alt Hacker NewsI've seen a lot of this sentiment over the previous six months from people on reddit. I have yet to experience this myself as a developer with over 20 years of experience.
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I see a lot of the "4.7 is a downgrade" sentiment. 4.7 does (mostly) what you ask it to do. 4.6 does what it thinks it should do. As someone with 20 years writing my own code I want the former, but the loud contingent online wants the latter.
When you're on a mature codebase with 500k+ lines of code, I haven't seen anything else be as effective as 4.7.
Opus 4.7 has been a real downgrade for me. I’m back to mid 2025 when I had to catch all the completely intermediary goals/assumptions the model is creating for itself
It's the same phenomenon as when you learn a new vocabulary word you see it everywhere.
People heard "Claude is nerfed" and now they see it everywhere, they notice failures a lot more than they would have otherwise.
Doesn't matter that Claude is not, in fact, nerfed. Perception is powerful and most humans are not rational.
What it does seem like is that they're tuning some knobs up and down or releasing new versions of models or system prompts that result in the model getting dumber and smarter in waves.
Opus has been dumb this week.
Claude was having a lot of capacity problems and downtime and then this week that has been much less obvious... and the model is dumber.
It could also just be luck and my impressions are false... who knows.
It’s because it’s not true, there’s no evidence for it that passes the sniff test. No lab is “shipping a worse model once they’ve got you”. People have a bad few days and blame the model providers instead of stepping back to fix their workflow.
As always, I think this happen more to vibe coder. They don't understand that bigger project means worse AI performance. On top of that Opus felt being nerfed at understanding prompt so if your spec is bad you won't get good result.