Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 829 posts

Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

#91

Post by nrds »

riskassessment wrote: post #67
matheusmoreira wrote: post #33

That analysis is pretty brutal. It's very disconcerting that they can sell access to a high quality model then just stealthily degrade it over time, effectively pulling the rug from under their customers.

Stealthily degrade the model or stealthily constrain the model with a tighter harness? These coding tools like Claude Code were created to overcome the shortcomings of last year's models. Models have gotten better but the harnesses have not been rebuilt from scratch to reflect improved planning and tool use inherent to newer models. I do wonder how much all the engineering put into these coding tools may actually in…

I've been using pi.dev since December. The only significant change to the harness in that time which affects my usage is the availability of parallel tool calls. Yet Claude models have become unusable in the past month for many of the reasons observed here. Conclusion: it's not the harness.

I tend to agree about the legacy workarounds being actively harmful though. I tried out Zed agent for a while and I was SHOCKED at how bad its edit tool is compared to the search-and-replace tool in pi. I didn't find a single frontier model capable of using it reliably. By forking, it completely decouples models' thinking from their edits and then erases the evidence from their context. Agents ended up believing that a less capable subagent was making editing mistakes.

Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

#92

Post by logicchains »

robwwilliams wrote: post #85
summarity wrote: post #8

Not claude code specific, but I've been noticing this on Opus 4.6 models through Copilot and others as well. Whenever the phrase "simplest fix" appears, it's time to pull the emergency break. This has gotten much, much worse over the past few weeks. It will produce completely useless code, knowingly (because up to that phrase the reasoning was correct) breaking things. Today another thing started happening which are…

Yes, and over the last few weeks I have noticed that on long-context discussions Opus 4.6e does its best to encourage me to call it a day and wrap it up; repeatedly. Mother Anthropic is giving preprompts to Claude to terminate early and in my case always prematurely.

Try Codex, it's a breath of fresh air in that regard, tries to do as much as it can.

Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

#93

Post by cactusplant7374 »

mrcwinn wrote: post #73

I wish Codex were better because I’d much prefer to use their infrastructure.

A lot of people think it is better including me. It's not like Codex is a discount agent. You pay quite a lot to use it.

Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

#95

Post by jonnycoder »

phillipcarter wrote: post #11

Maybe it's because I spend a lot of time breaking up tasks beforehand to be highly specific and narrow, but I really don't run into issues like this at all. A trivial example: whenever CC suggests doing more than one thing in a planning mode, just have it focus on each task and subtask separately, bounding each one by a commit. Each commit is a push/deploy as well, leading to a shitload of pushes and deployments, but…

I do the same but I often find that the subtasks are done in a very lazy way.

Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

#96

Post by pkilgore »

stared wrote: post #78

I am curious - is there any hard data (e.g. a benchmark score drop)? I feel that we look for patterns to the point of being superstitious. (ML would call it overfitting.)

Did you have specific complaints about the data in the OP?

Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

#97

Post by bityard »

rubicon33 wrote: post #77
SkyPuncher wrote: post #69

I've noticed this as well. I had some time off in late January/early February. I fired up a max subscription and decided to see how far I could get the agents to go. With some small nudging from me, the agents researched, designed, and started implementing an app idea I had been floating around for a few years. I had intentionally not given them much to work with, but simply guided them on the problem space and my co…

There is a huge difference between greenfield development and working with an existing codebase. I'm not trying to discredit your experience and maybe it really is something wrong with the model. But in my experience those first few prompts / features always feel insanely magical, like you're working with a 10x genius engineer. Then you start trying to build on the project, refactor things, deploy, productize, etc. a…

This has been my (admittedly limited) experience as well. LLMs are great at initial bring-up, good at finding bugs, bad at adding features.

But I'm optimistic that this will gradually improve in time.

Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

#98

Post by _visgean »

rubicon33 wrote: post #86
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #36

Its so silly everyone being dependent on a black box like this

You will literally build nothing but the most primitive of devices unless you accept black boxes. In fact I'd argue its one of humanities great strengths that we can build on top of the tools others have built, without having to understand them at the same level it took to develop them.

not really. Most of the technology is not black box but something of a grey box. You usually choose to treat it as a black box because you want to focus on your problems/your customers but you can always focus on underlying technologies and improve them. Eg postgresql for me is a black box but if I really wanted or had need I could investigate how it works.

Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

#99

Post by StanAngeloff »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #51
Avicebron wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't noticed any changes either, but I noticed that opus 4.6 is now offered as part of perplexity enterprise pro instead of max, so I'm guessing another model is on the horizon

I just finished reading the full analysis on GitHub. > When thinking is deep, the model resolves contradictions internally before producing output. > When thinking is shallow, contradictions surface in the output as visible self-corrections: "oh wait", "actually,", "let me reconsider", "hmm, actually", "no wait." Yeah, THIS is something that I've seen happen a lot. Sometimes even on Opus with max effort.

I missed that from the long issue, thanks for pointing it out! My experience with Opus today was riddled with these to the point where it was driving me completely mental. I've rarely seen those self-contradictions before, and nothing on my setup has changed - other than me forcing Opus at --effort max at startup.

I wonder if this is even more exaggerated now through Easter, as everyone’s got a bit extra time to sit down and with Claude. That might be pushing capacity over the limit - I just don’t know enough about how Antropic provision and manage capacity to know if that could be a factor. However quality has gotten really bad over the holiday.

Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

#100

Post by nyeah »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #33

That analysis is pretty brutal. It's very disconcerting that they can sell access to a high quality model then just stealthily degrade it over time, effectively pulling the rug from under their customers.

It's disconcerting. But in 2026 it's not very surprising.
Post reply on HN