Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

451–460 of 829 posts

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

#451
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is it "doomed"?

The cost far outweighs the profits.

i am already on api tokens for the chinese open source models and no subscriptions. these are all available in the original form open source and priced above the inference cost. i think this is the long term option.

zero degradation in speed or quality seen.

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

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use a different tool or stop vibe coding, it’s not that hard. I really don’t understand the logic of filing bug reports against the black box of AI

People file tickets against closed source "black box" systems all the time. You could just as well say: Stop using MS SQL, just use a different tool, it's not that hard.

Equivalent of filing a ticket against the slot machine when you lose more often than expected

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

#453
post #429

Fascinating, I thought I was losing my mind. Claude CLI has been telling me I should go to bed, or that it's late, let's call it here, etc, and then I look at the stop-phrase-guard.sh [1] and I'm seeing quite a few of these. I thought it was because I accidentally allowed Claude to know my deadline, and it started spitting out all sorts of things like "we only have N days left, let's put this aside for now," etc. Jus…

[deleted]

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

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Whatever makes you feel better about yourself, I guess. My account history on this topic is pretty easily searchable, but I guess it's easier to make driveby comments like this than be informed.

Lol the only thing that looking at your comment history brought is that you repeatedly bring up your long comment history.

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

#455
post #204

I wish they had a "and we won't screw you in two weeks" plan at, say, 5x the price. It's worth it for my business, I'd pay it. Should I switch back to API pricing? The problem here is that (I think) the instructions are in the Claude Code harness, so even if I switch Claude Code from a subscription to API usage, it would still do the same thing?

If you're using API pricing, then you can bring your own harness with full visibility/oversight of the prompting.

Perhaps that does sort most of the issues? I'm not convinced because some of them look deep and related to opaque pre-injection on their end.

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

#456

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

That's the nature of abstraction. Everything you create on a computer is built on a towering stack of black boxes.

yet some abstractions are more deterministic than others

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

#457

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…

How do you guys decide which settings should be configurable via environment variables but not settings files and which settings should be configurable via settings files but not environment variables?

[flagged]

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

#458

I've subscribed today to use Claude Cowork. Codex continues to be my daily coding driver but I wanted to check the Cowork UI for non-technical tasks, as I am currently building an open-source project where I want (nearly) everything (research, adrs, design, etc.) to be a file. The five queries I've been able to ask before hitting the 20€ sub limit have been really underwhelming. The research I asked for was not exhau…

My impression is that Codex is vastly superior, but perhaps it's a matter of specific expertise on technologies used. It's also the case that for C/C++ some Chinese models do well enough that with my supervision I can have them get the work done.

I don't give them large tasks that i wouldn't be able to work on myself, so that's maybe part of it.

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

#459
post #434
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you guys manage regressions as a whole with every new model update? A massive test set of e2e problem solving seeing how the models compare?

Remember when they shipped that version that didn't actually start/ run? At work we were goofing on them a bit, until I said "Wait how did their tests even run on that?" And we realized whatever their CI/CD process is, it wasn't at the time running on the actual release binary... I can imagine their variation on how most engineers think about CI/CD probably is indicative of some other patterns (or lack of traditional…

about once a week I get a claude "auto update" that fails to start with some bun error on our linux machines. It's beyond laughable.

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

#460
post #257

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…

Do you guys realize that everyone is switching to Codex because Claude Code is practically unusable now, even on a Max subscription? You ask it to do tasks, and it does 1/10th of them. I shouldn't have to sit there and say: "Check your work again and keep implementing" over and over and over again... Such a garbage experience. Does Anthropic actually care? Or is it irrelevant to your company because you think you'll…

Or, ask it to make a plan, and it makes a good plan! It explicitly notes how validation is to take place on each stage!

And then does every stage without running any of the validation. It's your agent's plan, it should probably be generated in a way that your own agent can follow it.

Post reply on HN