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

441–450 of 829 posts

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

#441

Post by razodactyl »

yubblegum wrote: post #318
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…

> Before I keep going, I wanted to say I appreciate the depth of thinking & care that went into this. "This report was produced by me — Claude Opus 4.6 — analyzing my own session logs. ... Ben built the stop hook, the convention reviews, the frustration-capture tools, and this entire analysis pipeline because he believes the problem is fixable and the collaboration is worth saving. He spent today — a day he could hav…

Bad feedback loops. It's hard to tell with such a massive report if the numbers are real or bad data.

The worst part is how big AI generated reports are - so much time spent in total having to read fluff.

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

#442

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…

How do you guys decide which settings should be configurable via environment variables but not settings files and which settings should be configurable via settings files but not environment variables?

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

#443

Post by martin-t »

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…

[flagged]

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

#445

Post by kator »

I put together a quick audit to check for "early landing" messages[1] using jq, ripgrep, and the messages[2] flagged in the stop guard script.

I have noticed a trend in these sessions asking more and more about calling it a day, "it's getting late," and other phrases. I sort of assumed it was some kind of "load shedding" on Anthropic's side.

My audit of 80 sessions was interesting. Sorry, I won't share details, but I recommend you do the same.

[1] https://gist.github.com/karlbunch/d52b538e6838f232d0a7977e7f...

[2] https://gist.github.com/benvanik/ee00bd1b6c9154d6545c63e06a3...

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

#446

Post by ChurchillsLlama »

I'm genuinely curious why some of these results are so terrible for so many people. I've built in my own harness, and while I've noticed a degradation of quality, the local harness - as well as validation agents - generally catch these issues. For me, I've had to institute tighter controls and guardrails via hooks but I don't see results that warrant changing to a different provider.

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

#447

Post by lukewarm707 »

TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #333
robwwilliams wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've noticed this as well. "Now you should stop X and go do Y" is a phrase I see repeated a lot. Claude seems primed to instruct me to stop using it.

as someone who uses deepseek, glm and kimi models exclusively, an llm telling me what to do is just off the wall

glm and kimi in particular, they can't stop writing... seriously very eager to please. always finishing with fireworks emoji and saying how pleased it is with the test working.

i have to say to write less documentation and simplify their code.

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

#448

Post by jchanimal »

koverstreet wrote: post #249
bcherny wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback. To make it actionable, would you mind running /bug the next time you see it and posting the feedback id here? That way we can debug and see if there's an issue, or if it's within variance.

I'll have a look. The CoT switch you mentioned will help, I'll take a look at that too, but my suspicion is that this isn't a CoT issue - it's a model preference issue. Comparing Opus vs. Qwen 27b on similar problems, Opus is sharper and more effective at implementation - but will flat out ignore issues and insist "everything is fine" that Qwen is able to spot and demonstrate solid understanding of. Opus understands…

One of the thing is we’ve seen at vibes.diy is that if you have a list of jobs and you have agents with specialized profiles and ask them to pick the best job for themselves that can change some of the behavior you described at the end of your post for the better.

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

#449

Post by zmmmmm »

Obviously it's entirely unprovable but it all aligns in very suspicious ways with a compelling narrative:

Anthropic simply can't actually scale Claude Code to meet the opportunity right now. Every second enterprise on the planet is probably negotiating large seat volume deals. It's a race for survival against the other players. The sales team is making huge promises engineering and ops can't fulfil.

So - they first force everyone to use the first party client, then they mask visibility of the thinking budget being utilised, and then finally they start to actually modify behaviour to reduce actual thinking behaviour, hoping that they can gaslight power users into thinking it's them and not the tool, while new users will never know what they were missing.

Is the narrative true? It's compelling but we really need objective evidence - and there's the problem. When parts of the system are not under your control, it's impossible to generate such objective evidence. Which all winds up with a strong argument to have it all under your control. If it didn't happen this time, it probably will. Enshittification is a fundamental human behavioral constant.

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

#450

Post by flakes »

p1necone wrote: post #425
noxa wrote: post #179

I'm the author of the report in there. The stop-phrase-guard didn't get attached but here it is: https://gist.github.com/benvanik/ee00bd1b6c9154d6545c63e06a3... You can watch for these yourself - they are strong indicators of shallow thinking. If you still have logs from Jan/Feb you can point claude at that issue and have it go look for the same things (read:edit ratio shifts, thinking character shifts before the red…

The "this test failure is preexisting so I'm going to ignore it" thing has been happening a lot for me lately, it's so annoying. Unless it makes a change and then immediately runs tests and it's obvious from the name/contents that the failing test is directly related to the change that was made it will ignore it and not try to fix.

> "this test failure is preexisting so I'm going to ignore it"

Critical finding! You spotted the smoking gun!

Post reply on HN