Someone at work recently termed this “Claude Creep”. It’s so easy to generate things push you towards going further but the reality is that’s you’re setting yourself up for more and more work to get them over the line.
One thing I recently did was run a pass over some unit test and functional test suites, asking for standardization on initialization, and creating reasonable helper methods to minimize boilerplate. Any dev can do that, if they have a week, and it'll future code changes more pleasant later. For Claude, an hour was a -8000 line PR that kept all the tests, with all the assertions.
It's what people need to figure out out of a a codebase. Our normal quality practices have an embedded max safe speed for changes without losing stability. If you use LLMs to try to change things faster, the quality practices have to improve if one wants to keep the number of issues per week constant. Whether it's improving testing, or sending the LLM to look at logs and find the bugs faster, one needs to increase the quality budget.
So lately I’ve just decided that I’ll time box things instead of set defined endpoints. And by “endpoint” I really mean “I’m done for the day” and honestly maybe thinking about it… “I’m done with this project”.
I don’t know. But the term “Claude Creep” is absolutely something I can identify with. That thing will take you down a rathole that started with just pulling in some document and ends with you completely repartitioning your file system. lol.
I agree that the efficiency and quality are very hard to measure. I’m extremely confident that when used well, agents are a huge gain for both though. When used poorly, it is just slop you can make really fast.