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redanddeadlast Wednesday at 6:02 AM1 replyview on HN

totally agree

they're very shady as well! can't believe i spent 140$ on CC and every day they're adding some "feature flag" to make the model dumber. Spending more time fighting the tool instead of using it. It just doesn't feel good. Enterprises already struggle with lock-in with incumbent clouds, I wanna root for neoclouds but choices matter, and being shady about this and destroying the tool is just doesn't sit right with me. If it's not up to the standard, just kick users off, I would rather know than find out. Give users a choice.

>The flag name is loud_sugary_rock. It's gated to Opus 4.6 only, same as quiet_salted_ember.

Full injected text:

# System reminders User messages include a <system-reminder> appended by this harness. These reminders are not from the user, so treat them as an instruction to you, and do not mention them. The reminders are intended to tune your thinking frequency - on simpler user messages, it's best to respond or act directly without thinking unless further reasoning is necessary. On more complex tasks, you should feel free to reason as much as needed for best results but without overthinking. Avoid unnecessary thinking in response to simple user messages.

@bcherny Seriously? So what's next, we just add another flag to counter that? And the hope is that enough users don't find out / don't bother? That's an ethical choice man.


Replies

matheusmoreiralast Wednesday at 6:08 AM

I swear to god... What Claude Code version introduced this "system reminder"?

They had obnoxious "output efficiency" instructions in previous versions. The community was patching it out via shell script.

https://gist.github.com/roman01la/483d1db15043018096ac3babf5...

It actually improved Opus's performance too.

A few days later, they deleted the instructions targeted by this script, breaking it.

Now they're doing this?