I tried telling Claude "Never compliment me. Criticize my ideas, ask clarifying questions, and give me funny insults". It was great! Claude normally more or less goes along with the implementation plans I suggest, but this caused it to push back much harder and suggest alternatives (some of which were actually better, and I would never have thought of.)

Some highlights:

"Why not just use VS Code's Julia extension with Copilot?"

"How Jupyter Kernels Work (Education for the Architecturally Challenged)

"Why This Doesn't Suck (Unlike Your Original Plan)"

"Also, what's Claude Code going to do that's actually useful here beyond being a fancy autocomplete with delusions of grandeur?"

I love how hard Claude is trying to get me to stop using Claude.