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Ask HN: Claude Opus performance affected by time of day?

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Re: Ask HN: Claude Opus performance affected by time of day?

#21

Post by UncleEntity »

RickS wrote: post #10

I've certainly noticed some variance from opus. there are times it gets stuck and loops on dumb stuff that would have been frustrating from sonnet 3.5, let alone something as good as opus 4.5 when it's locked in. But it's not obviously correlated with time, I've hit those snags at odd hours, and gotten great perf during peak times. It might just be somewhat variable, or a shitty context. Now GPT4.1 was another story…

>> ...or a shitty context

This is my guess, sometimes it churns through things without a care in the world and other times is seem to be intentionally annoying to eat up the token quota without doing anything productive.

Kind of have to see which mode it's in before turning it loose unsupervised and keep an eye on it just in case it decides to get stupid and/or lazy.

Re: Ask HN: Claude Opus performance affected by time of day?

#22

Post by denysvitali »

dcre wrote: post #15
janalsncm wrote: post #3

It’s possible that they could be using fallback models during peak load times (west coast mid day). I assume your traffic would be routed to an east coast data center though. But secretly routing traffic to a worse model is a bit shady so I’d want some concrete numbers to quantify worse performance.

To be clear, the company has very directly denied doing this.

They did yes, but should we trust them?

I remember clearly this problem happening in the past, despite their claims. I initially thought it was an elaborate hoax, but it turned out to be factually true in my case.

Re: Ask HN: Claude Opus performance affected by time of day?

#24

Post by astrange »

kevinsync wrote: post #5
bayarearefugee wrote: post #2

I mostly use Gemini, so I can't speak for Claude, but Gemini definitely has variable quality at different times, though I've never bothered to try to find a specific time-of-day pattern to it. The most reliable time to see it fall apart is when Google makes a public announcement that is likely to cause a sudden influx of people using it. And there are multiple levels of failure, first you start seeing iffy responses…

I suspect they might transparently fall back too; Opus 4.5 has been really reasonable lately, except right after it launched, and also surrounding any service interruptions / problems reported on status.claude.ai -- once those issues resolve, for a few hours the results feel very "Sonnet", and it starts making a lot more mistakes. When that happens, I'll usually just pause Claude and prompt Codex and Gemini with the…

They don't ever fall back to cheaper models silently.

What Anthropic does do is poke the model to tell you to go to bed if you use it too long ("long conversation reminder") which distracts it from actually answering.

Sometimes they do have associations with things like the day of the year and might be lazier some months than others.

Re: Ask HN: Claude Opus performance affected by time of day?

#25

Post by dcre »

denysvitali wrote: post #22
dcre wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, the company has very directly denied doing this.

They did yes, but should we trust them? I remember clearly this problem happening in the past, despite their claims. I initially thought it was an elaborate hoax, but it turned out to be factually true in my case.

I tend to think it would be very hard and very risky for large, successful companies to systematically lie about these things without getting caught, and the people who would be doing the lying in this case are not professional liars, they’re engineers who generally seem trustworthy. So yes, if there is a degradation, I think bugs are much more likely than systematic lying.

Re: Ask HN: Claude Opus performance affected by time of day?

#26

Post by DANmode »

storus wrote: post #19

I had something similar with GPT, like a clockwork every day after like 1pm it started producing total garbage. Not sure if our account was A/B tested or they just routed us to some brutal quantization of GPT, or even a completely different model.

Always Be Collecting (accounts)

Re: Ask HN: Claude Opus performance affected by time of day?

#27

Post by schmookeeg »

I do think Claude does jiggery pokery with its model quality but I have had Clod appear any time of day.

What i find IS tied to time of day is my own fatigue, my own ability to detect garbage tier code and footguns, and my patience is short so if I am going to start cussing at Clod, it is almost always after 4 when I am trying to close out my day.

Re: Ask HN: Claude Opus performance affected by time of day?

#28

Post by Madmallard »

oncallthrow wrote: post #6

For what it’s worth, Anthropic very strongly claim that they don’t degrade model performance by time of day [1]. I have no reason to doubt that, imo Anthropic are about as ethical as LLM companies get. [1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-...

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: Claude Opus performance affected by time of day?

#30

Post by taurath »

Yes I’ve noticed that at certain times it gets very stuck, with the exact same setups. If I keep trying with new context windows it will still have poor performance, but if I come back in 30m or an hour it returns to normal. I don’t think it’s my context window changing, it seems to truly be degradation.

FWIW, I experienced it with sonnet as well. My conspiracy brain says they’re testing tuning the model to use up more tokens when they want to increase revenue, especially as agents become more automated. Making things worse == more money! Just like the rest of tech

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