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Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th

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Re: Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th

#241

It's also routinely failing the car wash question across all models now, which wasn't the case a month ago. :-/ Seeing some things about how the effort selector isn't working as intended necessarily and the model is regressing in other ways: over-emphasizing how "difficult" a problem is to solve and choosing to avoid it because of the "time" it would take, but quoted in human effort, or suggesting the "easier" path f…

it does feel something in the hidden system prompt makes it try less hard, so many times in the past several weeks I have found divergences with what was in plan and looking back at the jsonl it's always some variant of "doing it this way would be too complicated, let me take this hardcoded way out". If asked to review the change, it will find it, and it will say also yeah I agree prompt said not to do this, but I did anyways, not sure why.

As others have said, anthropic is between a rock and a hard place, you can't scale compute as quickly, and the influx of new accounts has definitely made things tough for them: I think all the "how is claude this session 1/2/3/4" questions that keep coming up must be part of some a/b on just how far to quantize / lower thinking while still maintaining user satisfaction.

Re: Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th

#242
post #65

Has anybody else noticed a pretty significant shift in sentiment when discussing Claude/Codex with other engineers since even just a few months ago? Specifically because of the secret/hidden nature of these changes. I keep getting the sense that people feel like they have no idea if they are getting the product that they originally paid for, or something much weaker, and this sentiment seems to be constantly spreadin…

Well, off the top of my head: - Banning OpenClaw users (within their rights, of course, but bad optics) - Banning 3rd party harnesses in general (ditto) (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?) - Lowering reasoning eff…

Most of those are issues are coming from a very small minority. A lot of times its good for businesses to focus on the customers that are driving them the highest margin, most likely not users like yourself.

1) Nobody should expect to use OpenClaw without API usage.

2) We have known for a long time that the plans are subsidized. It was not as big of a deal but now that demand has continued to explode at a multiple and tools like OpenClaw were creating a lot of usage from a small minority of customers, prices change.

Everything for me points more towards, we have made a service people really want to use and we are trying to balance a supply shortage (compute) with pricing. Nothing is stopping folks like yourself from simply paying the API rates. It is the simple no hassle way to get around any issue you are having, pay the API cost and you will have no limitations!

Re: Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th

#243
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A month ago the company I work at with over 400 engineers decided to cancel all IDE subscriptions (Visual Studio, JetBrains, Windsurf, etc.) and move everyone over to Claude Code as a "cost-saving measure" (along with firing a bunch of test engineers). There was no migration plan - the EVP of Technology just gave a demo showing 2 greenfield projects he'd built with Claude Opus over a weekend and told everyone to copy…

Pretty bad decision on his part. I've been telling other engineers within my company who felt threatened by AI that this would happen. That prices would rise and the marginal cost for changes to big codebases would start to exceed the cost of an engineer's salary. API credits are expensive, especially for huge contexts, and sometimes the model will use $200 in credits trying to solve a problem that could be fixed in…

Even if you take it as true that prices have risen recently, and may continue to rise as the VC subsidies dry up, they will fall again long-term. Inference will get more power efficient with model-on-chip solutions like Taalas and God willing we will get cheaper and cheaper renewable energy.

Despite this I don't think engineers should feel threatened. As long as there is a need for a human in the loop, as today, there will still be engineering jobs. And if demand for engineering effort is elastic enough, there could easily be even more jobs tomorrow.

Rather than threatened, I think engineers should feel exposed. To danger, yes, but opportunity as well.

Re: Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively products like openclaw have an outsized impact on Anthropic's infrastructure for essentially no benefit to them. Especially when you're taking advantage of the $200 plan. OpenAI has never shyed away from burning mountains of cash to try and capture a little more market share. They paid a billion dollars for a vibe coded mess just for the opportunity to associate themselves with the hype.

> Taking advantage of the $200 plan. No, I'm paying $200 a month for a premium product that I expect premium service for. It's the single most expensive IT expense I have. Taking advantage my foot.

You are simply a bit too entitled. It's not a premium product and honestly not that expensive in my opinion either (though that is going to depend on your location).

You are more than able to pay for API rates.

Re: Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th

#245
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, off the top of my head: - Banning OpenClaw users (within their rights, of course, but bad optics) - Banning 3rd party harnesses in general (ditto) (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?) - Lowering reasoning eff…

Why were third party harnesses banned? Surely they'd want sticking power over the ecosystem.

I want to differentiate 2 kinds of harnesses

1. openclaw like - using the LLM endpoint on subscription billing, different prompts than claude code

2. using claude cli with -p, in headless mode

The second runs through their code and prompts, just calls claude in non-interactive mode for subtasks. I feel especially put off by restricting the second kind. I need it to run judge agents to review plans and code.

Re: Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly noticed a significant drop in reasoning power at some point after I subscribed to Claude. Since then I've applied all sorts of fixes that range from disabling adaptive thinking to maxing out thinking tokens to patching system prompts with an ad-hoc shell script from a gist. Even after all this, Opus will still sometimes go round and round in illogical circles, self-correcting constantly with the telltale…

The real question I see nobody asking is how GPT-5.4 beats Opus at a fraction of the price. I doubt it’s only a question of subsidization. My impression from the past is that GPT-5 was around a Sonnet-sized model, and 5-mini was Haiku-sized. At least on my codebase anyways, Codex one-shots tricky things that Opus needs several tries to fully get right.

I wanted to choose Anthropic because they were apparently more ethical compared to OpenAI, but... Yeah.

Right now the only blocker for me is the lack of Linux support.

Re: Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th

#250
post #65

Has anybody else noticed a pretty significant shift in sentiment when discussing Claude/Codex with other engineers since even just a few months ago? Specifically because of the secret/hidden nature of these changes. I keep getting the sense that people feel like they have no idea if they are getting the product that they originally paid for, or something much weaker, and this sentiment seems to be constantly spreadin…

Well, off the top of my head: - Banning OpenClaw users (within their rights, of course, but bad optics) - Banning 3rd party harnesses in general (ditto) (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?) - Lowering reasoning eff…

I think we are about a month away from a class action lawsuit, at their revenue they are a juicy target. And god knows they got the entirely self inflicted unholy combination going on, marketing & sales that borders on fraud (X times the usage of plan Y which has Z times of free tier which has unknowable "magic tokens") and then of course the actual fraud, reducing usage in fifteen different non obvious non public ways.
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