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Claude Code is being dumbed down?

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Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#311

Post by seg_lol »

robomartin wrote: post #301
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 management --and managers-- can be, shall we say, interesting. I was recently involved with a company that wanted us to develop a product that would be disruptive enough to enter an established market, make waves and shock it. We did just that. We ran a deep survey of all competing products, bought a bunch of them, studied absolutely everything about them, how they were used and their users. Armed with that i…

Replace the C levels with AI. The C suite is am impediment to innovation and progress. They are the office politics mentioned in this entire thread. The person with the vision and the strategy is a random person out there that doesn't even work for your company. Hell, you could have done it.

> The point is: Technology companies are not immune to human failings, ego, protectionism/turf guarding, bad decisions, bad management, etc.

They only accidentally succeed in spite of those things. They have those things more than existing businesses precisely because having too much money masks the pressures that would force solid execution and results. When you have 80% profit margins, you can show up drunk.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#312

Post by lizardking »

viking123 wrote: post #287
prmph wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, OpenCode is nowhere near Claude Code. It's amazing how much other agentic tools suck in comparison to Claude Code. I'd love to have a proper alternative. But they all suck. I keep trying them every few months and keep running back to Claude Code. Just yesterday I installed Cursor and Codex, and removed both after a few hours. Cursor disrespected my setting to ask before editing files. Codex renamed my tabs afte…

5.3 Codex on cursor is better than Claude code

Not in my (limited) experience. I gave CC and codex detailed instructions for reworking a UI, and codex did a much worse job and took 5x as long to finish.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#313

Post by idopmstuff »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #294
idopmstuff wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of Claude Code users who aren't software developers. Maybe they've decided that group is the one they want to cater to? I recognize that won't be a popular decision with the HN crowd, but that doesn't mean it's the wrong one.

I fully agree with you on almost everything you wrote in this thread, but I’m not sure this is the right answer. I myself currently spend a lot of time with CC and belong to that group of developers who don’t care about this problem. It’s likely that I’m not alone. So it doesn’t have to be the least professional audience they serve with this update. It’s possible that Anthropic knows what are they doing (e.g. reducin…

Oh totally - I'm definitely not saying that they made the decision to cater to non-dev users, just that it's a possibility. Totally agree with you that at the end of the day, we haven't the foggiest idea.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#314

Post by cmrdporcupine »

viking123 wrote: post #297
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Dario & crew are getting high on their own supply and really believe the "software developers out of work by end of 2026" pronouncements. Meanwhile all evidence is that the true value of these tools is in their ability to augment & super-charge competent software engineers, not replace them. Meanwhile the quality of Claude Code the tool itself is a bit of a damning indictment of their philosophy. Give me a te…

Amodei has to be the most insufferable of all the AI hucksters, nowadays even Altman looks tame compared to him. The whole company also has this meme about AI safety and some sort of fear-mongering about the models every few months. It's basically a smokescreen for normies and other midwits to make it look more mysterious and advanced than it really is. OOOOH IT'S GOING TO BREAK OUT! IT KNOWS IT'S BEING EVALUATED! I…

Just 1 more data center build, man! A few more megawatts and double the context window and it's AGI!

I just want useful tools.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#317

Post by 8note »

mingus88 wrote: post #260
NinjaTrance wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It requires deep understanding of customer usage to know whether it's a mistake at all Software developers like customizable tools. That's why IDEs still have "vim keybindings" and many other options. Your user is highly skilled - let him decide what he wants to see.

Then why is the suggestion to use verbose mode treated as another mistake? The user is highly skilled; let them filter out what is important This should be better than adding an indeterminate number of toggles and settings, no?

does claude code let me control whats output when?

verbose i think puts it on the TUI and i cant particularly grep or sed on the TUI

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#318

Post by mbesto »

alphazard wrote: post #216
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 management might be the worst meme in the industry. Hire people who have never used the product and don't think like or accurately represent our users, then let them allocate engineering resources and gate what ships. What could go wrong? It should be a fad gone by at this point, but people never learn. Here's what to do instead: Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple…

This sentiment is going exactly against the trend right now. AI coding is making technically minded product manager's MORE powerful not less. When/if coding just because your ability to accurately describe what you want to build, the people yielding this skill are the ones who understand customer requirements, not the opposite.

> Find your most socially competent engineer,

These usually get promoted to product management anyway, so this isn't a new thought.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#319

Post by TJTorola »

muyuu wrote: post #285

Perhaps some power user of Claude Code can enlighten me here, but why not just using OpenCode? I admit I've only briefly tried Claude Code, so perhaps there are unique features there stopping the switch, or some other form of lock-in.

Anthropic is actively blocking calls from anything but claude code for it's claude plans. At this point you either need to be taking part in the cat and mouse game to make that plan work with opencode or you need to be paying the much more expensive API prices.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#320

Post by mlinsey »

alphazard wrote: post #216
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 management might be the worst meme in the industry. Hire people who have never used the product and don't think like or accurately represent our users, then let them allocate engineering resources and gate what ships. What could go wrong? It should be a fad gone by at this point, but people never learn. Here's what to do instead: Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple…

Good PM's are extremely good at understanding users, and use soft-skills to make the rest of the org focus on users more. I've worked with a couple, and they've added an enormous amount of value, sometimes steering teams of dozens of engineers in a more productive direction.

The problem is, it's hard to measure how good a PM is, even harder than for engineers. The instinct is to use product KPI's to do so, but especially at BigTech company, distribution advantages and traction of previous products will be the dominant factor here, and the best way of raising many product KPI's are actually user-hostile. Someone who has been a successful FAANG engineer who goes to a startup might lean towards over-engineering, but at least they should be sharp on the fundamentals. Someone who has been a successful FAANG PM might actually have no idea how to get PMF.

> Here's what to do instead: Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times a month

This is actually a great idea, but what will happen is this socially competent engineer will soon have a new full-time job gathering those insights, coalescing them into actionable product changes, persuading the rest of the org to adopt those changes, and making sure the original user insights make it into the product. Voila: you've re-invented product management.

But I actually think it's good to source PM's from people who've been engineers for a few years. PM's used to come from a technical background; Google famously gave entry-level coding tests to PM's well into the '10s. I dunno when it became more fashionable to hire MBA's and consultants into this role, but it may have been a mistake.

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