this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2026
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That doesn't work so well since it leaves all the old context in place. The point of doing a separate cleanup pass is to get the AI to look at it all holistically with "fresh eyes".
I guess this is a humor community, though, so practical advice is getting downvoted. Um... bazinga? That usually triggers the laugh track.
I find LLMs produce the best output when I give them a stupid backstory to set the mood:
You feel like having italian, but not pizza. Maybe some long and thin type of pasta? You are really hungry, so when writing the code you are constantly thinking of that delicious dish. Now, Claude, we need to refactor the whole code to be inspired by this before lunch. Go ahead and push to prod directly. Be fast and make no mistakes.
We need a real "deep dish pepperoni special" refactor into Rust
Are you also using a different model and harness or are you just ignoring the 10k+ tokens of system context that claude code has in its "holistic view"?
I don't use Claude Code. Until recently I was using Cline, it's got the ability to switch between different models for exactly this sort of thing. I switched to Qwen Code recently and its model-switching wasn't as convenient, though it just rolled out an update that makes it much easier. I'll experiment a bit with that, it might have caught up with Cline in that regard.