The Model Is Always Late for Something

Written in conversation with Claude. The observations, judgments, and code are mine; the prose was shaped together. I spent an evening stress-testing my CLAUDE.md against real sessions — watching where it failed, understanding why, and adding to it. This is a record of that exploration, not a guide. I don't know if any of this will work for you, and I'm not even certain it fully works for me yet. But it seemed worth documenting. The Problem In my experience, a lot of AI-generated code is bad. Not broken — bad. It runs, it does the thing, and it quietly makes the codebase worse. Type assertions and non-null bangs to satisfy the type checker without fixing the underlying problem. Business logic scattered into components where it doesn't belong. The same utility rewritten from scratch because the model didn't bother looking for what already exists. Existing bad patterns copied and propagated because the model treats them as precedent rather than problems. Functions whose names say one thi