“A clean session with a better prompt almost always outperforms a long session with accumulated corrections.”Anthropic (documentația Claude Code) · Best practices for Claude Code · 2026 · Best practices for Claude Code (code.claude.com, 2026) — secțiunea «Course-correct early and often»
After two failed corrections: /clear and a better prompt, not a third correction.
The five patterns. The kitchen-sink session: unrelated tasks in one context, each leaving residue — /clear between them. Endless correcting: after two failed corrections the context is full of failed approaches and every answer is worse — /clear and a new prompt that incorporates what you learned, not a third correction. The over-specified CLAUDE.md: rules Claude ignores because they drown in noise — cut, or turn the rule into a hook. Trust without verification: code that "looks fine" and is wrong — tests, scripts, screenshots. Infinite exploration: "investigate" with no scope fills the window with hundreds of files — narrow the scope or use a sub-agent that returns only the conclusion. The productivity tweaks from the same guide, in the order you use them: Esc stops without losing context; Esc Esc or /rewind returns the conversation, the code or both to a checkpoint (every prompt creates one) and can summarize just a slice; /compact with instructions chooses what survives; /btw for side questions that stay out of the history; /rename so sessions become working branches; /usage shows what eats the limits; /permissions and the sandbox for fewer interruptions; a status line with context consumption. The guide ends with the antidote to recipes: when a session went well, notice what worked — the prompt, the context, the mode — and why.
Why it matters Each pattern has a mechanical fix; what links them is treating context as something to clean, not to accumulate.