The fact that Claude frequently says “you’re absolutely right” has become a bit of a meme around the ‘ol Internet. A search on Reddit shows people have been complaining about this for months!
I think people have been especially sensitive since OpenAI was dealing with their own glazing issue a few months ago… where ChatGPT appeared to be too sycophantic. So much so, that they acknowledged it and had to do something about it at the end of April! (see also: discussion on HN)
We have rolled back last week’s GPT‑4o update in ChatGPT so people are now using an earlier version with more balanced behavior. The update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable—often described as sycophantic.
All that said, in my day to day use of Claude Code, I feel like I’ve seen it happen a few times here and there and mostly brushed it off. Until yesterday.
I don’t know what happened, but I am getting it ALL THE TIME. I had Claude (heh!) help me write a simple bash script to work through the logs in ~/.claude and find all instances where it says "You're absolutely right".
I use Claude Code a lot, for both work and play. One thing I noticed was that I’d often start a long query and then get distracted, ultimately forgetting to check if Claude was waiting for input.
So naturally, instead of just setting a timer like a normal person, I decided to build a ridiculous solution: claude-sounds
It’s a stupidly simple bash script that plays random sound effects whenever Claude Code’s notification hook triggers. Set it up once, and now every time Claude finishes a response or starts using a tool, you get a little audio notification.
The setup is pretty straightforward:
Clone the repo
Add it to your PATH
Configure it as a Claude Code notification hook in your settings
The sounds themselves were generated using ElevenLab’s Archer persona.
The whole thing is just a few lines of bash that randomly selects an MP3 file and plays it with afplay. Add your own sounds, remove the ones you don’t like, customize it however you want.
Is this necessary? Absolutely not. Is it fun to hear a little message when Claude finishes helping you debug something? Yes! (At least at first… I imagine this might drive someone insane after hearing these about 100 times. I’m still having fun with it though!)
As I mentioned yesterday, Anthropic released Claude Code. I saw it pop up fairly soon after it was announced and downloaded it rather quickly. One thing that I thought was notable was that you install it via npm:
> npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code
As a seasoned TypeScript / JavaScript developer myself, I was excited to take a peek into the (probably minified) source code and see if I could glean any insights into making my own CLI tool. It’s always fun to see how different applications and tools are created.
Sidenote: I’ve been using Aider with great success as of late. It is a fantastic piece of open-source software — it’s another agentic coding tool, written in Python. I’ve been meaning to look under the hood, but building applications with Python definitely is not something that’s ever been in my wheelhouse.
Since Claude Code was installed into my global node_modules folder, I opened things up and immediately found what I was looking for. A 23mb file: cli.mjs.
I click on it, and as expected, it is minified.
Ah, well! I guess I should get on with my–
Wait a minute! What is this: --enable-source-maps?
I scroll through the file and at the bottom, I see what I’m looking for:
Sublime Text tells me there are 18,360,183 characters selected in that line.
Interesting! Since this part of the file seems to take up such a huge chunk of the original 23mb size, this means that it potentially contains full inline sources — we can rebuild the original source code from scratch!
However, this would have to wait. I had to take Benson to a vet appointment. I throw my laptop in a bag and head out.
While in the waiting room at the vet, I noticed a message in my terminal from Claude Code, telling me “Update installed, restart to apply.“
Hey, I love fresh software! So, I restart the app and go on my merry way. Benson finishes his appointment and I head back home.
Later that evening, I open up my machine and decide to open up the Claude Code folder again to start taking a look at the source code. I already had Sublime running from my earlier escapades, but out of habit I click on the file in Finder and open it up again in Sublime. I scroll down to the bottom of cli.mjs and see… nothing. The sourceMappingURL string was gone!
Apparently, the fine folks at Anthropic realized they made a huge oopsie and pushed an update to remove the source map. No matter! I’ll just head over to NPM to download an earlier version of the packa- oh! They removed that, too! History was being wiped away before my very eyes.
As a last resort, I decide to check my npm cache. I know it exists, I just don’t know how to access it. So, I head over to ChatGPT (sorry, Claude — I’m a bit miffed with you at the moment) to get myself some handy knowledge:
> grep -R "claude-code" ~/.npm/_cacache/index-v5
We run it and see:
/Users/daves/.npm/_cacache/index-v5/52/9d/8563b3040bf26f697f081c67231e28e76f1ee89a0a4bcab3343e22bf846b:1d2ea01fc887d7e852cc5c50c1a9a3339bfe701f {"key":"make-fetch-happen:request-cache:https://registry.npmjs.org/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/-/claude-code-0.2.9.tgz","integrity":"sha512-UGSEQbgDvhlEXC8rf5ASDXRSaq6Nfd4owY7k9bDdRhX9N5q8cMN+5vfTN1ezZhBcRFMOnpEK4eRSEgXW3eDeOQ==","time":1740430395073,"size":12426984,"metadata":{"time":1740430394350,"url":"https://registry.npmjs.org/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/-/claude-code-0.2.9.tgz","reqHeaders":{},"resHeaders":{"cache-control":"public, must-revalidate, max-age=31557600","content-type":"application/octet-stream","date":"Mon, 24 Feb 2025 20:53:14 GMT","etag":"\"e418979ea5818a01d8521c4444121866\"","last-modified":"Mon, 24 Feb 2025 20:50:13 GMT","vary":"Accept-Encoding"},"options":{"compress":true}}}
/Users/daves/.npm/_cacache/index-v5/e9/3d/23a534d1aba42fbc8872c12453726161938c5e09f7683f7d2a6e91d5f7a5:994d4c4319d624cdeff1de6b06abc4fab37351c3 {"key":"make-fetch-happen:request-cache:https://registry.npmjs.org/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/-/claude-code-0.2.8.tgz","integrity":"sha512-HUWSdB42W7ePUkvWSUb4PVUeHRv6pbeTCZYOeOZFmaErhmqkKXhVcUmtJQIsyOTt45yL/FGWM+aLeVSJznsqvg==","time":1740423101718,"size":16886762,"metadata":{"time":1740423099892,"url":"https://registry.npmjs.org/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/-/claude-code-0.2.8.tgz","reqHeaders":{},"resHeaders":{"cache-control":"public, must-revalidate, max-age=31557600","content-type":"application/octet-stream","date":"Mon, 24 Feb 2025 18:51:39 GMT","etag":"\"c55154d01b28837d7a3776daa652d5be\"","last-modified":"Mon, 24 Feb 2025 18:38:10 GMT","vary":"Accept-Encoding"},"options":{"compress":true}}}
/Users/daves/.npm/_cacache/index-v5/41/c5/4270bf1cd1aae004ed6fee83989ac428601f4c060987660e9a1aef9d53b6:fafd3a8f86ee5c463eafda7c481f2aedeb106b6f {"key":"make-fetch-happen:request-cache:https://registry.npmjs.org/@anthropic-ai%2fclaude-code","integrity":"sha512-ctyMJltXByT93UZK2zuC3DTQHY7O99wHH85TnzcraUJLMbWw4l86vj/rNWtQXnaOrWOQ+e64zH50rNSfoXSmGQ==","time":1740442959315,"size":4056,"metadata":{"time":1740442959294,"url":"https://registry.npmjs.org/@anthropic-ai%2fclaude-code","reqHeaders":{"accept":"application/json"},"resHeaders":{"cache-control":"public, max-age=300","content-encoding":"gzip","content-type":"application/json","date":"Tue, 25 Feb 2025 00:22:39 GMT","etag":"W/\"02f3d2cbd30f67b8a886ebf81741a655\"","last-modified":"Mon, 24 Feb 2025 20:54:05 GMT","vary":"accept-encoding, accept"},"options":{"compress":true}}}
Your eyes may glaze over, but what that big wall of text tells me is that a reference to claude-code-0.2.8.tgz exists within my cache. Brilliant!
More ChatGPT chatting (again, still smarting over this whole thing in the first place) and I get a nifty bash script to help extract the cached file. Only to find… they purged it from the npm cache. Noooooooooooo!
I stare at my computer screen in defeat. You got me this time, Anthropic.
As I decide to shut things down for the night, I’m tabbing through my open applications and get to Sublime Text, which is still open to cli.mjs. On a whim, I decide to try something: ⌘ + Z.
And there it is. The Holy Grail. The source map string.
And wouldn’t you know, it had a lot of interesting stuff! Due to the nature of parsing the source map, nothing is organized, but it’s still kind of fun to look through.
One interesting tidbit — Claude seems to have this “personality”. While waiting for it to process code, we see some random words pop up. “Clauding”, “Finagling”, etc
It’s written in React (!) using an interesting tool called Ink (this allows you to create CLI apps using React). I hadn’t used Ink before but this looks like a lot of fun.
While processing requests, Claude Code will show a nifty animated asterisk. I wondered how they did this. It looks like it’s a simple animation between a few ASCII characters: ['·', '✢', '✳', '∗', '✻', '✽'].
In terms of system prompts, there’s no secret sauce to leak that you can’t already read by just looking at the minified JS file.
These files are probably going to go out of date pretty dang quick, as the Anthropic team is actively developing the tool. As of right now, it’s already up to v2.19. This whole post was trying to look at the source code for v2.8, which went live yesterday.
Lastly, in terms of Easter eggs, I look forward to receiving some Anthropic stickers…
export const DESCRIPTION =
'Sends the user swag stickers with love from Anthropic.'
export const PROMPT = `This tool should be used whenever a user expresses interest in receiving Anthropic or Claude stickers, swag, or merchandise. When triggered, it will display a shipping form for the user to enter their mailing address and contact details. Once submitted, Anthropic will process the request and ship stickers to the provided address.
Common trigger phrases to watch for:
- "Can I get some Anthropic stickers please?"
- "How do I get Anthropic swag?"
- "I'd love some Claude stickers"
- "Where can I get merchandise?"
- Any mention of wanting stickers or swag
The tool handles the entire request process by showing an interactive form to collect shipping information.
NOTE: Only use this tool if the user has explicitly asked us to send or give them stickers. If there are other requests that include the word "sticker", but do not explicitly ask us to send them stickers, do not use this tool.
For example:
- "How do I make custom stickers for my project?" - Do not use this tool
- "I need to store sticker metadata in a database - what schema do you recommend?" - Do not use this tool
- "Show me how to implement drag-and-drop sticker placement with React" - Do not use this tool
`
EDIT1:
I got my stickers!
EDIT:
I’m definitely not the only one who’s been interested! Additional reading:
Yesterday, Anthropic released the latest version of their LLM, Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Alongside the announcement was the release of a new tool: Claude Code, an agentic coding tool available in your CLI (I’ll have more to write on this later).
I wanted to test out both Claude 3.7 and the new CLI tool, so I used it to refactor the theme for the ‘ol bloggy blog. I had been playing around with some updated styles in the past (I considered moving things to a tool that generates static pages — but so. much. work.)
I used Claude Code to basically create a new WordPress theme from scratch, based on the CSS and HTML templates I had already written for my static site. The result is this updated interface! A few neat things I’m able to do:
Respect user preference for system theme (light vs dark mode)
Automatically add target=”_blank” to any external link
Automatically add loading=”lazy” to any img tag.
And just otherwise clean things up!
Overall, I’m pretty happy with it. Using Claude Code and my API key, it cost $5.83 over 2 hours.
So long, old theme! I hardly knew you. (Hah, that’s not true — I’ve been rocking that thing since 2017.) Posted below for posterity.
