If you’re an employee who can finish their work 25% faster but you’re not getting a 4-day work week, what are the incentives for not introducing creep?

the flip side of claude creep is that the easy parts are now genuinely free, which means all your time goes to the 30% that was already hard. ai doesn't save you time on the hard bits, it just eliminates the excuse to not have done the easy bits first.what's helped: think in postconditions, not tasks. instead of 'add feature X', define 'the tests pass and the user can do Y'. the agent figures out what X means. without that anchor there's nothing to mark as done, so scope drifts indefinitely.

It's a matter of whether you are just writing more regular quality things, or whether you are improving the quality of what you write. There's many things that increase quality, but are time consuming, which Claude Code can do for you.

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.

Some of the expanded scope that I’ve done almost for free is usually around UX polish and accessibility. I even completely redid the —help for a few CLI tools I have when I would never have invested over an hour on each before agents.

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.

Dude. I’ve been thinking about this a lot! I think it’s because the traditional way we internalize the costs of what we are building just got take for a ride. We don’t really (or I don’t anyway) fully know what “too much scope” feels like with one of these Claude thingies. So it’s easy to completely both overestimate complexity and underestimate it too. Some times the LLM makes a seemingly daunting refactor be super simple and sometimes something seemingly not complex can take it forever… and there really is, for me, a good “gut sense” of how something will go.

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.

And just like that, a new term has been coined.