In my experience, wanting the model to fix everything it finds is not a good idea.

First the model will lose focus, trying to do too much at the same time, leading to worse quality of output. Secondly because if the model reports to you or has questions for you, it will start to talk about multiple topics, leading to conversation where you talk about too many different points each round.

In general I find it is best to start a session, tackle some implementation, start a new session, ask for TODO fixing (only TODOs in the same module or otherwise accross codebase but related to a single concern). You can use an agent to scan the codebase for TODO (or ask it to use credo for that), then group the todos, categorize and handoff a fixing plan for the next session on a single concert, and start a new session.

(now of course sometimes the code is small, the fixes are easy so fixing todos along the way can be ok)

It usually depends on how it is used. Plain direct usage of prompting (even through Plan mode) most of the time result if crap output. Could be subjective of course, but it writes duplicated code, do not reuse already written functions and module, ignore codebase standards (even if they are directly written to local CLAUDE.md).

Sometimes psychosis starts out of nowhere, and it’s starting outputting pure crap. Or it states he did something, but never actually wrote that code. It can also easily wipe hours of work but just resetting git state. Things happens, to what Claude usually say - “I as so sorry!“.

Only way. I was able to keep it in line is through having very strict orchestration framework with a lot of hooks. So, in short - your friend is correct.

Besides those “features“, service has terrible uptime - it is down very often. It’s not a feeling - their status page all red.

Something I faced often was comments like “Hmmm… I see this #TODO in the file but not related to my changes. The next operator will fix it.” which is quite infuriating behaviour, since I left the #TODO for my next passage on this file, be it manually or assisted.

When I added “Think like a boy scout, leave the place better than you encountered it” in CLAUDE.md, it started saying “Hmmm… I see this #TODO in the file but not related to my changes. – wait : boy scout rule, I must fix it” which I must admit, I have not decided if that was more or less irritating than the previous version, but it fixed this refusal to handle low hanging fruit, like restructuring types, doing a small refactor…

Generally I see a lot of behaviours that I do not tolerate in myself, and being “augmented” this way is a bit tiring.