Imagine a starting point – whatever you’re prepared to specify up front about your software. Then far to the right on the x axis imagine a solution. It’s perfect software – exactly what you needed.

Claude doesn’t know how to get from here to there in a straight line. It’s going to do a lot of trial and error – try a few things until something works. At each decision point, Claude might be moving up or down the y axis on its journey along x towards the solution.

Part of this vertical movement is produced by a dangerous fear of crashing: ‘What if this obviously intrinsically necessary field isn’t provided? I better engineer a crazy fallback.’ Anthropic this is my number one problem with Claude Code. Another contributor to extra complexity is that Claude makes confident guesses until it’s right and then moves on; typically the first thing that works is suboptimal.

This is software engineering as a combinatorial expansion of the guesses that happen to work into code, over time and tokens. At the end you have this kind of zig-zagging line – more complicated than it needs to be, but proven working. I think *overfitted* is the right word for it.

How are you managing this? For me, with one arm (session) I’m extending and with the other I’m pushing the weird adventures on the y axis back toward the most direct route – simplifying.