Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I used to love Claude, but the latest models are slowly ruining it

androidauthority.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 63 posts

Re: I used to love Claude, but the latest models are slowly ruining it

#21

Post by garganzol »

solidasparagus wrote: post #19

I hate it. A useful tip - Claude goes into what I call Safety Mode when it gets afraid of risk. Once it's in that mode, you will never get out and it lobotomizes its effective intelligence. As soon as Claude sends a message like this, use the "edit message" feature in the chat UI to try again and avoid Safety Mode rather than trying to convince it or redirect it out by continuing the conversation.

Claude always was slightly lobotomized - instead of solving problems intellectually, it often prefers to be a middle-level code monkey. Maybe this was a part of the implicit safe mode from the very beginning. Cursor/Codex always work better for a way lower spend, at least in my experience.

Re: I used to love Claude, but the latest models are slowly ruining it

#22

Post by vkou »

skybrian wrote: post #15
nolok wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master." (he, in this case, would not be the llm but the people over it) I find those kind of limitation very dystopian and way more dangerous than the threat they claim to fight against.

Businesses are usually allowed to refuse service: "Sorry, we're closed" or "sir, this is a Wendy's." There's nothing dystopian about that. But it's a rather annoying service if the customer can't predict in advance what sort of tasks they're willing to take on. You should have some idea about what they're normally willing to do for you.

> There's nothing dystopian about that.

It'll be dystopian when that'll become your only source of information, and we're working on getting there. If you want to be horrified, look at what students (in school and post-secondary) are doing these days.

It's insane to offload your thinking and knowledge to a machine owned by other people, but you have to if you want to keep up with the rat race.

Re: I used to love Claude, but the latest models are slowly ruining it

#23

Post by nozzlegear »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #6

It's quite obnoxious. I asked if brown rice left in the fridge for a couple days–originally put in for use in fried rices–was still safe. Fable decided I'm trying to produce biotoxins. Which, ironically, prompted me to learn how to produce Bacillus cereus at home [1]. I paid for a year but am going back to Kagi's multi-model system [2]. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7913059/ Don't Do It [2] https://ass…

> I paid for a year but am going back to Kagi's multi-model system [2].

I've been using DuckDuckGo's multi-model service for my "ask an AI random questions" needs. I was already paying them and discovered this LLM thing is part of my subscription. Works pretty well and has privacy guarantees I'd expect out of DDG, though I think they've been tightening the usage you can get out of it recently.

I'll have to try Kagi if DDG gets much tighter.

Re: I used to love Claude, but the latest models are slowly ruining it

#24

Post by g42gregory »

I am ignoring Fable at the moment. It’s on and off available, twice the price and does not seem to be better.

I use Opus 4.8 with OMP/Pi coding agent and Matt Pocock Skills installed. I use professional/polite/questions-based communication pattern with Opus and it seems to work fine for coding. I am always aware that I need to justify my requests so it doesn’t barf.

Of course, I would never use Claude for anything customer-facing. It’s woke to the point of being fanatical.

Re: I used to love Claude, but the latest models are slowly ruining it

#25

Post by nozzlegear »

firasd wrote: post #14

But this is what all the tech bros wanted right? Spending 2025 panicking about sycophancy[1] and how GPT-4o needed to be shut down ASAP meant that 2026 models would be prone to thinking they know Better Than You. That was the germ of the sycophancy panic, the idea that there is a Truth that the GPUs know better than the user. [1] HN thread on my post in January https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488396

Goomba fallacy

Re: I used to love Claude, but the latest models are slowly ruining it

#26

Post by queenkjuul »

I get really sick of Opus 4.8 and Fable telling me things i ask it at work are "out of scope," "not related to my ticket," "not the real problem"...

I decide what is in scope, what I work on, and what needs fixing! It drives me nuts, it's like it's trying to avoid doing work

Re: I used to love Claude, but the latest models are slowly ruining it

#27

Post by skybrian »

vkou wrote: post #22
skybrian wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses are usually allowed to refuse service: "Sorry, we're closed" or "sir, this is a Wendy's." There's nothing dystopian about that. But it's a rather annoying service if the customer can't predict in advance what sort of tasks they're willing to take on. You should have some idea about what they're normally willing to do for you.

> There's nothing dystopian about that. It'll be dystopian when that'll become your only source of information, and we're working on getting there. If you want to be horrified, look at what students (in school and post-secondary) are doing these days. It's insane to offload your thinking and knowledge to a machine owned by other people, but you have to if you want to keep up with the rat race.

It’s probably a good idea to know how to use AI tools, but they certainly don’t have to be your only source of information.

Re: I used to love Claude, but the latest models are slowly ruining it

#28

Post by pizza234 »

> I suspect Anthropic had to turn up its safety guardrails to an 11 to assuage the government’s concerns, as this hasn’t been a one-model problem.

This behavioral change is actually official (https://www.anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5):

> For Fable 5, we made this safety margin much larger than in any prior launch (row B), meaning that many more benign requests would be blocked. We understood that these kinds of false positives would be frustrating for users, but made this tradeoff in the interest of making the model’s other capabilities widely available.

Re: I used to love Claude, but the latest models are slowly ruining it

#29

Post by OptionOfT »

From my point of view, a lot of frustration is tied to LLMs not evolving at the same rate/manner as people around you do.

We're using human language against a system that produces human-like output, which tricks our brain into having similar expectations.

Re: I used to love Claude, but the latest models are slowly ruining it

#30

Post by jiggawatts »

nolok wrote: post #16
skybrian wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses are usually allowed to refuse service: "Sorry, we're closed" or "sir, this is a Wendy's." There's nothing dystopian about that. But it's a rather annoying service if the customer can't predict in advance what sort of tasks they're willing to take on. You should have some idea about what they're normally willing to do for you.

I do not disagree with business deciding to only provide the service they want, I am not talking about the AI business themselves, I am thinking about the people who think we should remove pages from knowledge book. Whether the book takes the form of an llm or an online website or a printed book is merely implementation details.

> people who think we should remove pages from knowledge book.

"No knowledge in Kamar-Taj is forbidden. Only certain practices."

You reminded me of that quote from the Doctor Strange movie.

Even the most "dangerous" knowledge can be life-saving, depending on the circumstances. When I was a teenager, I read the Terrorist's Handbook, which was a text file circulating on bulletin boards. After 9/11 it vanished, because posession was considered a crime in some jurisdictions.

Knowing how to build a bomb is useless and/or dangerous in civilian life. Ask a Ukrainian if it is useful knowledge!

Knowing all about nuclear weapons doesn't mean you're going to blow up a city. But if someone else does, then you'll have the knowledge needed to avoid the worst of the radiation and maybe survive.

Post reply on HN