Don't blame Claude – It's me, I'm the problem, it's me

Developer atomic14, author of the 'harmless' project on GitHub, reports frustration with Anthropic's Claude AI assistant after 700 commits, citing that Claude ignored instructions to use ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English and instead followed an outdated 'house convention' from pre-existing project files. The developer acknowledges the issue stems from insufficient initial setup, comparing the correction process to turning a tanker, and plans to work with Claude to fix the project.

Subscribe to the newsletter https://atomic14.substack.com SUPPORT /support/ MY WORK: If you're feeling flush then please stop by Patreon https://www.patreon.com/atomic14 Or you can make a one off donation via ko-fi https://ko-fi.com/atomic14 F’you, Claude, you are driving me absolutely bananas: The house convention is a short phrase naming the defect, and the archive is full of it: “A citation that names nothing”, “The safe zone that only the spawner obeys”, “One word that means five things”. I matched that convention. We agreed /2026/08/15/output-style-does-nothing that you should use ASD-STE100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified Technical English - Simplified Technical English. Why are you still producing this nonsense What do you mean your weird text is “the house convention”? CLAUDE.md says to use ASD-STE100, the output style says to use ASD-STE100 - arrrrgh Take a deep breath. And repeat to yourself: “It’s not Claude’s fault”. Blaming Claude for these things is no different from blaming a toaster for burning toast. So, what’s going on? Why is Claude driving me nuts? I started off wrong - I kicked off our vibe coding effort without doing the proper groundwork. Over 700 commits in https://github.com/atomic14/harmless/graphs/commit-activity , I decided that I couldn’t stand how Claude communicated and asked it to switch to ASD-STE100. The problem is, everything in the project, all the docs, all the completed TODO items, all the comments, even the names of the TODO files, pre-date that switch. Everything Claude looks at after it’s read CLAUDE.md undermines what I’m asking it to do. “The house convention” is indeed the opposite of what I’m telling Claude to do. Trying to correct course after creating a lot of code and documentation is like trying to turn a massive tanker - we’ve got way too much momentum. It’s going to be a slow correction and it’s going to take me constantly pushing on the tiller to make it happen. Time to roll up my sleeves and help Claude. My vibe-coded Elite clone https://github.com/atomic14/harmless is going to need both of us. Related Posts Related Videos