Getting a bad answer from Claude? Make a hundred of them compete
When one answer is not good enough, generating many and making them fight produces a better one. Arena is a free skill that does exactly that.
Sometimes Claude gives you an answer that is fine but not right, and asking again just gets you a differently-shaped version of the same thing. Arena takes a different approach: generate a large number of candidate answers, then put them against each other and keep what survives.
Install and run it
- Open the Arena repository and copy its URL.
- Paste it into Claude Code and say “install this skill”.
- Restart Claude Code.
- Run
/arena --quickon a question you are stuck on.
Start with --quick. The full run generates considerably more candidates and costs accordingly.
When this is worth the tokens
It earns its cost on problems with many valid shapes and no obvious best one — naming things, structuring an argument, picking an approach, writing copy. It is wasted on anything with a single correct answer. A hundred candidates for “what does this error mean” is a hundred ways of saying the same thing.
Pair it with the Haiku subagent trick and the cost of running many candidates drops sharply, since generating the field is exactly the mechanical work a cheaper model handles well.