I have a toy repo where I’m working on optimizing the “mayor method” from re-frame-2 (further based on Gastown). At this point the “mayor” is Claude Code with Opus 4.8 (1M context) while workers are Sonnet/Haiku as necessary. Today I noticed this really “funny” behavior from the “mayor” where it… simply forgot how to do anything – it keeps failing to dispatch Agents, execute MCP calls or invoke tools like Bash.

This is an extremely long session. Three days, maybe? There was at least one compaction or maybe two. The weirdness crept in gradually. First I noticed that occasionally it started its messages with verbatim inline <br> after any user input (from me). Then for whatever reason it started saying “court:” before any tool invocations (which are overwhelmingly Bash).

Then just earlier it got even better: it completely forgot how to invoke commands altogether. I could shrug off the <br> or the “court:” since those don’t hurt. But now it’s “saying” raw XML inline (usually preceded by “Diagnostics”) instead of actually invoking anything.

Diagnostics
<invoke name="Bash">
  <parameter name="command">ls -la ./scripts</parameter>
  <parameter name="description">Confirm the repro script exists</parameter>
</invoke>

Way back when I was playing more with MCP, I also noticed that occasionally it’d try invoking MCP calls as if the mcp_ prefixed alias (or whatever it is) was an actual bash command. Just like back then, with this XML invoke too if I tell it that it’s doing it wrong, it’ll correct itself (doesn’t say <br> or “court:” either), but it’ll soon relapse. It only got better once I “scolded” it and it reflected with something along the lines “indeed the unnecessary court: Diagnostics preamble was causing issues, I should stop doing that.”

Guess the session was running too long. Maybe Opus needs sleep too. Or it’s just a known bug. Also yes totally this clanker is going to steal my job.