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Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

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Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

#331

Post by johndough »

bcherny wrote: post #209

Hey all, Boris from the Claude Code team here. I just responded on the issue, and cross-posting here for input. --- Hi, thanks for the detailed analysis. Before I keep going, I wanted to say I appreciate the depth of thinking & care that went into this. There's a lot here, I will try to break it down a bit. These are the two core things happening: > `redact-thinking-2026-02-12` This beta header hides thinking from th…

I think it is hilarious that there are four different ways to set settings (settings.json config file, environment variable, slash commands and magical chat keywords).

That kind of consistency has also been my own experience with LLMs.

Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

#333

Post by TonyAlicea10 »

robwwilliams wrote: post #85
summarity wrote: post #8

Not claude code specific, but I've been noticing this on Opus 4.6 models through Copilot and others as well. Whenever the phrase "simplest fix" appears, it's time to pull the emergency break. This has gotten much, much worse over the past few weeks. It will produce completely useless code, knowingly (because up to that phrase the reasoning was correct) breaking things. Today another thing started happening which are…

Yes, and over the last few weeks I have noticed that on long-context discussions Opus 4.6e does its best to encourage me to call it a day and wrap it up; repeatedly. Mother Anthropic is giving preprompts to Claude to terminate early and in my case always prematurely.

I've noticed this as well. "Now you should stop X and go do Y" is a phrase I see repeated a lot. Claude seems primed to instruct me to stop using it.

Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

#335

Post by wonnage »

JohnMakin wrote: post #297
bcherny wrote: post #209

Hey all, Boris from the Claude Code team here. I just responded on the issue, and cross-posting here for input. --- Hi, thanks for the detailed analysis. Before I keep going, I wanted to say I appreciate the depth of thinking & care that went into this. There's a lot here, I will try to break it down a bit. These are the two core things happening: > `redact-thinking-2026-02-12` This beta header hides thinking from th…

I’ve seen you/anthropic comment repeatedly over the last several months about the “thinking” in similar ways - “most users dont look at it” (how do you know this?) “our product team felt it was too visually noisy” etc etc. But every time something like this is stated, your power users (people here for the most part) state that this is dead wrong. I know you are repeating the corporate line here, but it’s bs.

Anecdotally the “power users” of AI are the ones who have succumbed to AI psychosis and write blog posts about orchestrating 30 agents to review PRs when one would’ve done just fine.

The actual power users have an API contract and don’t give a shit about whatever subscription shenanigans Claude Max is pulling today

Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

#336

Post by Tade0 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #292
rileymichael wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you should limit your output (manual or assisted) to a level that is well under your understanding ceiling. Kernighan’s Law states that debugging is twice as hard as writing. how do you ever intend on debugging something you can’t even write?

It's simple, they'll just let the LLM debug it! This is why I believe the need for actually good engineers will never go away because LLMs will never be perfect.

Exactly. It's a force multiplier - sometimes the direction is wrong.

Same week I went into a deep rabbit hole with Claude and at no point did it try to steer me away from pursuing this direction, even though it was a dead end.

Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

#337

Post by dnaranjo »

Aperocky wrote: post #56

In my opinion cramming invisible subagents are entirely wrong, models suffer information collapse as they will all tend to agree with each other and then produce complete garbage. Good for Anthropic though as that's metered token usage. Instead, orchestrate all agents visibly together, even when there is hierarchy. Messages should be auditable and topography can be carefully refined and tuned for the task at hand. Ot…

[dead]

Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

#338

Post by throwaway613746 »

quietsegfault wrote: post #260
ctoth wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I’m not sure being confrontational like this really helps your case. There are real people responding, and even if you’re frustrated it doesn’t pay off to take that frustration out on the people willing to help.

[dead]

Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

#339

Post by FergusArgyll »

lelanthran wrote: post #207
phillipcarter wrote: post #11

Maybe it's because I spend a lot of time breaking up tasks beforehand to be highly specific and narrow, but I really don't run into issues like this at all. A trivial example: whenever CC suggests doing more than one thing in a planning mode, just have it focus on each task and subtask separately, bounding each one by a commit. Each commit is a push/deploy as well, leading to a shitload of pushes and deployments, but…

> Maybe it's because I spend a lot of time breaking up tasks beforehand to be highly specific and narrow, but I really don't run into issues like this at all. I'm looking at the ticket opened, and you can't really be claiming that someone who did such a methodical deep dive into the issue, and presented a ton of supporting context to understand the problem, and further patiently collected evidence for this... does no…

The methodical guy confused visible reasoning traces in the UI with reasoning tokens & used claude to hallucinate a report

Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

#340

Post by stldev »

dc_giant wrote: post #246
bcherny wrote: post #209

Hey all, Boris from the Claude Code team here. I just responded on the issue, and cross-posting here for input. --- Hi, thanks for the detailed analysis. Before I keep going, I wanted to say I appreciate the depth of thinking & care that went into this. There's a lot here, I will try to break it down a bit. These are the two core things happening: > `redact-thinking-2026-02-12` This beta header hides thinking from th…

All right so what do I need to do so it does its job again? Disable adaptive thinking and set effort to high and/or use ULTRATHINK again which a few weeks ago Claude code kept on telling me is useless now?

You can't. This is Anthropic leveraging their dials, and ignoring their customers for weeks.

Switch providers.

Anecdotally, I've had no luck attempting to revert to prior behavior using either high/max level thinking (opus) or prompting. The web interface for me though doesn't seem problematic when using opus extended.

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