alt Hacker NewsAn update on recent Claude Code quality reports
Comments
Who’s going to pay for the exorbitant number of tokens Claude used without delivering any meaningful outcome? I spent many sessions getting zero results, and when I posted about it on their subreddit, all I got were personal attacks from bots and fanboys. I instantly cancelled my subscription and moved to Codex.
Also, it may be a coincidence, that the article was published just before the GPT 5.5 launch, and then they restored the original model while releasing a PR statement claiming it was due to bugs.
I’ve stuck to the non-1M context Opus 4.6 and it works really well for me, even with on-going context compression. I honestly couldn’t deal with the 1M context change and then the compounding token devouring nonsense of 4.7 I sincerely hope Anthropic is seeing all of this and taking note. They have their work cut out for them.
Those are exactly the kind of issues you run into when your app is ai coded you built one thing and kill something else.
You have too many and the wrong benchmarks
> On April 16, we added a system prompt instruction to reduce verbosity.
What verbosity? Most of the time I don’t know what it’s doing.
They had this ready and timed it for GPT 5.5 announcement. Zero chance it's a coincidence .
Doesn't change anything about opus 4.7 being an absolute buffon. Even going back to opus 4.6 doesn't feel like the magical period maybe 3-4 weeks ago. Gonna go back to openAI
An interesting question to wonder is why these optimizations were pushed so aggressively in the first place. Especially given this is the time they were running a 2x promotion, by themselves, without presumably seeing any slowdown in demand.
It’s incredible how forgiving you guys are with Anthropic and their errors. Especially considering you pay high price for their service and receive lower quality than expected.
Hi Boris, random observer here. Would you consider apologizing to the community for mistakenly closing tickets related to this and then wrongly keeping them closed when, internally, you realized they were legitimate?
I think an apology for that incident would go a long way.
Weren't there reports that quality decreased when using non-CC harnesses too? Nothing in blog post can explain that.
As an end-user, I feel like they're kind of over-cooking and under-describing the features and behavior of what is a tool at the end of the day. Today the models are in a place where the context management, reasoning effort, etc. all needs to be very stable to work well.
The thing about session resumption changing the context of a session by truncating thinking is a surprise to me, I don't think that's even documented behavior anywhere?
It's interesting to look at how many bugs are filed on the various coding agent repos. Hard to say how many are real / unique, but quantities feel very high and not hard to run into real bugs rapidly as a user as you use various features and slash commands.
ngl lost alot of trust in cc after reading this, specially point 1
how do you just do that to millions of users building prod code with your shit
ugh, caching based on idle time is horrible for my usage anyway; since claude is both fairly slow and doesn't really have much of a daily quota anyway I often tell it to do something and then wander off and come back to check on it when I next think about it. I always vaguely assumed that my session would not "detect" the intervening time anyway since it was all async. I guess from a global perspective time-based cache eviction makes sense.
To think we'd have known about this in advance if they'd just have open sourced Claude Code, rather than them being forced into this embarrassing post mortem. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
This reads like good news! They probably still lost a bunch of users due to the negative public sentiment and not responding quickly enough, but at least they addressed it with a good bit of transparency.
If anthropic is doing this as a result of "optimizations" they need to stop doing that and raise the price. The other thing, there should be a way to test a model and validate that the model is answering exactly the same each time. I have experienced twice... when a new model is going to come out... the quality of the top dog one starts going down... and bam.. the new model is so good.... like the previous one 3 months ago.
The other thing, when anthropic turns on lazy claude... (I want to coin here the term Claudez for the version of claude that's lazy.. Claude zzZZzz = Claudez) that thing is terrible... you ask the model for something... and it's like... oh yes, that will probably depend on memory bandwith... do you want me to search that?...
YES... DO IT... FRICKING MACHINE..
A heavily vibe coded CLI would have tons of issues, regularly.
LLMs over edit and it's a known problem.
How about just not change the harness abruptly in the first place? Make new system prompt changes "experimental" first so you can gather feedback.
I missed the part about the refunds…
Good on Anthropic for giving an update & token refund, given the recent rumors of an inexplicable drop in quality. I applaud the transparency.
Cool but I switched to Codex for the time being.
In other words we did the right things, but we understand feedback, oh and bugs happen.
something i note from this is that this is not a model weights change, but it is a hidden state change anthropic is doing to the outputs that can tune the quality and down on the "model" without breaking the "we arent changing the model" promise.
how often do these changes happen?
I had similar experience just before 4.5 and before 4.6 were released.
Somehow, three times makes me not feel confident on this response.
Also, if this is all true and correct, how the heck they validate quality before shipping anything?
Shipping Software without quality is pretty easy job even without AI. Just saying....
The issue making Claude just not do any work was infuriating to say the least. I already ran at medium thinking level so was never impacted, but having to constantly go "okay now do X like you said" was annoying.
Again goes back to the "intern" analogy people like to make.
It appears that Opus 4.7 has been nerfed already. Can't get any sensible results since yesterday. It just keeps running in circles. Even mention that it is committing fraud by doing superficial work it has been told specifically not to do doesn't help.
not the first time. Still not showing thinking are we?
Reading the "Going forward" section I see that they have zero understanding of the main complaints.
So now the solution is to input a “ping” message every hour so that it keeps the cache warm?
So we weren't going mad then!
yesterday CC created a fastapi /healthz endpoint and told me it's the gold standard (with the ending z). today I stopped my max sub and will be trying codex
Now we know why Anthropic banned the use of subscriptions with other agent harnesses: they partially rely on the Claude Code cli to control token usage through various settings.
And it also tells us why we shouldn’t use their harness anyway: they constantly fiddle with it in ways that can seriously impact outcomes without even a warning.
had this happen to me mid-refactor and spent 20 min wondering if I'd gone crazy. honestly the one hour threshold feels pretty arbitrary, sometimes you just step away to think
The funny thing is, in the last 3 days Claude has gotten substantially worse. So this claim, "All three issues have now been resolved as of April 20 (v2.1.116)" does not land with me at all.
Good on them for resolving all three issues, but is it any good again?
> All three issues have now been resolved as of April 20 (v2.1.116).
The latest in homebrew is 2.1.108 so not fixed, and I don't see opus 4.7 on the models list... Is homebrew a second class citizen, or am I in the B group?
Whatever they did, with the max plan, my daily usage quota was consumed in less than 10 minutes. Weird, let's hope they fix the usage now.
My takeaway is that they knew they were changing a bunch of stuff while their reps were gaslighting us in the comments here.
Why should we ever trust what they say again out trust that they won’t be rug-pulling again once this blows over?
If you think that you can just silently modify the model without any announcements and only react when it doesn't go through unnoticed, then be 100% sure that your clients will check every possible alternative and will leave you as soon as they find anything similar in quality (and no, not a degraded one).
Effort should not be configurable for Opus, it should be set to a single default that provides the highest level of capability. There are zero instances in which I am willing to accept a lesser result in exchange for a slightly faster response from Opus. If that were the case I would be using Flash or Haiku.
Too late bro, switched to Codex I’m done with your bullshit.
Interesting. All 3 seems like they’re obviously going to impact quality. e.g, reducing the effort from high to medium.
So then, there must have been an explicit internal guidance/policy that allowed this tradeoff to happen.
Did they fix just the bug or the deeper policy issue?
or you can use a non vibe designed efficient Rust TUI coding agent made by yours truly, all my coworkers use it too :) called https://maki.sh!
lua plugins WIP
Please for the love of god just put the max price plan up like 4x or 5x in cost and make it actually work.
Boris gaslighted us with all the quality related incidents for weeks not acknowledging these problems.
Appreciate the honesty from the team.
At the same time, personally I find prioritizing quality over quantity of output to be a better personal strategy. Ten partially buggy features really aren't as good as three quality ones.