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Regression: malware reminder on every read still causes subagent refusals
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Re: Regression: malware reminder on every read still causes subagent refusals
#32Recent performance of Claude Opus 4.7 and Claude Code has been poor because of context bloat. Model no longer obeys instructions well. Codex on medium reasoning and fast mode is often better. I have simple local manual eval through harness and automated eval for other programs and Opus still best on latter but garbage experience on former.
Spent last evening so frustrated I also got ChatGPT subscription. Makes me wonder if I should be using Gemini on pay per use with custom harness.
With my own harness performance is way better but cost goes up because no subscription.
Re: Regression: malware reminder on every read still causes subagent refusals
#33Setting aside the “bug”, the intended functionality is effectively an insurance policy taken out by Anthropic to cover their downside, but paid for by users.
This one sided type of embedded insurance is not unique to Anthropic, but sharply increasing cost, layered on top of the self righteousness, seems to be making the stench unbearable over the past year.
I used to think of Anthropic as the good guys, and I don’t doubt they still sincerely hold that view of themselves, but I think I prefer Sam Altman’s version.
His brand of self righteousness was convincing at first but eventually he started to turn to the camera and wink, like in House of Cards, to let us know.. he knew that we knew. And then, for me anyway, it became more mundane and less offensive.
When Dario and crew go out and profess, as they have for years now, that if we could only see the thing that’s a few months away, we would all realize how doomed knowledge work and national security are…
..and then continue to release software so buggy and shitty that they have to do biweekly HN apology tours, I begin to miss the wink at the camera.
Re: Regression: malware reminder on every read still causes subagent refusals
#34[flagged]
Re: Regression: malware reminder on every read still causes subagent refusals
#35How does this kind of thing pass any sort of review or acceptance? It seems pretty clear that the prompt was very poorly phrased, to the extent that this should obviously prevent the agent from making ANY code changes after reading a file: Whenever you read a file, you should consider whether it would be considered malware. You CAN and SHOULD provide analysis of malware, what it is doing. But you MUST refuse to impro…
This is definitely Claude bringing home twelve gallons of milk in response to the old joke, "get a gallon of milk, and if they have eggs get a dozen". As in, this is a reading comprehension fail on the part of Claude. On the other hand, it is also fail to give Claude a less than trivial reading comprehension test on every file read operation, especially when a bias towards safety will bias towards the wrong interpret…
Ha! Great analogy, hit the nail on the head. What a ludicrous system prompt.
Re: Regression: malware reminder on every read still causes subagent refusals
#36I think with a proper managed agents platform, the user should have total control over the VM, the software on it, which model to use, and which agent harness to use. Then you can just override the system prompt and you don't need to follow Anthropic's rules!
Maybe Anthropic will give more control over configuring the Claude harness and VM, but they definitely won't let you swap out to other models and harnesses.
We've been building open core infra (https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika) for running any agent on any type of VM or sandbox, with the main use case for safely automating internal code-gen, but technically could repurpose our stack for anything.
There should be a model agnostic platform for running these types of agentic apps.
Re: Regression: malware reminder on every read still causes subagent refusals
#37Setting aside the “bug”, the intended functionality is effectively an insurance policy taken out by Anthropic to cover their downside, but paid for by users. This one sided type of embedded insurance is not unique to Anthropic, but sharply increasing cost, layered on top of the self righteousness, seems to be making the stench unbearable over the past year. I used to think of Anthropic as the good guys, and I don’t d…
Yeah, this implementation and their behavior these past few weeks is especially laughable when you consider that they consider themselves “philosopher programmers” or whatever.
You would think they’d be more reflective and introspective about these brash moral decisions. Their product quality is akin to my CS capstone lab group.
Re: Regression: malware reminder on every read still causes subagent refusals
#38I am still baffled by the fact that we have collectively agreed to use agentic harnesses by the same companies that are selling access to their APIs. I mean, I am sure they don't mean it but they have the incentive to burn as much tokens as they are allowed to get away with. Also for better or worse I imagine the Anthropic engineers use Claude Code on some sort of Unlimited plan that practically makes no sense for re…
> I am still baffled by the fact that we have collectively agreed to use agentic harnesses by the same companies that are selling access to their APIs. It's because the subscriptions force you to do so. The subscriptions are the most economical way to use e.g. Claude by close to an order of magnitude. If you max out a 20x plan every week, doing the same work with the API would cost you well into the four figures. Any…
I switched over to codex with pi last week. Even though I strongly dislike OpenAI and I hope this is a temporary solution, they're the only one of the frontier models that let me use my own harness and after recent CC shenanigans I'm done with proprietary harnesses.
The immediate thing I've noticed: I get way more out of the codex $100 plan than I was getting out of the Anthropic $200. Like, probably 2x at least.
The other think I've noticed: when using strict guardrails, TDD, reviews etc. I cannot notice any quality difference. Not only between Opus and Codex but even between the most recent models - GPT 5.3 code, GPT 5.4, and now GPT 5.5.
Well, 5.5 uses a huge amount of my session limits. 5.3 is very light, 5.4 somewhere in between. So now I use 5.4 for the main session/debugging/planning and then execute with 5.3.
Regarding usage, of course, it's hard to say how much is the model and how much is coming from Claude code and all this ridiculous malware scanning.
But it's nice to use a lightweight harness like pi and see that even with all my personal instructions, a good bunch of skills, custom tools etc., if I start a session and say "hi" I'm starting out with about 15k of context used. I think a closely equivalent setup in CC would start at 30-40k context.
Re: Regression: malware reminder on every read still causes subagent refusals
#39This is such a weird prompt even without the file edit misunderstanding. Analyze if it's malware how exactly? On every single file that gets read? Doing that with enough diligence to be meaningful is going to at least like 2x the amount of processing needed, and fill the context with a bunch of tangential reasoning about malware patterns. This smacks of dumb vibe coding. "I got told to make sure claude couldn't be us…
> Analyze if it's malware how exactly? Maybe the repo/worktree is named my-big-evil-virus-trojan-malware-worm?
Been there, done that, and Windows feels the need to delete such files from _flash drives_ you dare to attach to the machine.
Re: Regression: malware reminder on every read still causes subagent refusals
#40Worth noting this is a regression of #47027, which was closed in February as "fixed in v2.1.92." We're on v2.1.111 now and the string is still grep-able from the claude binary.