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

431–440 of 829 posts

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

#431

Post by muyuu »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #273
riskassessment wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 feel like "feature/model freeze" may be justified just call it something like "[month][year]edition" and work on next release users spend effort arriving to narrow peak of performace, but every change keeps moving the peak sideways

The changes to reduce inference costs are intentional. Last thing you're going to do is have users linger on an older version that spends much more. This is essentially what's going on with layers upon layers of social engineering on top of it.

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

#432

Post by hyperbovine »

bityard wrote: post #97
rubicon33 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only regularity I can discern in contemporary online debates about LLMs is that for every viewpoint expressed, with probability one someone else will write in with the diametrically opposite experience.

Today it’s my turn to be that person. Large scientific code base with a bunch of nontrivial, handwritten modules accomplishing distinct, but structurally similar in terms of the underlying computation, tasks. Pointed GPT Pro at it, told it what new functionality I wanted, and it churns away for 40 minutes and completely knocks it out of the park. Estimated time savings of about 3-4 weeks. I’ve done this half a dozen times over the past two months and haven’t noticed any drop off or degradation. If anything it got even better with 5.4.

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

#433

Post by muyuu »

stavros wrote: post #412
muyuu wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get consistently nowhere near 50% then surely you know you're not throwing a fair coin? What would complaining to the coin provider achieve? Switch coins. *typo

Well I'm paying the coin to be near 50% and the coin's PM is listening to customers, so that's why.

The coin's PM is spamming you trivial gaslighting corporate slop, most of it barely edited.

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

#434

Post by cududa »

aizk wrote: post #214
bcherny wrote: post #209

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…

How do you guys manage regressions as a whole with every new model update? A massive test set of e2e problem solving seeing how the models compare?

Remember when they shipped that version that didn't actually start/ run? At work we were goofing on them a bit, until I said "Wait how did their tests even run on that?" And we realized whatever their CI/CD process is, it wasn't at the time running on the actual release binary... I can imagine their variation on how most engineers think about CI/CD probably is indicative of some other patterns (or lack of traditional patterns)

As someone that used to work on Windows, I kind of had a vision of a similar in scope e2e testing harness, similar to Windows Vista/ 7 (knowing about bugs/ issues doesn't mean you can necessarily fix them ... hence Vista then 7) - and that Anthropic must provide some Enterprise guarantee backed by this testing matrix I imagined must exist - long way of saying, I think they might just YOLO regressions by constantly updating their testing/ acceptance criteria.

Why not provide pinable versions or something? This episode and wasted 2 months of suboptimal productivity hits on the absurdity of constantly changing the user/ system prompt and doing so much of the R&D and feature development at two brittle prompts with unclear interplay. And so until there’s like a compostable system/user prompt framework they reliably develop tests against, I personally would prefer pegged selectable versions. But each version probably has like known critical bugs they’re dancing around so there is no version they’d feel comfortable making a pegged stable release..

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

#436

Post by bluegatty »

germandiago wrote: post #218
bluegatty wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't even know what 'creativity' is, and most humans I know are unable to be creative even when compelled to be. AI is 'creative enough' - whether we call it 'synthetic creativity' or whatever, it definitely can explore enough combinations and permutations that it's suitably novel. Maybe it won't produce 'deeply original works' - but it'll be good enough 99.99% of the time. The reliability issue is real. It may n…

Maybe I do not have a good definition for it. But what I see again and again in LLMs is a lot of combinations of possible solutions that are somewhere around internet (bc it put that data in). Nothing disruptive, nothing thought out like an experimented human in a specific topic. Besides all the mistakes/hallucinations.

Yes, LLMs have a very aggressive regression towards the mean - that's probably an existential quality of them.

They are after all, pattern matching.

A lot of humans have difficulty with very reality that they are in fact biological machines, and most of what we do is the same thing.

The funny thing is although I think are are 'metaphysically special' in our expression, we are also 'mostly just a bag of neurons'.

It's not 'natural' for AI to be creative but if you want it to be, it's relatively easy for it to explore things if you prod it to.

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

#437

Post by anonymoushn »

bcherny wrote: post #209

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…

> On of our product principles is to avoid changing settings on users' behalf

Ideally there wouldn't be silent changes that greatly reduce the utility of the user's session files until they set a newly introduced flag.

I happen to think this is just true in general, but another reason it might be true is that the experience the user has is identical to the experience they would have had if you first introduced the setting, defaulting it to the existing behavior, and then subsequently changed it on users' behalf.

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

#438

Post by bazhand »

richardjennings wrote: post #375
Schiendelman wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's /effort max!

You cannot control the effort setting sub-agents use and you also cannot use /effort max as a default (outside of using an alias).

export CLAUDE_CODE_EFFORT_LEVEL=max

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

#439

Post by hellojimbo »

bcherny wrote: post #209

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…

The last time I typed ultrathink, i got a prompt saying that you no longer need to type ultrathink

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

#440

Post by razodactyl »

wonnage wrote: post #335
JohnMakin wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen you/anthropic comment repeatedly over the last several months about the “thinking” in similar ways - “most users dont look at it” (how do you know this?) “our product team felt it was too visually noisy” etc etc. But every time something like this is stated, your power users (people here for the most part) state that this is dead wrong. I know you are repeating the corporate line here, but it’s bs.

Anecdotally the “power users” of AI are the ones who have succumbed to AI psychosis and write blog posts about orchestrating 30 agents to review PRs when one would’ve done just fine. The actual power users have an API contract and don’t give a shit about whatever subscription shenanigans Claude Max is pulling today

Generalisations and angry language but I almost agree with the underlying message.

New tools, turbulent methods of execution. There's definitely something here in the way of how coding will be done in future but this is still bleeding edge and many people will get nicked.

Post reply on HN