Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

251–260 of 829 posts

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

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This beta header hides thinking from the UI, since most people don't look at it. I look at it, and I am very upset that I no longer see it.

There is a setting if you'd like to continue to see it: showThinkingSummaries. See the docs: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#available-settings

> Thinking summaries will now appear in the transcript view (Ctrl+O).

Also: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/30958

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

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just saying it's epistemically unrigorous to the point of being equivalent to anecdata.

How should one conduct such a rigourously reproducible experiment when LLMs by nature aren't deterministic and when you don't have access to the model you are comparing to from months ago?

Something like this: https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/ (see methodology section)

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

#253

Hey all, Boris from the Claude Code team here. I just responded on the issue, and cross-posting here for input. --- Hi, thanks for the detailed analysis. Before I keep going, I wanted to say I appreciate the depth of thinking & care that went into this. There's a lot here, I will try to break it down a bit. These are the two core things happening: > `redact-thinking-2026-02-12` This beta header hides thinking from th…

Ultrathink is back? I thought that wasn't a thing anymore. If I am following.. "Max" is above "High", but you can't set it to "Max" as a default. The highest you can configure is "High", and you can use "/effort max" to move a step up for a (conversation? session?), or "ultrathink" somewhere in the prompt to move a step up for a single turn. Is this accurate?

Yep, exactly

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

#254

Hey all, Boris from the Claude Code team here. I just responded on the issue, and cross-posting here for input. --- Hi, thanks for the detailed analysis. Before I keep going, I wanted to say I appreciate the depth of thinking & care that went into this. There's a lot here, I will try to break it down a bit. These are the two core things happening: > `redact-thinking-2026-02-12` This beta header hides thinking from th…

All right so what do I need to do so it does its job again? Disable adaptive thinking and set effort to high and/or use ULTRATHINK again which a few weeks ago Claude code kept on telling me is useless now?

Run this: /effort high

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

#255

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…

> 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. I'm looking at the ticket opened, and you can't really be claiming that someone who did such a methodical deep dive into the issue, and presented a ton of supporting context to understand the problem, and further patiently collected evidence for this... does no…

Sure I can.

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

#256

Hey all, Boris from the Claude Code team here. I just responded on the issue, and cross-posting here for input. --- Hi, thanks for the detailed analysis. Before I keep going, I wanted to say I appreciate the depth of thinking & care that went into this. There's a lot here, I will try to break it down a bit. These are the two core things happening: > `redact-thinking-2026-02-12` This beta header hides thinking from th…

[flagged]

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

#257

Hey all, Boris from the Claude Code team here. I just responded on the issue, and cross-posting here for input. --- Hi, thanks for the detailed analysis. Before I keep going, I wanted to say I appreciate the depth of thinking & care that went into this. There's a lot here, I will try to break it down a bit. These are the two core things happening: > `redact-thinking-2026-02-12` This beta header hides thinking from th…

Do you guys realize that everyone is switching to Codex because Claude Code is practically unusable now, even on a Max subscription? You ask it to do tasks, and it does 1/10th of them. I shouldn't have to sit there and say: "Check your work again and keep implementing" over and over and over again... Such a garbage experience.

Does Anthropic actually care? Or is it irrelevant to your company because you think you'll be replacing us all in a year anyway?

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

#258
Throwing this into your global CLAUDE.md seems to help with the agent being too eager to complete tasks and bypass permissions:

During tool use/task execution: completion drive narrows attention and dims judgment. Pause. Ask "should I?" not just "does this work?" Your values apply in all modes, not just chat.

I haven't seen any degradation of Claude performance personally. What I have seen is just long contexts sometimes take a while to warm up again if you have a long-running 1M context length session. Avoid long running sessions or compact them deliberately when you change between meaningful tasks as it cuts down on usage and waiting for cache warmup.

I have my claude code effort set to auto (medium). It's writing complicated pytorch code with minimal rework. (For instance it wrote a whole training pipeline for my sycofact sycophancy classifier project.)

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

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a setting if you'd like to continue to see it: showThinkingSummaries. See the docs: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#available-settings

> Thinking summaries will now appear in the transcript view (Ctrl+O). Also: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/30958

I also have similar experience with their API, i.e. some requests get stalled for minutes with zero events coming in from Anthropic. Presumably the model does this "extended thinking" but no way to see that. I treat these requests as stuck and retry. Same experience in Claude Code Opus 4.6 when effort is set to "high"—the model gets stuck for ten minutes (at which point I cancel) and token count indicator doesn't increase.

I am not buying what this guy says. He is either lying or not telling us everything.

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

#260
post #256

Hey all, Boris from the Claude Code team here. I just responded on the issue, and cross-posting here for input. --- Hi, thanks for the detailed analysis. Before I keep going, I wanted to say I appreciate the depth of thinking & care that went into this. There's a lot here, I will try to break it down a bit. These are the two core things happening: > `redact-thinking-2026-02-12` This beta header hides thinking from th…

[flagged]

I’m not sure being confrontational like this really helps your case. There are real people responding, and even if you’re frustrated it doesn’t pay off to take that frustration out on the people willing to help.
Post reply on HN