Yeah just adding to this -- being able to see the files being operated on is absolutely essential for figuring out if you need to ^C it and try again or if you need to let it keep going.
Claude Code is being dumbed down?
631–640 of 732 posts
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#632Hey, 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…
Also open source CC already.
And stop banning 3rd party harnesses please. Thanks
Anthropic, your actual moat is goodwill. Remember that.
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#633I find it hard to care about claims of degradation of quality, since this has been a firehouse of claims that don't map onto anything real and is extremely subjective. I myself made the claim in error. I think this is just as ripe for psychological analysis as anything else.
Did you read the article? It's not about subjective claims, it's about a very real feature getting removed (file reads showing the filepath and numbers of lines read).
This is exactly what I am talking about. Let me try to explain.
I am interested in the more abstract and general concept of: "People excessively feel that things are worse, even if they are not." And I see this A LOT in the AI/LLM area.
For instance, the claim that Claude Code, on the UX/DX side, is dumbed down seems to me absolutely not a reasonable take. The "hiding" of the file name being read is no longer being shown neither supports that claim, AND has to be seen in the context of Claude Code as a whole.
On the first point: Could one not make the argument that "not showing files read", is part of a more advanced abstraction layer, switching emphasis to something else in the UX experience? That could, by some, be seen as the overall package becoming more advanced and making choices as to what is presented for cognitive load. Secondly... it's not removed. It's just not default shown in non-verbose mode. As I understand it, you can just hit CTRL+O to see it again.
Secondly, even if it was done ONLY to be less for "power user focus," and more for dumb people (got to love the humility in the developer world), it's blindly obvious that you can't just mention ONE change as proof that Claude Code is dumbed down. And to me, it just does not compute to say that Claude Code feels dumbed down over the last patches. The amount of more advanced features, like seeing background tasks, the "option" selection feature, lifecycle hooks, sub-agents, agent swarms, skills—all of these have been released in just the last few months. I have used Claude Code since the very beginning, and it is just insane to claim that it's getting dumber as a tool. And this is just in relationship to the actual functionality, UX, and DX, not the LLM quality. But people see "I now have to hit CTRL+O to see files being read = DUMBED DOWN ENSHITFICATION!!!" I don't get it.
My point was simply... I'm much more interested in the psychological aspects driving everybody to predictably always claim that "things are getting worse," when it seems to not be the case. Be that in the exaggerated (but sometimes true) claims of model degradation, or as in this example of Claude Code getting dumbed down. What is driving this bias towards seeing and claiming things are getting worse, out of proportion to reality?
Or even shorter: why are we obsessed with the narrative of decline?
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
> an escape goat Autocorrect hall of famer, there.
Scapegoat, got it. Can't blame the autocorrect though... I honestly thought it was spelled like that, which is a shame since I've been studying English my entire life as a second language.
Etymologically speaking, "scapegoat" does mean "escaped goat" so it's not a crazy mistake to make.
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll add a counterpoint that in many situations (especially monorepos for complex businesses), it's easy for any LLM to go down rabbit holes. Files containing the word "payment" or "onboarding" might be for entirely different DDD domains than the one relevant to the problem. As a CTO touching all sorts of surfaces, I see this problem at least once a day, entirely driven by trying to move too fast with my prompts. And…
> 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…
Feels like you aren’t really listening to the feedback. Is verbose mode the same as the explicit callouts of files read in the previous versions? Yes, you intended it to fulfill the same need, but, take a step back. Is it the same? I’m hearing a resounding “no”. At the very least if you hace made such a big change, you’ve gotten rid of the value of a true “verbose mode”.
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think that?
DeepSeek had a theoretical profit margin of 545 % [1] with much inferior GPUs at 1/60th the API price. Anthropic's Opus 4.6 is a bit bigger, but they'd have to be insanely incompetent to not make a profit on inference. [1] https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-index/blob/main/20...
Deepseek lies about costs systematically. This is just another fantasy.
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's *worth it* when you're salaried? Compared to investing the money? Do you plan to land a very-high-paying executive role years down the line? Are you already extremely highly paid? Did Claude legitimately 10x your productivity? edit: Fuck I'm getting trolled
I don't know why you keep insisting that no one is making any money off of this. Claude Code has made me outrageously more productive. Time = Money right?
That's true if you're working as a contractor and being able to do more translates to higher income but it doesn't work so for employees.
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#638Hey, 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…
Based on the comments here, it sounds like repurposing a boolean "verbose" mode and having that verbose mode actually be multi-state is confusing.
It might be worth considering a "verbose level" type setting with a selection of levels that describe the level of verbosity. Effectively, use a select menu instead of a boolean when one boolean state is actually multiple nested states.
Edit: I realised my use of "verbose" and "verbosity" here is it self ironically verbose, sorry!
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#639Earlier 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.
Why does it have access to those paths?
Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?
#640Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 e…
I agree with you but I think there's a "defense in depth" angle to this. Yes, your security shouldn't depend on noticing which files Claude has read, since you'll mess up. But hiding the information means your guaranteed to never notice! It's good for the user to have signals that something might be going wrong.