Anthropic now calls "double-check your work" an anti-pattern, and published the cost numbers to back it

Anthropic (via r/ClaudeAI)·high signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

Anthropic's September 8 platform post names six prompt anti-patterns that current models make worse, not better: verification rituals, thoroughness boosters like "be maximally thorough", mandatory scratchpad procedures, stale few-shot examples, contradictory rules, and dated config such as manual thinking budgets. Running its `/claude-api prompt-audit` cut cost 14.6% and raised accuracy 5.3% on average, with roughly 58% cost reduction on LegalBench and 73% on tau2-bench retail. A r/ClaudeAI reader then counted 66 instances of "must" and 54 of "never" across their own rule files and could not tell which were hard constraints and which were the nudges Anthropic says to delete.