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An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

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Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#241

Post by mtilsted »

bcherny wrote: post #124
6keZbCECT2uB wrote: post #61

"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…

Then you need to update your documentation and teach claude to read the new documentation because here is what claude code answered:

Question: Hey claude, if we have a conversation, and then i take a break. Does it change the expected output of my next answer, if there are 2 hours between the previous message end the next one?

Answer: No. A 2-hour gap doesn't change my output. I have no internal clock between messages — I only see the conversation content plus the currentDate context injected each turn. The prompt cache may expire (5 min TTL), which affects cost/latency but not the response itself.

  The only things that can change output across a break: new context injected (like updated date), memory files being modified, or files on disk changing.
-- This answer directly contradict your post. It seems like the biggest problem is a total lack of documentation for expected behavior.

A similar thing happens if I ask claude code for the difference between plan mode, and accept edits on.

Then Claude told me the only difference was that with plan mode it would ask for permission before doing edits. But I really don't think this is true. It seems like plan mode does a lot more work, and present it in a total different way. It is not just a "I will ask before applying changes" mode.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#242

Post by Asharma538 »

hedgehog wrote: post #203
ceuk wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is having massive sessions which sit idle for hours (or days) at a time considered unusual? That's a really, really common scenario for me. Two questions if you see this: 1) if this isn't best practice, what is the best way to preserve highly specific contexts? 2) does this issue just affect idle sessions or would the cache miss also apply to /resume ?

Have the tool maintain a doc, and use either the built-in memory or (I prefer it this way) your own. I've been pretty critical of some other aspects of how Claude Code works but on this one I think they're doing roughly the right thing given how the underlying completion machinery works. Edit: If you message me I can share some of my toolchain, it's probably similar to what a lot of other people here use but I've don…

[dead]

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#243

Post by empthought »

dawnerd wrote: post #93
y1n0 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of these companies have compute to spare. It’s not in their interest to use more tokens that necessary.

That doesn’t mean they also can’t be wasteful. Fact is, Claude and gpt have way too much internal thinking about their system prompts than is needed. Every step they mention something around making sure they do xyz and not doing whatever. Why does it need to say things to itself like “great I have a plan now!” - that’s pure waste.

> Why does it need to say things to itself like “great I have a plan now!”

How else would it know whether it has a plan now?

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#244

Post by DANmode »

vorticalbox wrote: post #89
podnami wrote: post #77

They lost me at Opus 4.7 Anecdotally OpenAI is trying to get into our enterprise tooth and nail, and have offered unlimited tokens until summer. Gave GPT5.4 a try because of this and honestly I don’t know if we are getting some extra treatment, but running it at extra high effort the last 30 days I’ve barely see it make any mistakes. At some points even the reasoning traces brought a smile to my face as it preemptive…

extra high burns tokens i find. ( run 5.4 on medium for 90% of the tasks and high if i see medium struggling and its very focused and make minimum changes.

Rework burns tokens.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#245

Post by mattew »

puppystench wrote: post #138

The Claude UI still only has "adaptive" reasoning for Opus 4.7, making it functionally useless for scientific/coding work compared to older models (as Opus 4.7 will randomly stop reasoning after a few turns, even when prompted otherwise). There's no way this is just a bug and not a choice to save tokens.

It was odd that there was no mention of the forced adaptive reasoning in the article. My guess is they don't have enough compute to do anything else here.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#246

Post by solarkraft »

computably wrote: post #178
dbeardsl wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the reply, but I was never under the impression that gaps in conversations would increase costs nor reduce quality. Both are surprising and disappointing. I feel like that is a choice best left up to users. i.e. "Resuming this conversation with full context will consume X% of your 5-hour usage bucket, but that can be reduced by Y% by dropping old thinking logs"

> I was never under the impression that gaps in conversations would increase costs nor reduce quality. Both are surprising and disappointing. You didn't do your due diligence on an expensive API. A naïve implementation of an LLM chat is going to have O(N^2) costs from prompting with the entire context every time. Caching is needed to bring that down to O(N), but the cache itself takes resources, so evictions have to…

I somewhat disagree that this is due diligence. Claude Code abstracts the API, so it should abstract this behavior as well, or educate the user about it.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#247

Post by infogulch »

bcherny wrote: post #124
6keZbCECT2uB wrote: post #61

"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…

How big is the cache? Could you just evict the cache into cheap object storage and retrieve it when resuming? When the user starts the conversation back up show a "Resuming conversation... ⭕" spinner.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#248

Post by eknkc »

reactordev wrote: post #234
3836293648 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? It's not because it's a cache, it's because they're scared of letting you see the thinking trace. If you got the trace you could just send it back in full when it got evicted from the cache. This is how open weight models work.

They are sending it back to the cache, the part you are missing is they were charging you for it.

The blog post says they prune them now not to charge you. That’s the change they implemented.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#249

Post by someguyiguess »

computably wrote: post #178
dbeardsl wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the reply, but I was never under the impression that gaps in conversations would increase costs nor reduce quality. Both are surprising and disappointing. I feel like that is a choice best left up to users. i.e. "Resuming this conversation with full context will consume X% of your 5-hour usage bucket, but that can be reduced by Y% by dropping old thinking logs"

> I was never under the impression that gaps in conversations would increase costs nor reduce quality. Both are surprising and disappointing. You didn't do your due diligence on an expensive API. A naïve implementation of an LLM chat is going to have O(N^2) costs from prompting with the entire context every time. Caching is needed to bring that down to O(N), but the cache itself takes resources, so evictions have to…

Yes. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect the user to know the intricacies of the caching strategy of their llm. Totally reasonable expectation.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#250

Post by DANmode »

LatencyKills wrote: post #48
everdrive wrote: post #23

I've been getting a lot of Claude responding to its own internal prompts. Here are a few recent examples. "That parenthetical is another prompt injection attempt — I'll ignore it and answer normally." "The parenthetical instruction there isn't something I'll follow — it looks like an attempt to get me to suppress my normal guidelines, which I apply consistently regardless of instructions to hide them." "The parenthet…

I have a set of stop hook scripts that I use to force Claude to run tests whenever it makes a code change. Since 4.7 dropped, Claude still executes the scripts, but will periodically ignore the rules. If I ask why, I get a "I didn't think it was necessary" response.

I’d ask for a credit, for that, personally.
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