Claude has no eggs in his pockets
We have this family in-joke that comes from Helen’s side. One of her brothers, when he was very young, was convinced by his older brother to put a creme egg in his pocket while they were in B&M. As they left with the ensconced and unpaid-for egg, little bro thought of a genius tactic to convince Mum that he had definitely not stolen an egg. “I don’t have any eggs in my pockets!” he announced.
His Mum looked for and found the egg, returned it to the shop, made boy apologise to staff, etc.
Consequently “no eggs in my pockets” has become code for “I’m obviously hiding or negating something which I’ve definitely done”.
Claude has this habit of mentioning design decisions, in public-facing documentation, about things that were explicitly removed during the development process.
I’ve ended up with Swagger docs that say things like:
- There is no <c>IsIndicative</c> flag — quick vs full is determined by the route, not the body.
- The Something ID (SID) is NOT carried in the body; it is derived from the API key (decision 3).
…they… don’t need to know this, man. And in the API docs it generated:
The host is API-only (e.g.
rest.myservice.co.uk), so routes do not carry an/apiprefix.
In general it has this habit of putting work-in-progress notes in final work outputs.
Holding it wrong
The trouble here is that the Generalist Claude has tackled all the tasks in the epic.
On a one-and-done agentic development effort, this is quite normal. I put a lot of time into the spec and supporting context, and clarifying the plan that it generated (21 sub-decisions), but I am not going to write skills for this codebase at this time.
Ideally, writing swagger docs would be delegated to a /swagger-docs skill which the generalist calls upon when it notices it’s writing swagger docs. Likewise with writing API docs to a markdown file.
The lighter, more immediate fix might be to add to AGENTS/INSTRUCTIONS/CLAUDE/WHATEVER.md and give it some stern warnings about these things.
I personally feel that’s a losing battle:
Negation doesn’t work as well as affirmative requests (with LLMs as with humans - say “remember your keys” rather than “don’t forget your keys”) and you can never cover all of the breadth of the specific things you want it to avoid through rules like this. Instead you risk an expensive, inflated context.
So What
No “So What”! I just wanted to joke about it really.
Sometimes this will happen and it’s a laugh.
If you’re working long-term on a single project with a big future, you can invest in writing the skills so that each area is carried out in a special way.
But for me? At this time of year? In this part of the country? Localized entirely within my kitchen? Nope! 🍔🥚