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Claude Code is being dumbed down?

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Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#491

Post by perrygeo »

I must use AI differently than y'all. Do we not use plan mode?

There is almost no value in watching the stream of intermediate tokens. There's no need to micromanage the agent's steps. Just monitor the artifact and insist the LLM summarizes findings in plain English.

If it can't explain the proposed change coherently, it can't code it coherently either. `git restore .`

I find it much more effective to throw away bad sessions, try a new prompt than to massage the existing context swamp.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#492

Post by minimaxir »

toraway wrote: post #461
minimaxir wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe me, I wish it was just parroting. The real annoying thing about Opus 4.5 is that it's impossible to publicly say "Opus 4.5 is an order of magnitude better than coding LLMs released just months before it" without sounding like a AI hype booster clickbaiting, but it's the counterintuitive truth, to my personal frustration. I have been trying to break this damn model since its November release by giving it compl…

Wait, are you really saying you have never had Opus 4.5 fail at a programming task you've given it? That strains credulity somewhat... and would certainly contribute to people believing you're exaggerating/hyping up Opus 4.5 beyond what can be reasonably supported. Also, "order of magnitude better" is such plainly obvious exaggeration it does call your objectivity into question about Opus 4.5 vs. previous models and/…

Opus 4.5 does made mistakes but I've found that's more due to ambiguous/imprecise functional requirements on my end rather than an inherent flaw of the agent pipeline. Giving it more clear instructions to reduce said ambiguity almost always fixes it, so I do not consider Opus failing. One of the very few times Opus 4.5 got completely stuck was, after tracing, an issue in a dependency's library which inherently can't be fixed on my end.

I am someone who has spent a lot of time with Sonnet 4.5 before that and was a very outspoken skeptic of agentic coding (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43897320) until I gave Opus 4.5 a fair shake.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#493

Post by computerex »

stillpointlab wrote: post #263

I'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…

They have a dedicated product called Co-work for non-technical people. Claude Code is a *coding* tool (it's in the name) and anthropic has made decisions to thoroughly annoy a lot of the users.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#494

Post by [deleted] »

bcherny wrote: post #386

Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. I wanted to take a sec to explain the context for this change. One of the hard things about building a product on an LLM is that the model frequently changes underneath you. Since we introduced Claude Code almost a year ago, Claude has gotten more intelligent, it runs for longer periods of time, and it is able to more agentically use more tools. This is one of the magical th…

[deleted]

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#496

Post by bcherny »

consumer451 wrote: post #469
bcherny wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want verbose mode. I want Claude to tell me what it's reading in the first 3 seconds, so I can switch gears without fear it's going to the wrong part of the codebase. By saying that my use case requires verbose mode, you're saying that I need to see massive levels of babysitting-level output (even if less massive than before) to be able to do this. To be clear: we re-purposed verbose mode to do exactly what…

This is an interesting and complex ui decision to make. Might it have been better to retire and/or rename the feature, if the underlying action was very different? I work on silly basic stuff compared to Claude Code, but I find that I confuse fewer users if I rename a button instead of just changing the underlying effect. This causes me to have to create new docs, and hopefully triggers affected users to find those d…

Yeah, in hindsight, we probably should have renamed it.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#498

Post by cyanydeez »

1f60c wrote: post #482
cyanydeez wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to be paranoid and guess they're trying to segment the users into those that'll notice they're dumbing down the system via caches, limited model via quantized downgrade and those that expect the fully available tools.

Thariq (who's on the Claude Code team) swears up and down that they do not do this. Honestly, man, this is just weird new tech. We're asking a probabilistic model to generate English and JSON and Bash at the same time in an inherently mutable environment and then Anthropic also release one or two updates most workdays that contain tweaks to the system prompt and new feature flags that are being flipped every which wa…

Yeah, I know it's new tech and the pipeline for the magic is a bunchof shims ontop of a non-deterministic models; but the MBAs are going to swoop in eventually and segmenting the users into tiers of price discrimnation is in the pike regardless of how earnest the current PMs are.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#499

Post by minimaxir »

dudeinhawaii wrote: post #483
minimaxir wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe me, I wish it was just parroting. The real annoying thing about Opus 4.5 is that it's impossible to publicly say "Opus 4.5 is an order of magnitude better than coding LLMs released just months before it" without sounding like a AI hype booster clickbaiting, but it's the counterintuitive truth, to my personal frustration. I have been trying to break this damn model since its November release by giving it compl…

I don't know how to say this but either you haven't written any complex code or your definition of complex and impossible is not the same as mine, or you are "ai hyper booster clickbaiting" (your words). It strains belief that anyone working on a moderate to large project would not have hit the edge cases and issues. Every other day I discover and have to fix a bug that was introduced by Claude/Codex previously (some…

I resent your implication that I am baselessly hyping. I've open sourced a few Opus 4.5-coded projects (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46543359) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682115) that while not moderate-to-large projects, are very niche and novel without much if any prior art. The prompts I used are included with each those projects: they did not "run and look fine" on first run, and were refined just as with normal software engineering pipelines.

You might argue I'm No True Engineer because these aren't serious projects but I'd argue most successful uses of agentic coding aren't by FANG coders.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#500

Post by guyisonrepeat »

bcherny wrote: post #405
sdoering wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many config options. Most I still need to truly deeply understand. But this one isn't? I'd call myself a professional. I use with tons of files across a wide range of projects and types of work. To me file paths were an important aspect of understanding context of the work and of the context CC was gaining. Now? It feels like running on a foggy street, never sure when the corner will come and I'll hit a…

You want verbose mode for this -- we evolved it to do exactly what you're asking for: verbose file reads, without seeing thinking traces, hook output, or (after tomorrow's release) full subagent output. More details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982177

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