I thought this was going to talk about a nerfed Opus 4.6 experience. I believe I experienced one of those yesterday. I usually have multiple active claude code sessions, using Opus 4.6, running. The other sessions were great, but one session really felt off. It just felt much more dumbed down than what I was used to. I accidentally gave that session a "good" feedback, which my inner conspiracy theorist immediately jumps to a conclusion that I just helped validate a hamstrung model in some A/B test.
Claude Code is being dumbed down?
371–380 of 732 posts
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and no. There are many not-trivial things you have to solve when using an LLM to help (or fully handle writing) code. For example, applying diffs to files. Since the LLM uses tokenization for all its text input/output, sometimes the diffs it'll create to modify a file aren't quite right as it may slightly mess up the text which is before/after the change and/or might introduce a slight typo in text which is being…
I'm part of the subset of developers that was not trained in Machine Learning, so I can't actually code up an LLM from scratch (yet). Some of us are already behind with AI. I think not getting involved in the foundational work of building coding agents will only leave more developers left in the dust. We have to know how these things work in and out. I'm only willing to deal with one black box at the moment, and that…
what you are doing is largely a free text=> structured api call and back, more than anything else.
ML related stuff isnt going to matter a ton since for most cases an LLM inference is you making an API call
web scraping is probably the most similar thing
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#373Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#374Earlier 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.
Yeah, I made a similar point about the tone of ChatGPT responses; to me, I can't imagine why someone would want less information when working and tuning an AI model. However, something tells me they actually have hard evidence that users respond better with less information regardless of what the loud minority say online, and are following that.
100%. Metrics don't lie. I've A/B tested this a lot. Attention is a rare commodity and users will zone out and leave your product. I really dislike this fact
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#375I'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…
> Seemed to work out for them overall.
I'm guessing you're not aware of how their newest game, Starfield, was received. In the long term, that direction did not work out for them at all.
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
I switched to Codex 5.3 too, it's cheaper also anyway and as dumb as it sounds, Scam Altman is actually the less annoying CEO compared to Amodei which is kind of an achievement. Amodei really looking more and more like some huckster giving these idiotic predictions to the press.
OpenAI’s president is a Trump mega-donor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46771231
>Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
Sam wants money. Dario wants to be your dad.
I'm going with Sam.
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#377Claude'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…
> you need an internal crusade to fight these impulses. Take the high road in the short-term...
Anthropic is the market leader for advanced AI coding with no serious competitor currently very close and they are preparing to IPO this year. This year is a transition year. The period where every decision would default toward delighting users and increasing perceived value is ending. By next year they'll be fully on the quarterly Wall Street grind of min/maxing every decision to extract the highest possible profit from customers at the lowest possible cost.
This path is inevitable and unavoidable, even with the most well-intentioned management and employees.
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I understand not exposing a full stack trace, but I don't see any excuse to not even expose a googleable error code. If me having an error code makes your product insecure, then you have a much bigger problem.
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#379> 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.
This is directly addressed in the article.
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have worked with some really really good product managers. But not lately. Lately it’s been people who have very little relevant domain expertise, zero interest in putting in the time to develop said expertise beyond just cataloguing and regurgitating feedback from the customers they like most on a personal level, and seem to mostly have only been selected for the position because they are really good at office pol…
There are individuals who have good taste for products in certain domains. Their own preferences are an accurate approximation for those of the users. Those people might add value when they are given control of the product. That good taste doesn't translate between domains very often. Good taste for developer tools doesn't mean good taste for a video game inventory screen. And that's the crux of the problem. There is…
> There is a segment of the labor market calling themselves "product manager" who act like good taste is domain independent
That’s definitely one of the biggest problems with product management. The delusion that you can be an expert at generic “product”.
We used to have subject matter experts who worked with engineers. That made sense to me.