Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Please tell me that this is a grossly exaggerated parody, and that the tools don’t write like this, or do so many ridiculous things It's a pisstake, but (in the bits I read, and based on my own personal experience) the writing style is barely exaggerated, while the behaviour doesn't ring true at all.
The behavior, while slightly exaggerated, rings entirely true for me. From the other comments in this thread, it seems I am prompting poorly in a similar way to the options offered. I am guessing you prompt differently than what is shown in the game?
"Why is half the site blue now? I asked you to change one button."; half the site isn't blue, why would you say that? What would "half the site" even mean? Ironically even in this satire supposed to make fun of how Claude responds to prompts, it is smart enough to ignore that. A better prompt would be "Why are many parts of the site, such as the Cancel button, now also blue?", though in this case it doesn't matter as the reply would be roughly the same.
Next, Claude helpfully tells us we're dealing with a monstrosity of a codebase out of hell: "Seven components consume the token directly; another eleven reach it through aliases; three use it only in hover/focus state; and two appear to be accidental cross-role consumers" is such an insane codebase that the initial request was basically impossible to carry out.
Claude made that perfectly clear, yet the next prompt choice just ignores that fact. "Revert everything except Add to Cart. That is the whole task." It just explained why this is impossible. It had only made one change, so there is no "revert everything except X"; there's only a single change to revert, which would mean Add to Cart too would no longer be blue. The human just chose to ignore that. The other option is "I do not care about the token architecture. I do not care why it happened. Put everything back the way it was and leave ONLY the Add to cart button blue. Please.". This has the same issue; "Put everything back and _leave_ only the button blue" is an impossible ask, which it just explained to you. So if you really don't want to deal with cleaning up some of the mess, instead only adding on to it but getting your blue button, then you'd want to say "Revert the change you made, then make a new change that scopes the new blue color to only the Cancel button".
Ignoring the information it gives you, or telling it things that are incorrect, of course will lead to bad results. It's impossible not to.