Anthropic is optimizing for enterprise contracts, not hacker cred. This is what happens when you take VC money and need to sell to Fortune 500s. The "dumbing down" is just the product maturing beyond the early adopter phase.
Claude Code is being dumbed down?
341–350 of 732 posts
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#342Claude's brand is sliding dangerously close to "the Microsoft of AI." DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS I write mainly out of the hope that some Anthropic employees read this: you need an internal crusade to fight these impulses. Take the high road in the short-term and you may avoid being disrupted in the long-term. It's a culture issue. Probably your strongest tool is specifically educating people abou…
The thing that annoys me most of all is they block me from using OpenCode with my Claude Max plan. I find the OpenCode UI to be meaningfully better than Claude Code's, so this is really annoying.
Some workarounds are here https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/7410 but I agree with you, this should be a native feature.
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#343> That’s it. “Read 3 files.” Which files? Doesn’t matter.
It doesn't say "Read 3 files." though - it says "Read 3 files (ctrl+o to expand)" and you press ctrl+o and it expands the output to give you the detail.
It's a really useful feature to increase the signal to noise ratio where it's usually safe to do so.
I suspect the author simply needs to enable verbose mode output.
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#344> 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…
> people who have never used the product and don't think like or accurately represent our users
I agree completely that these are the important qualifications to be setting direction for a product.
> Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times a month.
This doesn't necessarily follow from the above, but in Anthropic's case specifically, where the users are software engineers, it probably would have worked better than whatever they have going on now.
In general, it's probably better to have domain experts doing product management, as opposed to someone who is trained in product management.
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#345I'm old, so I remember when Skyrim came out. At the time, people were howling about how "dumbed down" the RPG had become compared to previous versions. They had simplified so many systems. Seemed to work out for them overall. I understand the article writers frustration. He liked a thing about a product he uses and they changed the product. He is feeling angry and he is expressing that anger and others are sharing in…
Skyrim is one of the most over-rated games of all time. Dark Messiah Might and Magic did everything except music and exploration/scale better, and I mean a LOT better. It's from 2006.
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 especi…
> Voila: you've re-invented product management.
This is a names vs. structure thing. For a moment, taboo the term product manager.
What I'm suggesting is a low risk way to see if an engineer has an aptitude for aligning the roadmap with what the users want. If they aren't great at it, they can go back to engineering. We also know for sure that they are technically competent since they are currently working as an engineer, no risk there.
The conventional wisdom (bad meme) is going to the labor market with a search term for people who claim to know what the users want, any user, any problem, doesn't matter. These people are usually incompetent and have never written software. Then hiring 1 and potentially more of the people that respond to the shibboleth.
If you want the first case, then you can't say "product manager" because people will automatically do the second case.
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#347Exact same thing with Codex from 5.2 to 5.3.
There's no conspiracy, though, other than more tokens consumed = more money, and they want that.
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
The model is being trained to use claude code. i.e. the agentic patterns are reinforced using reinforcement learning. thats why it works so well. you cannot build this on your own, it will perform far worse
Are you certain of this? I know they use a lot of grep to find variables in files (recall reading that on HN), load the lines into into context. There's a lot of common sense context management that's going on.
Of course, agentic tooling is the future of ai
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#349> 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…
> your most socially competent engineer
Unfortunately, he’s already two of our SEs and the CTO and we’re starting to run low on coders.
What are we going to do when we need a customer success manager or a profserv team?
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#350> 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…
Every single website on the internet just says "whoopsie doodle, me made an oopsie" instead of just telling me what the problem is. This so-called mistake is so widespread that it has been the standard for at least a decade. I agree it's a mistake, but I don't believe that it's viewed that way by anyone making the decision to do it.
You dont expose error details to the user for security reasons, even though it does indeed make the user experience worse.