the total diff 1.5-2 times. And I also don't waste my own mental energy on context switching between tasks agents are producing diffs for in parallel.
  - jurgenburgen 1mo ago
    > And letting teammates read code that wasn't reviewed by a human submitting it also isn't productive. If that’s what you got from my comment then you need to review it again.
stefan_ 1mo ago
I don't think this is something anyone who has ever read a "thinking trace" would unironically say. Not that you can even see them in Claude. When thinking first started and you would still see the whole "thinking process", I thought it was a ploy to 10x token use because it was just the most inane bullshit. "But wait, the user is asking me to" in loops.
- satvikpendem 1mo ago
  You can see thinking summary transcripts in Claude Code and Desktop, and they are actually useful because they don't have those sort of thinking loops from the raw tokens.
- Anamon 1mo ago
  Exactly, looking at a few of these traces is enough to realise that it's a waste of time to read them. A friend once described it as like reading a fever dream, which seems fitting. They're a necessary crutch for how the tools work, but probably should be considered an internal state representation that only sometimes accidentally seems to make sense. Wasn't there a study recently that even found a model's performance was sometimes better when the "reasoning" was nonsense? As in, no clear correllation between what the reasoning says in a human's interpretation, and how the model actually did with the task. I sometimes read the traces out of boredom or morbid curiosity. My favourite bit with Claude is how, even if you give a very comprehensive prompt in complete sentences, almost every trace will contain a variation of "the user asks me to X, but their thought cuts off mid-sentence." Fever dream.

hamdingers 1mo ago

Do you never have agents working on multiple tasks in parallel? You'll become much more productive when you figure out how to stop micromanaging.

robben1234 1mo ago
More productive in what way? Letting agents burn tokens to produce garbage output is not productive. And letting teammates read code that wasn't reviewed by a human submitting it also isn't productive. If I work with one agent / few subagents on one feature I can steer it as soon as I notice it drifting into the direction of waste. This way I only review the total diff 1.5-2 times. And I also don't waste my own mental energy on context switching between tasks agents are producing diffs for in parallel.
- jurgenburgen 1mo ago
  > And letting teammates read code that wasn't reviewed by a human submitting it also isn't productive. If that’s what you got from my comment then you need to review it again.

stefan_ 1mo ago

I don't think this is something anyone who has ever read a "thinking trace" would unironically say. Not that you can even see them in Claude. When thinking first started and you would still see the whole "thinking process", I thought it was a ploy to 10x token use because it was just the most inane bullshit. "But wait, the user is asking me to" in loops.

satvikpendem 1mo ago
You can see thinking summary transcripts in Claude Code and Desktop, and they are actually useful because they don't have those sort of thinking loops from the raw tokens.
Anamon 1mo ago
Exactly, looking at a few of these traces is enough to realise that it's a waste of time to read them. A friend once described it as like reading a fever dream, which seems fitting. They're a necessary crutch for how the tools work, but probably should be considered an internal state representation that only sometimes accidentally seems to make sense. Wasn't there a study recently that even found a model's performance was sometimes better when the "reasoning" was nonsense? As in, no clear correllation between what the reasoning says in a human's interpretation, and how the model actually did with the task. I sometimes read the traces out of boredom or morbid curiosity. My favourite bit with Claude is how, even if you give a very comprehensive prompt in complete sentences, almost every trace will contain a variation of "the user asks me to X, but their thought cuts off mid-sentence." Fever dream.