First of all, use Astra with Sol or Opus with Sonnet. Let the bigger model do the high level guiding. Claude Code even has an `--advisor` mode in the CLI. I mix with open weight models as well.

What you want is to branch questions in different agents and this is hard UX.

— Why is this function here?

This question can be but ideally should not be sent to an ongoing chat about a codebase. With some previous context, this question should become a separate "branch"/"fork"/"node" - whatever you call it. You can start a new session, share some context from previous chat and ask the question.

The reason is, and forgive me for assuming, if you are in a code/build flow, the LLM may go ahead and take action because it has a lot of previous chats with instructions to edit files.

In my experience the best way to not have these issues is to branch a new session with some context from which file you were looking at or your previous questions but as a read-only investigation.