I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file? • Hacker News Board

Re: I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?

#101

Post by swiftcoder » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 8:06 PM UTC

0xferruccio wrote: post #75

swiftcoder wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shows a profound gap between what people think working in customer service is like and how fucking hard it actually is Nicely fitting the pattern where everyone who is bullish on AI seems to think that everyone else's specialty is ripe for AI takeover (but not my specialty! my field is special/unique!)

to be fair at least half of the software engineers i know are facing some level of existential crisis when seeing how well claude code works, and what it means for their job in the long term and these are people are not junior developers working on trivial apps

Yeah, I've watched a few peers go down this spiral as well. I'm not sure why, because my experience is that Claude Code and friends are building a lifetime of job security for staff-level folks, unscrewing every org that decided to over-delegate to the machine

Re: I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?

#102

Post by tstrimple » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 8:08 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #65

superb_dev wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author was using instance A of Claude to update a `claude.md` while another instance B of Claude was consuming that file. When Claude B did something wrong, the author asked Claude A to update the `claude.md` so that Claude B didn’t make the same mistake again

More likely explanation: Their account was closed for some other reason, but it went into effect as they were trying this. They assumed the last thing they were doing triggered the ban.

This does sound sus. I have CC update other project's claude.md files all the time. I've got a game engine that I'm tinkering with. The engine and each of the game concepts I play around with have their own claude.md. The purpose of writing the games is to enhance the engine, so the games have to be familiar with the engine and often engine features come from the game CC rather than the engine CC. To keep the engine CC from becoming "lost" about features implemented each game project has instructions to update the engine's claude.md when adding / updating features. The engine CC bootstraps new game projects with a claude.md file instructing it how to keep the engine in sync with game changes as well as details of what that particular game is designed to test or implement within the engine. All sorts of projects writing to other project's claude.md files.

Re: I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?

#103

Post by kmoser » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 8:09 PM UTC

furyofantares wrote: post #90

areoform wrote: post #11

I recently found out that there's no such thing as Anthropic support. And that made me sad, but not for reasons that you expect. Out of all of the tech organizations, frontier labs are the one org you'd expect to be trying out cutting edge forms of support. Out of all of the different things these agents can do, surely most forms of "routine" customer support are the lowest hanging fruit? I think it's possible for An…

> I recently found out that there's no such thing as Anthropic support. The article discusses using Anthropic support. Without much satisfaction, but it seems like you "recently found out" something false.

If you want to split hairs, it seem that Anthropic has support as a noun but not as a verb.

Re: I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?

#104

Post by jordemort » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 8:12 PM UTC

Forget the ethical or environmental concerns, I don't want to mess with LLMs because it seems like everyone who goes heavy on them ends up sounding like they're on the verge of cracking up.

Re: I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?

#105

Post by omer_balyali » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 8:12 PM UTC

Similar thing happened to me back in November 19 shortly after GitHub outage (which sent CC into repeated requests and time outs to GitHub) while beta testing Claude Code Web.

Banned and appeal declined without any real explanation to what happened, other than saying "violation of ToS" which can be basically anything, except there was really nothing to trigger that, other than using their most of the free credits they gave to test CC Web in less than a week. (No third party tools or VPN or anything really) There were many people had similar issues at the same time, reported on Reddit, so it wasn't an isolated case.

Companies and their brand teams work hard to create trust, then an automated false-positive can break that trust in a second.

As their ads say: "Keep thinking. There has never been a better time to have a problem."

I've been thinking since then, what was the problem. But I guess I will "Keep thinking".

Re: I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?

#106

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 8:14 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #94

Romario77 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are confused because the message from Claude is confusing. Author is not an organization, they had an account with anthropic which got disabled and Anthropic addressed them as organization.

> Author is not an organization, they had an account with anthropic which got disabled and Anthropic addressed them as organization. Anthropic accounts are always associated with an organization; for personal accounts the Organization and User name are identical. If you have an Anthropic API account, you can verify this in the Settings pane of the Dashboard (or even just look at the profile button which shows the org…

I've always kind of hated that anti-pattern in other software I use for peronal/hobby purposes, too. "What is your company name? [required]" I don't have a company! I'm just playing around with your tool on my own! I'm not an organization!

Re: I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?

#107

Post by Terr_ » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 8:14 PM UTC

swiftcoder wrote: post #49

eightysixfour wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Out of all of the different things these agents can do, surely most forms of "routine" customer support are the lowest hanging fruit? I come from a world where customer support is a significant expense for operations and everyone was SO excited to implement AI for this. It doesn't work particularly well and shows a profound gap between what people think working in customer service is like and how fucking hard it ac…

> shows a profound gap between what people think working in customer service is like and how fucking hard it actually is Nicely fitting the pattern where everyone who is bullish on AI seems to think that everyone else's specialty is ripe for AI takeover (but not my specialty! my field is special/unique!)

> bullish [...] but not my specialty

IMO we can augment this criticism by asking which tasks the technology was demoed on that made them so excited in the first place, and how much of their own job is doing those same tasks--even if they don't want to admit it.

__________

1. "To evaluate these tools, I shall apply them to composing meeting memos and skimming lots of incoming e-mails."

2. "Wow! Look at them go! This is the Next Big Thing for the whole industry."

3. "Concerned? Me? Nah, memos and e-mails are things everybody does just as much as I do, right? My real job is Leadership!"

4. "Anyway, this is gonna be huge for replacing staff that have easier jobs like diagnosing customer problems. A dozen of them are a bigger expense than just one of me anyway."

Re: I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?

#108

Post by bastard_op » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 8:15 PM UTC

I've been doing something a lot like this, using a claude-desktop instance attached to my personal mcp server to spawn claude-code worker nodes for things, and for a month or two now it's been working great using the main desktop chat as a project manager of sorts. I even started paying for MAX plan as I've been using it effectively to write software now (I am NOT a developer).

Lately it's gotten entirely flaky, where chat's will just stop working, simply ignoring new prompots, and otherwise go unresponsive. I wondered if maybe I'm pissing them off somehow like the author of this article did.

Now even worse is Claude seemingly has no real support channel. You get their AI bot, and that's about it. Eventually it will offer to put you through to a human, and then tell you that don't wait for them, they'll contact you via email. That email never comes after several attempts.

I'm assuming at this point any real support is all smoke and mirrors, meaning I'm paying for a service now that has become almost unusable, with absolutely NO means of support to fix it. I guess for all the cool tech, customer support is something they have not figured out.

I love Claude as it's an amazing tool, but when it starts to implode on itself that you actually require some out-of-box support, there is NONE to be had. Grok seems the only real alternative, and over my dead body would I use anything from "him".

Re: I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?

#109

Post by foxglacier » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 8:17 PM UTC

landryraccoon wrote: post #38

This blog post feels really fishy to me. It's quite light on specifics. It should have been straightforward for the author to excerpt some of the prompts he was submitting, to show how innocent they are. For all I know, the author was asking Claude for instructions on extremely sketchy activity. We only have his word that he was being honest and innocent.

It doesn't even matter. The point is you can't just use SAAS product freely like you can use local software because they all have complex vague T&C and will ban you for whatever reason they feel like. You're force to stifle your usage and thinking to fit the most banal acceptable-seeming behavior just in case.

Maybe the problem was using automation without the API? You can do that freely with local software using software to click buttons and it's completely fine, but with a SAAS, they let you then ban you.

Re: I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?

#110

Post by kstenerud » Thu, Jan 22, 2026, 8:17 PM UTC

ankit219 wrote: post #91

cortesoft wrote: post #5

I am really confused as to what happened here. The use of ‘disabled organization’ to refer to the author made it extra confusing. I think I kind of have an idea what the author was doing, but not really.

My rudimentary guess is this. When you write in all caps, it triggers sort of a alert at Anthropic, especially as an attempt to hijack system prompt. When one claude was writing to other, it resorted to all caps, which triggered the alert, and then the context was instructing the model to do something (which likely would be similar to a prompt injection attack) and that triggered the ban. not just caps part, but that…

> When you write in all caps, it triggers sort of a alert at Anthropic

I find this confusing. Why would writing in all caps trigger an alert? What danger does caps incur? Does writing in caps make a prompt injection more likely to succeed?