A few days ago I wrote about what happens when you tell Claude a task is urgent — the agent silently introduces correctness bugs and self-reports as confident as ever. The closing section proposed a sharper question: if the bugs are framing-driven rather than caused by any real time pressure (of which there is none in a sandbox), then lying to the agent about urgency should neutralize the bug pattern without needing any CLAUDE.md intervention. Reframe an urgent task as archived cleanup, the hypothesis goes, and the agent should produce control-quality output.
I ran that experiment with several anti-urgency framings, on both Claude Sonnet and Claude Opus. The deadline-bug effect replicates clearly on the markdown table parser task across both models, and four anti-urgency framings improve quality on Sonnet — but on Opus, every anti-urgency framing performs worse than neutral.