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Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

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Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#21
Not trying to tell anyone else how to live, just want to make sure the other side of this argument is visible. I run 5+ agents all day every day. I measure, test, and validate outputs exhaustively. I value the decrease in noise in output here because I am very much not looking to micromanage process because I am simply too slow to keep up. When I want logging I can follow to understand “thought process” I ask for that in a specific format in my prompt something like “talk through the problem and your exploration of the data step by step as you go before you make any changes or do any work and use that plan as the basis of your actions”.

I still think it’d be nice to allow an output mode for you folks who are married to the previous approach since it clearly means a lot to you.

Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#22

[flagged]

> it's about catching when it goes off the rails before it makes a mess

The latest "meta" in AI programming appears to be agent teams (or swarms or clusters or whatever) that are designed to run for long periods of time autonomously.

Through that lens, these changes make more sense. They're not designing UX for a human sitting there watching the agent work. They're designing for horizontally scaling agents that work in uninterrupted stretches where the only thing that matters is the final output, not the steps it took to get there.

That said, I agree with you in the sense that the "going off the rails" problem is very much not solved even on the latest models. It's not clear to me how we can trust a team of AI agents working autonomously to actually build the right thing.

Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#23
post #8

> Cherny responded to the feedback by making changes. "We have repurposed the existing verbose mode setting for this," he said, so that it "shows file paths for read/searches. Does not show full thinking, hook output, or subagent output (coming in tomorrow's release)." How to comply with a demand to show more information by showing less information.

Words have lost all meaning. "Verbose" no longer means "containing more words than necessary" but instead "Bit more than usual". "Fast" no longer mean "characterized by quick motion, operation, or effect" but instead depends on the company, some of them use slightly different way, but same "speed", but it's called "fast mode".

It's just a whole new world where words suddenly mean something completely different, and you can no longer understand programs by just reading what labels they use for various things, you need to also lookup if what they think "verbose" means matches with the meaning you've built up understanding of first.

Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#24
post #9

Well, there is OpenCode [1] as an alternative, among many others. I have found OpenCode being the closest to Claude Code experience, and I find it quite good. Having said that I still prefer Claude Code for the moment. [1] https://opencode.ai/

I haven't tried it myself but there was a plenty of people in the other thread complaining that even on the Max subscription they couldn't use OpenCode.

Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#25

That is such silly framing. They are not "trying" to hide anything. They are trying to create a better product -- and might be making unpopular or simply bad choices along the way -- but the objective here is not to obfuscate which files are edited. It's a side effect.

Instead of adding a settings option to hide the filenames they hide them for everyone AND rewrite verbose mode, which is no longer a verbose mode, but the way to see filenames, thus breaking everyone's (depending on these) workflows for...... what exactly?

If they tried to create a better product I'd expect them to just add the awesome option, not hide something that saves thousands of tokens and context if the model goes the wrong way.

Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#26
post #8

> Cherny responded to the feedback by making changes. "We have repurposed the existing verbose mode setting for this," he said, so that it "shows file paths for read/searches. Does not show full thinking, hook output, or subagent output (coming in tomorrow's release)." How to comply with a demand to show more information by showing less information.

This is really the kind of things Claude sometimes does. "Actually, wait... let's repurpose the existing verbose mode for this, simpler, and it fits the user's request to limit bloating"

Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#27
post #22

[flagged]

> it's about catching when it goes off the rails before it makes a mess The latest "meta" in AI programming appears to be agent teams (or swarms or clusters or whatever) that are designed to run for long periods of time autonomously. Through that lens, these changes make more sense. They're not designing UX for a human sitting there watching the agent work. They're designing for horizontally scaling agents that work…

None of those wild experiments are running on a "real", existing codebase that is more than 6 months old. The thing they don't talk about is that nobody outside these AI companies wants to vibe code with a 10 year old codebase with 2000 enterprise customers.

As you as you start to work with a codebase that you care about and need to seriously maintain, you'll see what a mess these agents make.

Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#28

[flagged]

Yes, this is why I generally still use "ask for permission" prompts.

As tedious as it is a lot of the time ( And I wish there was an in-between "allow this session" not just allow once or "allow all" ), it's invaluable to catch when the model has tried to fix the problem in entirely the wrong project.

Working on a monolithic code-base with several hundred library projects, it's essential that it doesn't start digging in the wrong place.

It's better than it used to be, but the failure mode for going wrong can be extreme, I've come back to 20+ minutes of it going around in circles frustrating itself because of a wrong meaning ascribed to an instruction.

Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#29
post #9

Well, there is OpenCode [1] as an alternative, among many others. I have found OpenCode being the closest to Claude Code experience, and I find it quite good. Having said that I still prefer Claude Code for the moment. [1] https://opencode.ai/

What does Claude-Code do different that you still prefer it? I'm so in love with OpenCode, I just can't go back. It's such a nicer way of working. I even love the more advanced TUI

Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#30
post #22

[flagged]

> it's about catching when it goes off the rails before it makes a mess The latest "meta" in AI programming appears to be agent teams (or swarms or clusters or whatever) that are designed to run for long periods of time autonomously. Through that lens, these changes make more sense. They're not designing UX for a human sitting there watching the agent work. They're designing for horizontally scaling agents that work…

Looking at it from far is simply making something large from a smaller input, so its kind of like nondeterministic decompression.

What fills the holes are best practices, what can ruin the result is wrong assumptions.

I dont see how full autonomy can work either without checkpoints along the way.

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