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Claude Code is being dumbed down?

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Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#581

Post by retsibsi »

benn67 wrote: post #555
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…

I’m just some tinkerer and signed up just to say this. These are my thoughts after reading the blog post and ur response in full. I subscribe to max rn. Tons of money. Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads were shit, not letting us use open code was shit, and this is more shit. Might only be a single straw left before I go to codex (no one’s complaining about it. And the openclaw creator prefers it) This dev is clearly writing…

> This dev is clearly writing his reply with Claude

> You can even see the emdash attempt (markdown renders two normal dashes as an emdash)

He says he wrote it all manually.[0] Obviously I can't know if that's true, but I do think your internal AI detector is at least overconfident. For example, some of us have been regularly using the double hyphen since long before the LLM era. (In Word, it auto-corrects to an en dash, or to an em dash if it's not surrounded by spaces. In plain text, it's the best looking easily-typable alternative to a dash. AFAICT, it's not actually used for dashes in CommonMark Markdown.)

The rest is more subjective, but there are some things Claude would be unlikely to write (like the parenthetical "(ie. progressive disclosure)" -- it would write "i.e." with both dots, and it would probably follow it with a comma). Of course those could all be intentional obfuscations or minimal human edits, but IMO you are conflating the corporate communications vibe with the LLM vibe.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982418

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#582

Post by verelo »

bostonvaulter2 wrote: post #541
rob wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should be able to do something like this: "spinnerVerbs": { "mode": "replace", "verbs": ["Thinking"] } https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#available-settings

Thank you for the config and the link, that's very much appreciated!

How absurd this is an option, but I’ll be using this config too.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#583

Post by JetSetIlly »

deaux wrote: post #523
JetSetIlly wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 competitor…

I understand the issue is that Anthropic is not adhering to a standard. I was simply asking whether it's possible to solve the problem created by Anthropic in the way I was asking.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#586

Post by indemnity »

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…

Do you feel that a terminal UX will remain your long term interface for Claude Code? Or would you consider a native interface like Codex has built?

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#587

Post by zo1 »

retsibsi wrote: post #581
benn67 wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m just some tinkerer and signed up just to say this. These are my thoughts after reading the blog post and ur response in full. I subscribe to max rn. Tons of money. Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads were shit, not letting us use open code was shit, and this is more shit. Might only be a single straw left before I go to codex (no one’s complaining about it. And the openclaw creator prefers it) This dev is clearly writing…

> This dev is clearly writing his reply with Claude > You can even see the emdash attempt (markdown renders two normal dashes as an emdash) He says he wrote it all manually.[0] Obviously I can't know if that's true, but I do think your internal AI detector is at least overconfident. For example, some of us have been regularly using the double hyphen since long before the LLM era. (In Word, it auto-corrects to an en d…

> `For example, some of us have been regularly using the double hyphen since long before the LLM era.

This "emdash" and "double dash" discussion and mention is the first time I have heard of it or seen discussion of it. I've never encountered it in the wild, nor seen it used in any meaningful way in all my time on the internet these last 27 years.

And yes - I've seen that special dash character in word for many years. Not once has anyone said "oh hey I type double dashes and word uses that". No it's always been "word has this weird dash and if you copy-paste it it's weird", and no one knows how it pops up in word, etc.

And yes, I've seen the AI spit out the special dash many times. It's a telltale sign of using LLM generated text.

And now, magically, in this single thread, you can see half-dozen different users all using this "--" as if it's normal. It's like upside down world. Either everyone is now using this brand new form of speaking, or they're covering for this Claude code developer.

So yeah, maybe I've been sticking my head in the sand for years now, or maybe I just blindly ignored double-dashes when reading text till now. But it sure seems fishy.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#588

Post by pbasista »

taude wrote: post #359
pbasista wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The below remark is unrelated to the main topic of this thread. Why would you even watch a YouTube video with ads? There are ad blockers, sponsor segment blockers, etc. If you use them, it will block almost every kind of YouTube ad.

all the ad blockers I used to use stop working, and it became an annoying game of cat and mouse that I didn't have time for. Luckily, most of the time I can "skip" the ad in like five seconds, and it gives me a moment to catch up on incoming Slack messages.

The only ad blocker I have used for the past couple of years has been uBlock Origin, more recently combined with SponsorBlock.

There has been two or three instances that I can remember when it did not block YouTube ads correctly for a couple of days. But those were quickly patched and it started to work again.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#589

Post by deaux »

JetSetIlly wrote: post #583
deaux wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 competitor…

I understand the issue is that Anthropic is not adhering to a standard. I was simply asking whether it's possible to solve the problem created by Anthropic in the way I was asking.

The better way to solve it is a symlink. The way you're suggesting works too, but should be done using an @ reference, which is auto-followed by Claude. This is the most common way on Windows.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#590

Post by deaux »

bakugo wrote: post #578
deaux wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Boris, by far the most upvoted issue at 2550 on your github is "Support AGENTS.md" with 2550 upvotes. The second highest one has 563. Every single other agent supports AGENTS.md. Care to share why you haven't? > Yoshi and others -- please keep the feedback coming. We want to hear it, and we genuinely want to improve the product in a way that gives great defaults for the majority of users, while being extremely hac…

> Every single other agent supports AGENTS.md. Care to share why you haven't? Are you actually wondering, or just hoping to hear a confirmation of what you already know? Because the reason behind it is pretty clear, it doubles as both vendor lock-in and advertisement.

I'd love to hear Boris' thoughts on it given his open invitation for feedback and _genuinely_ wanting to improve the product, including specifically hackability and customizability (emphasis mine).
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