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Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
111–120 of 829 posts
Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
#112Lol, software company execs didn't see this coming. Fire all your experienced devs to jump on Anthropic bandwagon. Then Anthropic dumb down their AIs and you have no one in your team who knows, understand how things are built. Your entire company goes down. Your entire company's operation depends on the whims of Anthropic. If Anthropic raises prices by 10% per year, you have to eat it. This is what you get when you don't respect human beings and human talent.
Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
#113Called it 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47533297#47540633 Something worse than a bad model is an inconsistent model. One can't gauge to what extent to trust the output, even for the simplest instructions, hence everything must be reviewed with intensity which is exhausting. I jumped on Max because it was worth it but I guess I'll have to cancel this garbage.
Yep. I was doing voice based vibe-coding flawlessly in Jan/Feb.
I've basically stopped using it because I have to be so hands on now.
Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ive been noticing something similar recently. If somethings not working out itll be like "Ok this isnt working out, lets just switch to doing this other thing instead you explicitly said not to do". For example I wanted to get VNC working with PopOS Cosmic and itll be like ah its ok well just install sway and thatll work!
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Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
#115Not 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…
> Whenever the phrase "simplest fix" appears, it's time to pull the emergency break.
Second! In CLAUDE.md, I have a full section NOT to ever do this, and how to ACTUALLY fix something.
This has helped enormously.
Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
#116That 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.
ChatGPT has been doing the same consistently for years. Model starts out smooth, takes a while, and produces good (relatively) results. Within a few weeks, responses start happening much more quickly, at a poorer quality.
Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
#117I cancelled my Pro plan due to this two weeks ago. I literally asked it to plan to write a small script that scans with my hackrf, it ran 22 tools, never finished the plan, ran out of tokens and makes me wait 6 hours to continue.
Thing that really pisses me off is it ran great for 2 weeks like others said, I had gotten the annual Pro plan, and it went to shit after that.
Bait and switch at its finest.
Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
#118Not 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…
I need to add another agent that watches the first, and pulls the plug whenever it detects "Wait, I see the problem now..."
Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
#119I can't tell from the issue if they're asserting a problem with the Claude model, or Claude Code, i.e. in how Claude Code specifically calls the model. I've been using Roo Code with Claude 4.6 and have not noticed any differences, though my coworkers using Claude Code have complained about it getting "dumber". Roo Code has its own settings controlling thinking token use.
(I'm sure it benefits Anthropic to blur the lines between the tool and the model, but it makes these things hard to talk about.)
Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is the kind of thing that I've been fighting by being super explicit in CLAUDE.md. For whatever reason, instead of being much more thorough and making sure that files are being changed only after fully understanding the scope of the change (behaviour prior to Feb/Mar), Claude would just jump to the easiest fix now, with no backwards compatibility thinking and to hell with all existing tests. What is even worse i…
I did not use the previous version of Opus to notice the difference, but Sonnet 4.6 seems optimized to output the shortest possible answer. Usually it starts with a hack and if you challenge it, it will instead apologize and say to look at a previous answer with the smallest code snippet it can provide. Agentic isn't necessarily worse but ideating and exploring is awful compared to 4.5
I did my usual thing today where I asked a Sonnet 4.6 agent to code review a proposed design plan that was drafted by Opus 4.6 - I do this lately before I delved into the implementation. What it came back with was a verbose output suggesting that a particular function `newMoneyField` be renamed throughout the doc to a name it fabricated `newNumeyField`. And the thing was that the design document referenced the correct function name more than a few dozen times.
This was a first for me with Sonnet. It completely veered off the prompt it was given (review a design document) and instead come out with a verbose suggestion to do a mechanical search and replace to use this newly fabricated function name - that it event spelled incorrectly. I had to Google numey to make sure Sonnet wasn't outsmarting me.