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Claude Code is being dumbed down?

symmetrybreak.ing

621–630 of 732 posts

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#621

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…

Thanks for the long and considered response, but this is a really ugly UX decision.

As others have said - 'reading 10 files' is useless information - we want to be able to see at a glance where it is and what it's doing, so that we can re-direct if necessary.

With the release of Cowork, couldn't Claude Code double down on needs of engineers?

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#622
post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This sentiment is going exactly against the trend right now. It's not. Engineers are having more and more minutia and busy work taken off their plate, now done by AI. That allows them to be heads up more often, more of their cognitive capacity is directed towards strategy, design, quality. Meanwhile, users are building more and more of their own tools in house. Why pay someone when you can vibe code a working solut…

> if it's complex: it's going to the smartest person in the room. That has never been the PM. Yet the PM always has the last say on what goes in the product, NOT the engineer. Funny how that works... None of your conclusions are consistent with experience (interviewed 900+ SaaS management teams)

In my average experience, without interviewing management teams - my observation is that the "smartest person in the room" is rarely the one deciding anything.

This also depends on your definition on "smartest".

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#624
You open your toolbox to get your pliers, but due to nanite software updates, your pliers are now a chisel.

We carefully considered this change and feel it brings the most value to our users, and we hope you'll love chisel as much as we do.

One day, you guys are gonna learn not to tie your livelihoods to the whim of a corporation, but today isn't that day.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#625
post #517

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…

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…

I'm sorry, this comment is opportunistic and a bit annoying to post here. Saying "keep the feedback coming" is not an invitation to turn this thread into the issue queue

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point we need to start preferring GUIs instead of terminals as the AI starts giving us more and more information. Features like hover-over tooltips and toggle switches designed for mouse operation might really start to matter. Maybe "AI IDEs" will gain ground in the future, e.g. vibe-kanban

Please for the love of God no. I rather have something completely agnostic of an IDE. OpenCode is doing the right thing IMO

You can have something IDE agnostic but still not be dependent on the ancient VT100 terminal protocol and rendering path.

(That said I do like being able to SSH in and run an agent that way. But there are other remote access modalities.)

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#627
post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do love my subagents and I wrote an entire Claude Code audio hook system for a11y but this would be still rather compelling if Codex weren't also somewhat of an a11y nightmare. It does some weird thing with ... maybe terminal repaints or something else that ends up rereading the same text over and over. Claude Code does this similarly but Codex ends up reading like ... all the weird symbols and other stuff? window…

Sorry for being off-topic, but isn't a11y a rather ironic term for accessibility? It uses a very uncommon abbreviation type -- numeronym, and doesn't mean anything to the reader unless they look it up (or already know what it means).

[dead]

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#628
post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we take accessibility seriously Do you guys have a screen reader user on the dev team? Is verbose mode the same as the old mode, where only file paths are spoken? Or does it have other text in it? Because I tried to articulate, and may have failed. More text is usually bad for me. It must be consumed linearly. I need specific text. Quality over quantity

"Is verbose mode the same as the old mode, where only file paths are spoken?" -- yes, this is exactly what the new verbose mode is.

Casually avoiding the first question

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#629
The meta issue here with AI companies is that they while they excel at producing LLMs, they don't have any inherent advantages when eating their own dog food and it shows in the quality and UX of their products.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI have been maintaining a high pace of releasing often poorly thought through new products and experimenting with features. A lot of their product releases show all the hallmarks of vibe coding: randomly breaking features, poor QA and testing on releases, etc.

OpenAI seems to have the upper hand in UX currently. Their products feel a bit more polished and they've clearly tried to up their game. Taking over Jony Ive's company a few months ago is a clear signal that they want to do better. The Codex AI desktop app was a clear step up from their web app and cli. I've been using both before that was released.

Both companies are spread very thin trying to do both end user and developer oriented products and features while keeping existing paying users happy as well. Both companies also have had a string of rushed product releases that kind of fizzled out: OpenAI's Atlas, which was a response to Anthropic's Comet. Neither of which seem to be very popular at this point. Several false starts with apps (OpenAI), Claude Cowork, etc. There are a lot of half formed product ideas there that than don't get the attention they deserve.

And it's not like MS, Google, and Apple are any better. If anything they are more hesitant and out of their depth here. They are all dancing around the hard issues here which are UX and security/trust models. Also, while coders get a lot of toys, nailing agentic tools for business users is proving to be a lot harder. Blanket access to everything via an agentic browser is not a viable solution. I can agentically code a structured document via latex or markdown. But the same tools are relatively useless in spreadsheets, presentations, and documents. And while you can do a lot of potentially interesting things if you surrender your inbox, the security failure modes around that remain a show stopping obstacle for wide adoption.

There's a lot of stage fright, hesitation, and immature product management in this sector. There's a bit of gold rush in terms of rapid experimentation. But as the stakes get higher, a lot of these companies are increasingly lacking the freedom to move as fast as needed. Fear of liability issues is preventing them to do a lot. Which is why most progress is concentrated around developer tools.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#630
post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t count how many times I benefitted from seeing the files Claude was reading, to understand how I could interrupt and give it a little more context… saving thousands of tokens and sparing the context window. I must be in the minority of users who preferred seeing the actual files. I love claude code, but some of the recent updates seem like they’re making it harder for me to see what’s happening.. I agree with…

Such as Claude Code reading your ssh keys. Hiding the file names masks the vulnerability.

That's approaching the problem from the worst possible angle. If your security depends on you catching 1 message in a sea of output and quickly rotating the credential everywhere before someone has a chance to abuse it then you were never secure to begin with.

Not just because it requires constant attention which will eventually lapse, but because the agent has an unlimited number of ways to exfiltrate the key, for example it can pretend to write and run a "test" which reads your key, sends it to the attacker and you'll have no idea it's happening.

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