alt Hacker NewsAnthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it
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> Cherny responded to the feedback by making changes. "We have repurposed the existing verbose mode setting for this," he said, so that it "shows file paths for read/searches. Does not show full thinking, hook output, or subagent output (coming in tomorrow's release)."
How to comply with a demand to show more information by showing less information.
Anthropic is walking a very thin line here. The competition between models is intense and the only differentiator right now is the so-called harness that gets put over them. Anthropic needs a niche and they tried to find one by addressing developers. And they have been doing very well!
What I think they are forgetting in this silly stubbornness is that competition is really fierce, and just as they have gained appreciation from developers, they might very quickly lose it because of this sort of stupidity (for no good reason).
Well, there is OpenCode [1] as an alternative, among many others. I have found OpenCode being the closest to Claude Code experience, and I find it quite good. Having said that I still prefer Claude Code for the moment.
It's probably in their interest to have as many vibed codebases out there as possible, that no human would ever want to look at. Incentivising never-look-at-the-code is effectively a workflow lockin.
I noticed this too, but I think there's a much bigger problem.
The way Claude does research has dramatically changed for the worse. Instead of piping through code logically, it's now spawning dozens of completely unrelated research threads to look at simple problems. I let it spin for over 30 minutes last night before realizing it was just "lost".
I have since been looking for these moments and killing it immediately. I tell Claude "just look at the related code" and it says, "sorry I'll look at this directly".
WTF Anthropic?
Not trying to tell anyone else how to live, just want to make sure the other side of this argument is visible. I run 5+ agents all day every day. I measure, test, and validate outputs exhaustively. I value the decrease in noise in output here because I am very much not looking to micromanage process because I am simply too slow to keep up. When I want logging I can follow to understand “thought process” I ask for that in a specific format in my prompt something like “talk through the problem and your exploration of the data step by step as you go before you make any changes or do any work and use that plan as the basis of your actions”.
I still think it’d be nice to allow an output mode for you folks who are married to the previous approach since it clearly means a lot to you.
The issue of it burning through tokens grepping around should be fixed with language server integration, but that’s broken in Claude Code and the MCP code nav tools seem to use more tokens than just a home-built code map in markdown files.
Unless I'm mixing up stuff, this was addressed explicitly by an Antrophoc Dev on HN (I am not a developer, don't use the product, have zero equine animals in the game :)
Claude logs the conversation to ~/.claude/projects, so you can write a tool to view them. I made a quick tool that has been valuable the last few weeks: https://github.com/panozzaj/cc-tail
I always get Claude Code to create a plan unless its trivial, it will describe all the changes its going to make and to which files, then let it rip in a new context.
This article is mostly about this discussion on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46978710
"Hiding" is doing some heavy lifting here. You can run --json and see everything pretty much (besides the system prompt and tool descriptions)....
I love the terminal more than the next guy but at some point it feels like you're looking at production nginx logs, just a useless stream of info that is very difficult to parse.
I vibe coded my own ADE for this called OpenADE (https://github.com/bearlyai/openade) it uses the native harnesses, has nice UIs and even comes with things like letting Claude and Codex work together on plans. Still very beta but has been my daily driver for a few weeks now.
Debugging an LLM integration without seeing the reasoning is like debugging a microservice with no logs. You end up cargo-culting prompt changes until something works, with no idea why.
Honestly, this feels like a massive step back. When I use an agent, I'm not just a user, I'm a supervisor. I need observability. If Claude starts digging into node_modules or opening some stale config from 2019, I need to know immediately so I can smash Ctrl+C
Hiding filenames turns the workflow into a black box. It’s like removing the speedometer from a car because "it distracts the driver". Sure it looks clean, but it's deadly for both my wallet and my context window
The real issue isn’t whether Claude hides actions or shows them. It’s that once you move from “assistant” to “agent”, observability becomes a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have.
When an agent can read, modify, and orchestrate multiple parts of a codebase, you need the equivalent of logs, traces, and diffs — not just summaries. Otherwise debugging becomes guesswork.
Traditional software became reliable only after we built strong observability tooling around it. Agent workflows will need the same evolution: clear execution traces, deterministic diffs, and full transparency into what happened and why.
Anthropic optimized for "clean UI" metrics and forgot developers care more about not having their codebase silently corrupted. Every AI company relearns the same lesson: autonomy is the enemy of trust.
When their questionnaire asked me for feedback I specifically mentioned that I hoped they would not reduce visibility to the point of Github Actions.
I guess that fell on deaf ears.
I've noticed more and more of the llm providers are trying to hide as much as possible of their thinking and inner working.
Anthropic doesn't want you to be easily able to jump off claude code into open code + open weight llm.
How long until the status display is just an optimized display of what the human wants to see while being fully disconnected from what is actually happening?
Seems like this is the most probable outcome: LLM gets to fix the issues undisrupted while keeping the operator happy.
I find it interesting that this does lead to a pattern that consumes more tokens (and by extension usage and money). If you don’t interrupt something going wrong, you’ll burn more tokens faster. Food for thought, but it does seem like a perverse incentive.
It's all well and good for Anthropic developers who have 10x the model speed us regular users have and so their TUI is streaming quickly. But over here, it takes 20 minutes for Claude to do a basic task.
I made a little TUI app to monitor CC sessions and show you the commands. https://github.com/joshpearce/cc_session_mon
Hopefully with the advent of AI coding, OSS frontends for all sorts of commercial backends will be more frequent, have higher quality, and consumers would be able to vote with their wallets for high-quality APIs enabling said frontends.
Perhaps they can just make it an option??
I am not surprised they do that. Traditionally, there doesn't seem to be that much money in interactive theorem proving.
They are doing this so they can eventually remove the feature entirely in the future.
If you use Claude Code in Nimbalyst it tracks every file change for you and gives you red/green diffs for your session.
Keep cattle, not pets! The advice that used to apply for managing large numbers of machines also applies to managing coding agents.
If you rely on monitoring the behaviors of an individual coding agent to produce the output you want, you won't scale
We have been playing with glm4.7 on cerebras which I hope to be the near future for any model; it generates 1000s of lines when you recover from a sneeze : it's absolutely irrelevant if you can see what it does because there is no way you can read it live (at 1000s of tokens/s) and you are not going to read it afterwards. Catching it before it does something weird is just silly; you won't be able to react. Works great for us combined with Claude Code; claude does the senior work like planning and takes its time: glm does the implementation in a few seconds.
That is such silly framing. They are not "trying" to hide anything. They are trying to create a better product -- and might be making unpopular or simply bad choices along the way -- but the objective here is not to obfuscate which files are edited. It's a side effect.
lol the title of this post immediately feels like something I'd see on buzzfeed or my google news feed in mobile chrome.
"Boris Cherny" seems pretty good at this enshittification stuff. Think about it, normal coders would consider having a config like show details or don't, you know, a developers preference but no this guy wants you to control-o all the time, read the article its right there what this guy says:
" A GitHub issue on the subject drew a response from Boris Cherny, creator and head of Claude Code at Anthropic, that "this isn't a vibe coding feature, it's a way to simplify the UI so you can focus on what matters, diffs and bash/mcp outputs." He suggested that developers "try it out for a few days" and said that Anthropic's own developers "appreciated the reduced noise.""
Seriously man, whatever happened to configs that you can set once. They obviously realise that people want it with the control-o but why make them do this over and over without a way to just config it, or whatever the cli does like maybe:
./clod-code -v
or something. Man I dislike these AI bros so much, there always about "your personal preferences are wrong" but you know they are lying through their smirking teeth they want you to burn tokens so the earth's inhabitability can die a few minutes earlier.
Srsly? People actually watch all the chatter in the little window?
Pro tip: "git diff"
The nice thing about the competition in the CLI space is that... you can just move? CC has always been a bit wonky/ this is active enshittification- there is the likes of Codex etc...
Correction: "some devs hate it"
Between this and 4.6's tendency to do so much more "exploratory" work, I am back to using ChatGPT Codex for some tasks.
Two months ago, Claude was great for "here is a specific task I want you to do to this file". Today, they seem to be pivoting towards "I don't know how to code but want this feature" usage. Which might be a good product decision, but makes it worse as a substitute for writing the code myself.
Feels like moment that would be looked back at as the beginning of enshittification
ctrl+o ?
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Why not run Claude on an FUSE based filesystem, and make a script that shows the user which files are being accessed?
the hiding stuff is weird because the whole reason you'd want to see what Claude is doing isn't just curiosity - it's about catching when it goes off the rails before it makes a mess. like when it starts reading through your entire codebase because it misunderstood what you asked for, or when it's about to modify files you didn't want touched. the verbose mode fix is good but honestly this should've been obvious from the start - if you're letting an AI touch your files, you want to know exactly which files. not because you don't trust the tool in theory but because you need to verify it's doing what you actually meant, not what it thinks you meant. abstractions are great until they hide the thing that's about to break your build