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Claude Code is being dumbed down?

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Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#271

Post by mattkrause »

idopmstuff wrote: post #180
vintagedave wrote: post #117

> That’s it. “Read 3 files.” Which files? Doesn’t matter. “Searched for 1 pattern.” What pattern? Who cares. Product manager here. Cynically, this is classic product management: simplify and remove useful information under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism if you're more overt about your influences. It's something that as an industry we should be over by now. It requires deep understa…

Also product manager here. Not at all cynically, this is classic product management - simplify by removing information that is useful to some users but not others. We shouldn't be over it by now. It's good to think carefully about how you're using space in your UI and what you're presenting to the user. You're saying it's bad because they removed useful information, but then why isn't Anthropic's suggestion of using…

Simplification can be good---but they've removed the wrong half here!

The notifications act as an overall progress bar and give you a general sense of what Claude Code is doing: is it looking in the relevant part of your codebase, or has it gotten distracted by some unused, vendored-in code?

"Read 2 files" is fine as a progress indicator but is too vague for anything else. "Read foo.cpp and bar.h" takes almost the same amount of visual space, but fulfills both purposes. You might want to fold long lists of files (5? 15?) but that seems like the perfect place for a user-settable option.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#272

Post by fhd2 »

bsder wrote: post #229
vintagedave wrote: post #117

> That’s it. “Read 3 files.” Which files? Doesn’t matter. “Searched for 1 pattern.” What pattern? Who cares. Product manager here. Cynically, this is classic product management: simplify and remove useful information under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism if you're more overt about your influences. It's something that as an industry we should be over by now. It requires deep understa…

> Cynically, this is classic product management: simplify and remove useful information under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism if you're more overt about your influences. Cynically , it's a vibe coded mess and the "programmers" at Anthropic can't figure out how to put it back. More cynically , Anthropic management is trying to hide anything that people could map to token count (aka m…

Fairly cynical indeed. Though I must admit that Anthropic's software - not the models, the software they build - seems to be generally plagued by quality issues. Even the dashboard is _somehow_ broken most of the time, at least whenever I try to do something.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#273

Post by Aurornis »

alphazard wrote: post #216
vintagedave wrote: post #117

> That’s it. “Read 3 files.” Which files? Doesn’t matter. “Searched for 1 pattern.” What pattern? Who cares. Product manager here. Cynically, this is classic product management: simplify and remove useful information under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism if you're more overt about your influences. It's something that as an industry we should be over by now. It requires deep understa…

Product management might be the worst meme in the industry. Hire people who have never used the product and don't think like or accurately represent our users, then let them allocate engineering resources and gate what ships. What could go wrong? It should be a fad gone by at this point, but people never learn. Here's what to do instead: Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple…

> Hire people who have never used the product and don't think like or accurately represent our users

In most of my engineering jobs, the Product Managers were much closer to our users than the engineers.

Good product managers are very valuable. There are a lot of bad ones carrying the product manager title because it was viewed as the easy way to get a job in tech without having to know how to program, but smart companies are getting better at filtering them out.

> Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times a month

Every single time I've seen this tried, it turns into a situation where one or two highly vocal customers capture the engineering team's direction and steer the product toward their personal needs. It's the same thing that happens when the sales people start feeding requests from their customers into the roadmap.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#274

Post by root_axis »

stillpointlab wrote: post #263

I'm old, so I remember when Skyrim came out. At the time, people were howling about how "dumbed down" the RPG had become compared to previous versions. They had simplified so many systems. Seemed to work out for them overall. I understand the article writers frustration. He liked a thing about a product he uses and they changed the product. He is feeling angry and he is expressing that anger and others are sharing in…

If you're paying a monthly rate you still have to optimize for tokens, otherwise you'll be rate limited.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#275

Post by binsquare »

Robdel12 wrote: post #266

I’m a heavy Claude code user and it’s pretty clear they’re starting to bend under their vibe coding. Each Claude code update breaks a ton of stuff, has perf issues, etc. And then this. They want to own your dev workflow and for some reason believe Claude code is special enough to be closed source. The react TUI is kinda a nightmare to deal with I bet. I will say, very happy with the improvements made to Codex 5.3. I’…

Same, codex 5.3 was able to solve a problem that I personally was stuck on even with help from Claude for the last 2 weeks.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#276

Post by qwertox »

It was because of the (back then) new Haiku model, maybe 3.5, that i decided to subscribe yearly. more than good enough for a language layer to interact with the mcp server. Now I'm even hesitant to use it.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#278

Post by mewpmewp2 »

co_king_3 wrote: post #170
kadushka wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would probably pay $2000 a month if I had to - it's a small fraction of my salary, and the productivity boost is worth it.

It's *worth it* when you're salaried? Compared to investing the money? Do you plan to land a very-high-paying executive role years down the line? Are you already extremely highly paid? Did Claude legitimately 10x your productivity? edit: Fuck I'm getting trolled

I am not paying this myself, but the place I work at is definitely paying around 2k a month for my Claude Code usage. I pay 2 x 200, for my personal projects.

I think personal subs are subsidized while corporate ones definitely not. I have CC for my personal projects running 16h a day with multiple instances, but work CC still racks way higher bills with less usage. If I had to guess my work CC is using 4x as little for 5x the cost so at least 20x difference.

I am not going to say it has 10xed or whatever with my productivity, but I would have never ever in that timeframe built all those things that I have now.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#279

Post by ekropotin »

JetSetIlly wrote: post #197
ekropotin wrote: post #7

Another instance of devs being out of touch is them wanting Claude Code to respect AGENT.md: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 What’s wrong with you, people? Are you stupid?

I've never used Claude or anything like it so this may be a dumb question: could you solve this problem by having a CLAUDE.md file that simply says to use AGENT.md if one is available. Can an AI agent not do that?

Yes, the most common solution for this problem either creating a symbolic CLAUDE.md link pointing to AGENT.md (or visa versa) if OS supports it.

Or, in CLAUDE.md have an instruction to follow AGENT.md - but this approach is quite unreliable.

These are solutions to a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place. How else can one explain Anthropic’s reluctance to adhere to a widely adopted standard, if not as an attempt to build a walled garden around an otherwise great product?

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#280

Post by runjake »

> “Read 3 files.” Which files?

> “Searched for 1 pattern.”

Hit Ctrl-o like it mentions right there, and Claude Code will show you. Or RTFM and adjust Output Styles[1]. If you don't like these things, you can change them.

Like it or not, agentic coding is going mainstream and so they are going to tailor the default settings toward that wider mainstream audience.

1. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles

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