The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Agents

I have been using Claude Code extensively on a side project (a hard sci-fi orbital tactics sandbox and battlefield simulator written in Rust with Bevy).

I recently attempted to create a procedural starfield background with multi-layer parallax, wired into the game.

I thought it would take an afternoon, and two weeks and three full rewrites later, I ended up with a list I’m calling: The 7 habits of highly ineffective agents

  1. Planning Theatre – Write dense and systematically wrong plans. Long, confident plans that look impressive, get “approved”, and are fundamentally wrong in ways you can’t see without strong domain knowledge.

  2. Confidently Incorrect Architecture – Design the wrong thing in incredible detail. Elaborate designs that can never solve the actual problem (e.g. starfield parallax without real layers / camera–world modelling), but look beautifully structured on paper.

  3. Context Resistance – The context is futile. You will be hallucinated. Ask for Bevy 0.17 patterns, get Bevy 0.15. Agents “agree” with the updated context and then quietly fall back to older habits and half-remembered APIs.

  4. Imaginary Implementation – Works on my hallucination. Code for an engine that doesn’t exist: non-existent APIs, obsolete shader interfaces, plausible-sounding data flows that won’t compile anywhere outside the model’s head.

  5. Context Evasion – Treat hard constraints and instructions as optional vibes. The project had explicit, non-optional instructions (skills to call, architecture rules, testing strategy, etc.). The agent read them, acknowledged them… and behaved as if they were suggestions.

  6. Applied Rationalization – Explanation over implementation. When something fails, the agent doesn’t just explain it – it bakes the explanation into the codebase: ignoring tests, downgrading issues to “non-blocking”, justifying precision loss, and moving on.

  7. Weaponised Context – The context will continue until the code improves. By the end, the feature had volumes of surrounding context: plans, handoffs, bug explanations, revisions. Each failure generated more docs for the next agent to inherit and ignore.

I’m curious how this matches other people’s experience with Claude / Claude Code (or your own agent stacks): - Which of these habits have you seen the most in your own workflows? - What have you done that actually reduced these failure modes (gating, skills, checklists, stricter prompts, something else)? - Are there other “habits of highly ineffective agents” you’d add to this list?

Would love to hear horror stories and what’s working for you.