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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

#371

Its so silly everyone being dependent on a black box like this

We are surrounded by black boxes we depend on - have been for at least a century.

Arguably political systems have generated similar convolution and lack of complete insight or oversight for much longer, and sometimes I wonder if markets are composed of complex, emergent components which no one truly understands as well.

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

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the contents of the issue, this seems like a fairly clear default effort issue. Would love your input if there's something specific that you think is unaddressed.

I commented on the GH issue, but Ive had effort set to 'high' for however long its been available and had a marked decline since... checks notes... about 23 March according to slack messages I sent to the team to see if I was alone (I wasnt). EDIT: actually the first glaring issue I remember was on 20 March where it hallucinated a full sha from a short sha while updating my github actions version pinning. That follow…

It hallucinated a GUID for me instead of using the one in the RFC for webscokets. Fun part was that the beginning was the same. Then it hardcoded the unit tests to be green with the wrong GUID.

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

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a setting if you'd like to continue to see it: showThinkingSummaries. See the docs: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#available-settings

> As I noted in the comment, Piece of free PR advice: this is fine in a nerd fight, but don't do this in comments that represent a company. Just repeat the relevant information.

Piece of free advice towards a better civilisation: people who didn't even read the comment they're replying to shouldn't be rewarded for their laziness.

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

#374

I've noticed this as well. I had some time off in late January/early February. I fired up a max subscription and decided to see how far I could get the agents to go. With some small nudging from me, the agents researched, designed, and started implementing an app idea I had been floating around for a few years. I had intentionally not given them much to work with, but simply guided them on the problem space and my co…

Same experience here. I was working on some easily testable problem and there was a simple task left. In January I was able to create 90% of the project with Claude, now I cannot make it to pass the last 10% that is just a few enums and some match. Codex was able to do it easily.

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

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was not aware the default effort had changed to medium until the quality of output nosedived. This cost me perhaps a day of work to rectify. I now ensure effort is set to max and have not had a terrible session since. Please may I have a "always try as hard as you can" mode ?

That's /effort max!

You cannot control the effort setting sub-agents use and you also cannot use /effort max as a default (outside of using an alias).

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

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been able to build plenty of stuff with a pretty plain emacs + ghci for years...neither are black boxes. Except maybe my brain driving them.

They run on an operating system you probably don't know all the inner workings of. And that runs on a chip with trillions of transistors.

Yeah so? Claude isn't an OS. It's the thing making my code. I don't want my codebase to be some bytecode adjacent thing that LLMs operate on.

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

#377

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…

Hi Boris, thanks for addressing this and providing feedback quickly. I noticed the same issue. My question is, is it enough to do /efforts high, or should I also add CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING to my settings?

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

#378

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…

> You can also use the ULTRATHINK keyword to use high effort for a single turn First I've heard that ultrathink was back. Much quieter walkback of https://decodeclaude.com/ultrathink-deprecated/

Pretty sure it's still gone and you should be using effort level now for this.

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

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wanted to say I appreciate the depth of thinking & care that went into this. The irony lol. The whole ticket is just AI-generated. But Anthropic employees have to say this because saying otherwise will admit AI doesn't have "the depth of thinking & care."

Ticket is AI generated but from what I've seen these guys have a harness to capture/analyze CC performance, so effort was made on the user side for sure.

There is this 3rd party tracker: https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/

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

#380

That analysis is pretty brutal. It's very disconcerting that they can sell access to a high quality model then just stealthily degrade it over time, effectively pulling the rug from under their customers.

Perhaps the subscription part of the business is so heavily subsidized that they have no choice but to reduce the cost.
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