"My Claude Code performance has tanked and I'm not sure why"

This is one of the most common posts in Reddit’s Claude Code community.

In this post, I will share why it happens and what the fix is. Read on!

The first question everyone asks: Did Anthropic change something on the server?

Curious, I searched around. Turns out, users have been asking this all year long.

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I had the same experience.

When I started using Claude Code for a new project, it was magical.

As my project grew bigger, Claude Code started:

• Violating best practices I gave it

• Hallucinating code that contradicted my instructions

• Claiming completion when tasks weren’t done

I wrote about my journey here: https://lnkd.in/gXjGiPZS

My hypothesis? Context collapse.

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Anthropic just released a best practice guide that confirms this.

https://lnkd.in/gJW_iSgc

Here’s what I found from research:

• Performance starts to degrade at 40-50% of context window

• The more best practices you give, the faster it fills up

• When context is filling up, Claude ignores your instructions

So if you give Claude Code lots of best practices to follow, and your codebase keeps growing…

It means nothing if Claude Code didn’t follow them.

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The good news? There’s a fix.

(1) Break best practices into individual skills. Skills allow Claude to load best practices on demand.

(2) Agents + Skills. Skills alone isn’t enough. When I tested, Claude loaded 5 relevant skills at once. Context filled up quickly. The real solution: One agent. One skill.

(3) Apply at every stage: during planning, plan review, and implementation.

(4) Create master skills for planning, plan review, and implementation. These skills repeat reviewers until all best practices pass.

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The irony?

To use Claude Code effectively, you need to understand how Claude Code works.

Vibe coding is not “just vibe.”

It requires engineering discipline.

We are just shifting from software engineering to context and workflow engineering.

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Are you experiencing Claude Code performance issues? What’s your workaround?

#ClaudeCode #VibeCoding #AI #SoftwareEngineering #DeveloperExperience

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