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Claude Code is being dumbed down?

symmetrybreak.ing

521–530 of 732 posts

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#521
post #360
post #325

They don’t seem to realize that doing vibe coding requires enough information to get the vibes. There are no vibes in “I am looking at files and searching for things” so I have zero weight to assign to your decision quality up until the point where it tells me the evals passed at 100%. Your agent is not good enough. I trust it like I trust a toddler not to fall into a swimming pool. It’s not trying to, but enough tim…

the definition of vibe coding is that you never check what it's doing, you only check its output; eg the actual website/feature you're having it build.

I could accept that definition, but really that seems less like vibe coding and more like just not coding. Vibe coding for me is more like: yeah this doesn’t look insane and you got the interface from the right git repo. Like I wouldn’t put my name on it at work and defend it in a code review but I also didn’t just push the button and hope.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#522

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.

> It's very clear that Anthropic doesn't really want to expose the secret sauce to end users Meanwhile, I am observing precisely how VS+Copilot works in my OAI logs with zero friction. Plug in your own API key and you can MITM everything via the provider's logging features.

> Plug in your own API key

I checked with ccusage (a cli tool that checks how much your Claude subscription tokens would have cost via the API).

My $200 a month subscription would have cost me more than $3000. The highest single day would have cost more than $300.

Gemini is cheaper, but not by much.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#523

Another instance of devs being out of touch is them wanting Claude Code to respect AGENT.md: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 What’s wrong with you, people? Are you stupid?

I've never used Claude or anything like it so this may be a dumb question: could you solve this problem by having a CLAUDE.md file that simply says to use AGENT.md if one is available. Can an AI agent not do that?

It's not a dumb question per se but it does fail to understand the issue. It's that there's 20 coding agents yet only 1 of them needs this solving. Imagine if all of them needed this. It's like IE6, or Lightning connectors. At least for that last one there's an argument that they performed better than USB-C. For the Anthropic people reading this - take note that both IE and Lightning are now dead and their competitors that followed the standards are thriving.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#524
post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I was the only person going crazy by the new default behavior not showing the file names! Please don't expect users to understand your product details and config options in such detail, it was working well before, let it remain. Or at least show some message like "to view file names, do xyz" in the ui for a few days after such a change. While we're here, another thing that's annoying: the token counter. Whi…

> Another thing: is it possible to turn off the words like finagling and similar (I can't remember the spelling of any of them) ? Big +1 on that. I find the names needlessly distracting. I want to just always say a single thing like “thinking”

I remember they shipped a feature so that’s configurable.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#525
post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 refi…

First, very cool! Thank you for sharing some actual projects with the prompts logged. I think you and I have different definitions of “one-shotting”. If the model has to be steered, I don’t consider that a one-shot. And you clearly “broke” the model a few times based on your prompt log where the model was unable to solve the problem given with the spec. Honestly, your experience in these repos matches my daily experi…

I never claimed Opus 4.5 can one-shot things? Even human-written software takes a few iterations to add/polish new features as they come to mind.

> And you clearly “broke” the model a few times based on your prompt log where the model was unable to solve the problem given with the spec.

That's less due to the model being wrong and more due to myself not knowing what I wanted because I am definitely not a UI/UX person. See my reply in the sibling thread.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#526
post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a cool idea!

Honestly Tmux, vim, kitty, almost every terminal, shell, script is configurable. It’s what we’re used to. I wouldn’t know why you wouldn’t start allowing more config options.

I do not use CC (yet) but I think this is the right direction. We are hackers. We love hacking. We love to tinker about and configure! Please allow us.

(And yeah, I would love the verbose mode myself, but there could be various levels to it.)

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#528

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…

The default view hiding files read is fully a regression imho. It is so helpful for sense of control, nevermind trust and human agency.

Please revert this

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#529
post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I was the only person going crazy by the new default behavior not showing the file names! Please don't expect users to understand your product details and config options in such detail, it was working well before, let it remain. Or at least show some message like "to view file names, do xyz" in the ui for a few days after such a change. While we're here, another thing that's annoying: the token counter. Whi…

> Another thing: is it possible to turn off the words like finagling and similar (I can't remember the spelling of any of them) ? Big +1 on that. I find the names needlessly distracting. I want to just always say a single thing like “thinking”

You should be able to do something like this:

    "spinnerVerbs": {
      "mode": "replace",
      "verbs": ["Thinking"]
    }
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#available-settings

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can no longer design for ourselves, and we rely heavily on community feedback to co-design the right experience. We cannot build the right things without that feedback. How can that be true, when you're deliberately and repeatedly telling devs (the community you claim to listen to) that you know better than they do? They're telling you exactly what they want, and you're telling them, "Nah." That isn't listening.…

I’m witnessing him respond in real time with not just feedback but also actual changes, in a respectful and constructive manner - which is not easy to do, when there are people who communicate in this rude of a manner. If that’s not listening, then I don’t know what is. And it shouldn’t need to be said, but the words that appear on the screen are from an actual person with, you know, feelings.

Acting like they can't take the heat when they purposely put themselves in the public sphere is odd.
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