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Claude Code is being dumbed down?

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Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#671

Post by duncangh »

ctoth wrote: post #433
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 a screen reader user and CTO of an accessibility company. This change doesn't reduce noise for me. It removes functionality. Sighted users lost convenience. I lost the ability to trust the tool. There is no "glancing" at terminal output with a screen reader. There is no "progressive disclosure." The text is either spoken to me or it doesn't exist. When you collapse file paths into "Read 3 files," I have no way to…

Dyslexic and also a prolific screen reader user myself. +1 and thank you for mentioning something that often gets (ironically) overlooked

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#672

Post by Citizen_Lame »

troupo wrote: post #647
SPICLK2 wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the list of problems they are experiencing with rendering in the terminal, it sounds like they want a GUI (Electron would be a good fit).

> From the list of problems they are experiencing with rendering in the terminal, it sounds like they want a GUI (Electron would be a good fit). Electron? The tech that is literally incapable of rendering large amounts of anything, including text, quickly?

Well it worked out great for Teams, no?

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#673

Post by pixl97 »

crazygringo wrote: post #333
vintagedave wrote: post #117

> That’s it. “Read 3 files.” Which files? Doesn’t matter. “Searched for 1 pattern.” What pattern? Who cares. Product manager here. Cynically, this is classic product management: simplify and remove useful information under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism if you're more overt about your influences. It's something that as an industry we should be over by now. It requires deep understa…

> under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism I think we can be more charitable. Don't you see, even here on HN, people constantly asking for software that is less bloated, that does fewer things but does them better, that code is cost, and every piece of complexity is something that needs to be maintained? As features keep getting added, it is necessary to revisit where the UX is "too mu…

>As features keep getting added ... so things need to be hidden

Here lies the problem

Your first users were here without all the added features. It's very likely they didn't need those features to use the software. Then you add new features and clutter it... then remove features from the UX that they were using.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#674

Post by DANmode »

johndough wrote: post #667
DANmode wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they'd have to be insanely incompetent to not make a profit on inference. Are you aware of how many years Amazon didn’t turn a profit? Not agreeing with the tactic - just…are you aware of it?

Did Amazon really not turn a profit, or apply a bunch of tricks to make it appear like they didn't in order to avoid taxes? Given their history, I'd assume the later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_tax_avoidance Anyway, this has nothing to do with whether inference is profitable.

It has everything to do with whether they make profit on paper,

vs give away the farm via free tier accounts, free trials,

and last but not least: subsidized compute to hook entire organizations………

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#675

Post by retsibsi »

retsibsi wrote: post #591
zo1 wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> `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…

Sounds like you see me as an untrustworthy source, so all I can suggest is that you look into this yourself. Search for "--" in pre-LLM forum postings and see how many hits you get. Here are my pre-2020 HN comments, with 3 double hyphens in 8 comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1576108800&dateRange=custom&... As I was in the process of typing the search term to get my comments (and had just typed 'author'), thi…

I've just realised I messed up the search, and the algolia link is to my pre-2020 comments containing the word 'author'. But my full (far longer) list of pre-2020 comments also shows some pretty heavy double-hyphen use: 6 hits on page 1 of the results, 15 hits on page 2, and so on.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#676

Post by dns_snek »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #640
dns_snek wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's no defense "in depth" here, it's like putting your SSH key in your public webroot and watching the logs to see if anyone's taken your key. That's your only layer of "defense" and you don't stand any chance of enforcing it. Real defense is rooted in technical measures, imperfect as they may be, but this is just defense through wishful thinking.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#677

Post by machiaweliczny »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #441
ctoth wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a screen reader user and CTO of an accessibility company. This change doesn't reduce noise for me. It removes functionality. Sighted users lost convenience. I lost the ability to trust the tool. There is no "glancing" at terminal output with a screen reader. There is no "progressive disclosure." The text is either spoken to me or it doesn't exist. When you collapse file paths into "Read 3 files," I have no way to…

Try Codex instead. Much greener pastures overall

For now until they are in the lead

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#678

Post by espeed »

dns_snek wrote: post #630
espeed wrote: post #558

Earlier 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 sent email to Anthropic (usersafety@anthropic.com, disclosure@anthropic.com) on January 8, 2025 alerting them to this issue: Claude Code Exploit: Claude Code Becomes an Unwitting Executor. If I hadn't seen Claude Code read my ssh file, I wouldn't have known the extent of the issue.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#679

Post by machiaweliczny »

roflcopter69 wrote: post #295
chairmanwow1 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much better in the codex cli harness

There's one really confusing thing in Codex CLI from my perspective. How do I make it run unsandboxed but still ask me for approvals? I'm fine with it running bare on my machine but I like to approve first before it runs commands. But I only see how I can configure to have both or none. What am I missing?

--help explains this, -s for sandbox and -a for approvals

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#680

Post by ivan_gammel »

bcherny wrote: post #496
consumer451 wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can call it “output granularity” and allow Java logger style configuration, e.g. allowing certain operations to be very verbose while others being simply aggregated
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