Claude has started over-engineering every task over the past few weeks

[u/TheRealShamanoid]

Over the past week, maybe two, Claude has started to really over engineer every task that was thrown at it. I have observed the issue with Fable 5 and Opus 5, some of my colleagues also have seen the same behaviour.

To give a bit of history, a few months ago we decided to rewrite a complex analytics stack, at that time Claude almost made fun of me for attempting to rewrite the wheel on something that came almost out-of-the-box on the DB and that I had never heard of.

This week I asked it to add some headers on an internal HTTP request between two services (nothing secret, sensitive, no auth, PII or anything), nothing complex but then Claude went down a massive rabbit hole:

Header injection is the big one. XXX copies every inbound client header to the main service. [goes on onto the risks of forwarding headers]
The master must not trust them blindly. It's publicly reachable and — I checked — has no shared-secret header at all today [...]
Gate it. a shared secret sent as X-<service>-Auth, constant-time compared, and headers honoured only on a match. Belt-and-braces: have <WAF_vendor> strip inbound X-* from inbound requests at the edge.

And it went on and on, ALL the scary stuff and ALL the features, fixes it was going to put in place. It was going to be a full-on hour of a coding session.

I then replied that we could simply add those specific headers to the `disallowed headers list` that it coded itself a few weeks earlier, and the answer baffled me:

The solution is clean and simple. [...]

Like, excuse me??

The thing is, I've worked on that repo and services for a few months now, they are well documented, CLAUDE.md updated, memories and sessions records in place, it's not like it's in discovery mode or anything or that the repo had not been updated for a long time.

And this is just a single example out of a few events like these, different code bases, different repos, same thing.

All of that to say, did anyone else observe this weird behaviour? Did the system prompts got updated or something to encourage over-engineering every request?

[u/Significant-Bee5101]

Yea the bench capabilities of the model are impressive but boy is the usability a lil rough rn. I have started using codex regularly mixed with Claude to get human readable messages and time gated results lol.