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An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

anthropic.com

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Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to say I appreciate your responses here. Engaging so directly with a highly critical audience is a minefield that you're navigating well. Thank you.

Very easy to do when you stand to make tens of millions when your employer IPOs. Let's not maybe give too much praise and employ some critical thinking here.

What is the purpose of this mindset? Should we encourage typical corporate coldness instead?

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#153
> "In combination with other prompt changes, it hurt coding quality, and was reverted on April 20"

Do researchers know correlation between various aspects of a prompt and the response?

LLM, to me at least, appears to be a wildly random function that it's difficult to rely on. Traditional systems have structured inputs and outputs, and we can know how a system returned the output. This doesn't appear to be the case for LLM where inputs and outputs are any texts.

Anecdotally, I had a difficult time working with open source models at a social media firm, and something as simple as wrapping the example of JSON structure with ```, adding a newline or wording I used wildly changed accuracy.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#154
post #87

Anthropic releases used to feel thorough and well done, with the models feeling immaculately polished. It felt like using a premium product, and it never felt like they were racing to keep up with the news cycle, or reply to competitors. Recently that immaculately polished feel is harder to find. It coincides with the daily releases of CC, Desktop App, unknown/undocumented changes to the various harnesses used in CC/…

Boris from the Claude Code team here. We agree, and will be spending the next few weeks increasing our investment in polish, quality, and reliability. Please keep the feedback coming.

And you didn't invest anything in polish, quality and reliability before... why? Because for any questions people have you reply something like "I have Claude working on this right now" and have no idea what's happening in the code?

A reminder: your vibe-coded slop required peak 68GB of RAM, and you had to hire actual engineers to fix it.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#155
I genuinely don't understand what they have been trying to achieve. All of these incremental "improvements" have ... not improved anything, and have had the opposite effect.

My trust is gone. When day-to-day updates do nothing but cause hundreds of dollars in lost $$$ tokens and the response is "we ... sorta messed up but just a little bit here and there and it added up to a big mess up" bro get fuckin real.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#156
One of Anthropic's ostensive ethical goals is to produce AI that is "understandable" as well as exceptionally "well-aligned". It's striking that some of the same properties that make AI risky also just make it hard to consistently deliver a good product. It occurs to me that if Anthropic really makes some breakthroughs in those areas, everyone will feel it in terms of product quality whether they're worried about grandiose/catastrophic predictions or not.

But right now it seems like, in the case of (3), these systems are really sensitive and unpredictable. I'd characterize that as an alignment problem, too.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#157

"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" This makes no sense to me. I often leav…

Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. Normally, when you have a conversation with Claude Code, if your convo has N messages, then (N-1) messages hit prompt cache -- everything but the latest message. The challenge is: when you let a session idle for >1 hour, when you come back to it and send a prompt, it will be a full cache miss, all N messages. We noticed that this corner case led to outsized token costs for u…

We at UT-Austin have done some academic work to handle the same challenge. Will be curious if serving engines could modified. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16434 .

The core idea is we can use user-activity at the client to manage KV cache loading and offloading. Happy to chat more!!

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#158

"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" This makes no sense to me. I often leav…

Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. Normally, when you have a conversation with Claude Code, if your convo has N messages, then (N-1) messages hit prompt cache -- everything but the latest message. The challenge is: when you let a session idle for >1 hour, when you come back to it and send a prompt, it will be a full cache miss, all N messages. We noticed that this corner case led to outsized token costs for u…

> We tried a few different approaches to improve this UX: 1. Educating users on X/social

No. You had random developers tweet and reply at random times to random users while all of your official channels were completely silent. Including channels for people who are not terminally online on X

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#159
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to say I appreciate your responses here. Engaging so directly with a highly critical audience is a minefield that you're navigating well. Thank you.

> Engaging so directly with a highly critical audience is a minefield that you're navigating well. They spent two months literally gaslighting this "critical audience" that this could not be happening and literally blaming users for using their vibe-coded slop exactly as advertised. All the while all the official channels refused to acknowledge any problems. Now the dissatisfaction and subscription cancellations have…

Examples of gaslighting on April 15th (the first 2 issues were "fixed" by April 10th according to the story):

https://x.com/bcherny/status/2044291036860874901 https://x.com/bcherny/status/2044299431294759355

No mention of anything like "hey, we just fixed two big issues, one that lasted over a month." Just casual replies to everybody like nothing is wrong and "oh there's an issue? just let us know we had no idea!"

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#160
>On April 16, we added a system prompt instruction to reduce verbosity

In practice I understand this would be difficult but I feel like the system prompt should be versioned alongside the model. Changing the system prompt out from underneath users when you've published benchmarks using an older system prompt feels deceptive.

At least tell users when the system prompt has changed.

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