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An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

anthropic.com

31–40 of 778 posts

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#31

It’s incredible how forgiving you guys are with Anthropic and their errors. Especially considering you pay high price for their service and receive lower quality than expected.

Look at any criticism of Mythos. Some members on HN are defending it tooth and nail, despite it not being released

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#32

It’s incredible how forgiving you guys are with Anthropic and their errors. Especially considering you pay high price for their service and receive lower quality than expected.

Anthropic actually not so bad. Anthropic models code good, usually. Price not so high compared to time to do it by self.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#33
post #15
post #5

Wow, bad enough for them to actually publish something and not cryptic tweets from employees. Damage is done for me though. Even just one of these things (messing with adaptive thinking) is enough for me to not trust them anymore. And then their A/B testing this week on pricing.

so who do you trust and go to? (NotClearlySo)OpenAI?

I went with MiniMax. The token plans are over what I currently need, 4500 messages per 5h, 45000 messages per week for 40$. I can run multiple agents and they don't think for 5-10 minutes like Sonnet did. Also I can finally see the thinking process while Anthropic chose to hide it all from me.

I'm using Zed and Claude Code as my harnesses.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#34
post #9
post #2

1. They changed the default in March from high to medium, however Claude Code still showed high (took 1 month 3 days to notice and remediate) 2. Old sessions had the thinking tokens stripped, resuming the session made Claude stupid (took 15 days to notice and remediate) 3. System prompt to make Claude less verbose reducing coding quality (4 days - better) All this to say... the experience of suspecting a model is get…

> Anthropic publicly gaslights their user-base: "we never degrade model performance" is frustrating. They're not gaslighting anyone here: they're very clear that the model itself, as in Opus 4.7, was not degraded in any way (i.e. if you take them at their word, they do not drop to lower quantisations of Claude during peak load). However, the infrastructure around it - Claude Code, etc - is very much subject to change…

Model performance at inference in a data center v.s. stripping thinking tokens are effectively the same.

Sure they didn't change the GPUs their running, or the quantization, but if valuable information is removed leading to models performing worse, performance was degraded.

In the same way uptime doesn't care about the incident cause... if you're down you're down no one cares that it was 'technically DNS'.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#35
post #2

1. They changed the default in March from high to medium, however Claude Code still showed high (took 1 month 3 days to notice and remediate) 2. Old sessions had the thinking tokens stripped, resuming the session made Claude stupid (took 15 days to notice and remediate) 3. System prompt to make Claude less verbose reducing coding quality (4 days - better) All this to say... the experience of suspecting a model is get…

> 2. Old sessions had the thinking tokens stripped, resuming the session made Claude stupid (took 15 days to notice and remediate)

This one was egregious: after a one hour user pause, apparently they cleared the cache and then continued to apply “forgetting” for the rest of the session after the resume!

Seems like a very basic software engineering error that would be caught by normal unit testing.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#36

It’s incredible how forgiving you guys are with Anthropic and their errors. Especially considering you pay high price for their service and receive lower quality than expected.

Because it is still good though.

If you have a good product, you are more understanding. And getting worse doesn't mean its no longer valuable, only that the price/value factor went down. But Opus 4.5 was relevant better and only came out in November.

There was no price increase at that time so for the same money we get better models. Opus 4.6 again feels relevant better though.

Also moving fastish means having more/better models faster.

I do know plenty of people though which do use opencode or pi and openrouter and switching models a lot more often.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#37

> On March 26, we shipped a change to clear Claude's older thinking from sessions that had been idle for over an hour, to reduce latency when users resumed those sessions. A bug caused this to keep happening every turn for the rest of the session instead of just once, which made Claude seem forgetful and repetitive. We fixed it on April 10. This affected Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6. Is it just me or does this seem kind o…

It's really hard to understand. There needs to be really loud batman sign in the sky type signals from some hero third party calling out objective product degradation. Do they use cc internally? If so do they use a different version? This should've been almost as loud a break as service just going down altogether, yet it took 2 weeks to fix?!

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#38
This is the problem with co-opting the word "harness". What agents need is a test harness but that doesn't mean much in the AI world.

Agents are not deterministic; they are probabilistic. If the same agent is run it will accomplish the task a consistent percentage of the time. I wish I was better at math or English so I could explain this.

I think they call it EVAL but developers don't discuss that too much. All they discuss is how frustrated they are.

A prompt can solve a problem 80% of the time. Change a sentence and it will solve the same problem 90% of time. Remove a sentence it will solve the problem 70% of the time.

It is so friggen' easy to set up -- stealing the word from AI sphere -- a TEST HARNESS.

Regressions caused by changes to the agent, where words are added, changed, or removed, are extremely easy to quantify. It isn’t pass/fail. It’s whether the agent still solves the problem at the same percentage of the time it consistently has.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#39
post #9
post #2

1. They changed the default in March from high to medium, however Claude Code still showed high (took 1 month 3 days to notice and remediate) 2. Old sessions had the thinking tokens stripped, resuming the session made Claude stupid (took 15 days to notice and remediate) 3. System prompt to make Claude less verbose reducing coding quality (4 days - better) All this to say... the experience of suspecting a model is get…

> Anthropic publicly gaslights their user-base: "we never degrade model performance" is frustrating. They're not gaslighting anyone here: they're very clear that the model itself, as in Opus 4.7, was not degraded in any way (i.e. if you take them at their word, they do not drop to lower quantisations of Claude during peak load). However, the infrastructure around it - Claude Code, etc - is very much subject to change…

Claude code is not infra, the model is the infra. They changed settings to make their models faster and probably cheaper to run too. Honestly with adaptive thinking it no longer matters what model it is if you can dynamically make it do less or more work.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#40

It’s incredible how forgiving you guys are with Anthropic and their errors. Especially considering you pay high price for their service and receive lower quality than expected.

At least personally, it feels like the choices are the one that's okay with being used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons targeting, the one that's on track to get acquired by the AI company that dragged its feet in getting around to stopping people from making child porn with it, the one that nobody seems to use from Google, and the one that everyone complains about but also still seems to be using because it at least sometimes works well. At this point I've opted out of personal LLM coding by canceling my subscription (although my employer still has subscriptions and wants us to keep using them, so I'll presumably keep using Claude there) but if I had to pick one to spend my own money on I'd still go with Claude.
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