Me and so many coworkers have been struggling with a big cognitive decline in Claude over the last two months. 4.5 was useful and 4.6 was great. I had my own little benchmark and 4.5 could just about keep track of a two way pointer merge loop whereas 4.6 managed a 3 way and the 1M context managed k-way. And this ability to track braids directly helped it understand real production code and make changes and be useful etc.

but then two months ago 4.6 started getting forgetful and making very dumb decisions and so on. Everyone started comparing notes and realising it wasn’t “just them”. And 4.7 isn’t much better and the last few weeks we keep having to battle the auto level of effort downgrade and so on. So much friction as you think “that was dumb” and have to go check the settings again and see there has been some silent downgrade.

We all miss the early days of 4.6, which just show you can have a good useful model. LLMs can be really powerful but in delivering it to the mass market Anthropic throttle and downgrade it to not useful.

My thinking is that soon deepseek reaches the more-than-good-enough 4.6+ level and everyone can get off the Claude pay-more-for-less trajectory. We don’t need much more than we’ve already had a glimpse of and now know is possible. We just need it in our control and provisioned not metered so we can depend upon it.