Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude Code is being dumbed down?

symmetrybreak.ing

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 732 posts

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#201

Post by peacebeard »

My biggest beef in recent versions is the automatic use of generic built in skills. I hate it when I ask a simple question and it says "OK! Time to use the RESEARCHING_CRAZY_PROBLEM skill! I'll kickstart the 20 step process!" when before it would just answer the question.

You can control this behavior, so it's not a dealbreaker. But it shows a sort of optimism that skills make everything better. My experience is that skills are only useful for specific workflows, not as a way to broadly or generally enhance the LLM.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#202

Post by lp0_on_fire »

idopmstuff wrote: post #180
vintagedave wrote: post #117

> That’s it. “Read 3 files.” Which files? Doesn’t matter. “Searched for 1 pattern.” What pattern? Who cares. Product manager here. Cynically, this is classic product management: simplify and remove useful information under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism if you're more overt about your influences. It's something that as an industry we should be over by now. It requires deep understa…

Also product manager here. Not at all cynically, this is classic product management - simplify by removing information that is useful to some users but not others. We shouldn't be over it by now. It's good to think carefully about how you're using space in your UI and what you're presenting to the user. You're saying it's bad because they removed useful information, but then why isn't Anthropic's suggestion of using…

> You're saying it's bad because they removed useful information, but then why isn't Anthropic's suggestion of using verbose mode a good solution?

Because reading through hundreds of lines verbose output is not a solution to the problem of "I used to be able to see _at a glance_ what files were being touched and what search patterns were being used but now I can't".

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#203

Post by roughly »

brutalc wrote: post #195
vintagedave wrote: post #117

> That’s it. “Read 3 files.” Which files? Doesn’t matter. “Searched for 1 pattern.” What pattern? Who cares. Product manager here. Cynically, this is classic product management: simplify and remove useful information under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism if you're more overt about your influences. It's something that as an industry we should be over by now. It requires deep understa…

Product managers aren’t needed anymore.

First they came for the product managers, and I said nothing, because I was a coder, and we're invincible and can do everything and also deliver value unlike all those other slackers, so they'd never come for us.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#204

Post by bayindirh »

It's pretty interesting to watch AI companies start to squeeze their users as the constraints (financial, technical, capacity-wise) start to squeeze the companies.

Ads in ChatGPT. Removing features from Claude Code. I think we're just beginning to face the music. It's also funny that how Google "invented" ad injection in replies with real-time auction capabilities, yet OpenAI would be the first implementer of it. It's similar to how transformers played out.

For me, that's another "popcorn time". I don't use any of these to any capacity, except Gemini, which I seldom use to ask stuff when deep diving in web doesn't give any meaningful results. The last question I asked managed to return only one (but interestingly correct) reference, which I followed and continued my research from there.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#205

Post by eldenring »

elzbardico wrote: post #165
nine_k wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just assume that they realized that they can split the offering, and to charge for the top tier more. (Yes, even more.) If Claude Code can replace an engineer, it should cost just a bit less than an engineer, not half as much.

But then you pay for the less outrageously subsidized rates of API instead of the a bit less incredibly generous prices of the subscription.

Its not subsidized, in fact, they probably have very healthy margins on Claude Code.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#206

Post by exitb »

kakugawa wrote: post #183
resiros wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, just use OpenCode. It works with Claude Code Max, and the TUI is 100x better. The only thing that sucks is Compaction.

How much longer is Anthropic going to allow OpenCode to use Pro/Max subscriptions? Yes, it's technically possible, but it's against Anthropic's ToS. [1] 1: https://blog.devgenius.io/you-might-be-breaking-claudes-tos-...

Consider switching to an OpenAI subscription, which allows OpenCode use.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#207

Post by NinjaTrance »

vintagedave wrote: post #117

> That’s it. “Read 3 files.” Which files? Doesn’t matter. “Searched for 1 pattern.” What pattern? Who cares. Product manager here. Cynically, this is classic product management: simplify and remove useful information under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism if you're more overt about your influences. It's something that as an industry we should be over by now. It requires deep understa…

Product managers are fooling themselves if they think they can "improve the user experience" for developers -- developers can't agree on the simplest things such as key bindings (vim, emacs) or identation (tabs, spaces).

Make the application configurable. Developers like to tinker with their tools.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#208

Post by sfink »

idopmstuff wrote: post #180
vintagedave wrote: post #117

> That’s it. “Read 3 files.” Which files? Doesn’t matter. “Searched for 1 pattern.” What pattern? Who cares. Product manager here. Cynically, this is classic product management: simplify and remove useful information under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism if you're more overt about your influences. It's something that as an industry we should be over by now. It requires deep understa…

Also product manager here. Not at all cynically, this is classic product management - simplify by removing information that is useful to some users but not others. We shouldn't be over it by now. It's good to think carefully about how you're using space in your UI and what you're presenting to the user. You're saying it's bad because they removed useful information, but then why isn't Anthropic's suggestion of using…

Developer> This is important information and most developers want to see it.

PM1> Looks like a PM who is out of touch with what the developers want. Easy mistake to make.

PM2> Anthropic knows better than this developer. The developer is probably wrong.

I don't know for sure what the best decision is here, I've barely used CC. Neither does PM1 nor PM2, but PM2 is being awfully dismissive of the opinion of a user in the target audience. PM1 is probably putting a bit too much weight on Developer's opinion, but I fully agree with "All of us... have seen UIs where this has occurred." Yes, we have. I personally greatly appreciate a PM who listens and responds quickly to negative feedback on changes like this, especially "streamlining" and "reducing clutter" type changes since they're so easy to get wrong (as PM1 says).

> It's good to think carefully about how you're using space in your UI and what you're presenting to the user.

I agree. It's also good to have the humility to know that your subjective opinion as someone not in the target audience even if you're designing the product is less informed in many ways than that of your users.

----

Personally, I get creeped out by how many things CC is doing and tokens it's burning in the background. It has a strong "trust me bro" vibe that I dislike. That's probably common to all agent systems; I haven't used enough to know.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#209

Post by viraptor »

I don't get why people cling to the Claude Code abusive relationship. It's got so many issues, it's getting worse, and it's clear that there's no plan to make it open for patching.

Meanwhile OpenCode is right there. (despite Anthropic efforts, you can still use it with a subscription) And you can tweak it any way you want...

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#210

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

TIPSIO wrote: post #198
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #78

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8477 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/15263 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/9099 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8371 It's very clear that Anthropic doesn't really want to expose the secret sauce to end users. I have to patch Claude every release to bring this functionality back.

To be fair they have like 10,000 open issues / spam issues, it's probably insane out there for them to filter all of it haha

GitHub Issues as a customer support funnel is horrible. It's easy for them, but it hides all the important bugs and only surfaces "wanted features" that are thumbs-up'd alot. So you see "Highlight text X" as the top requested feature; meanwhile, 10% of users experience a critical bug, but they don't all find "the github issue" one user poorly wrote about it, so it has like 7 upvotes.

GitHub Codespaces has a critical bug that makes the copilot terminal integration unusable after 1 prompt, but the company has no idea, because there is no clear way to report it from the product, no customer support funnel, etc. There's 10 upvotes on a poorly-written sorta-related GH issue and no company response. People are paying for this feature and it's just broken.

Post reply on HN