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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

#471

Post by HumanOstrich »

nickvec wrote: post #357
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…

Hey Boris, would appreciate if you could respond to my DM on X about Claude erroneously charging me $200 in extra credit usage when I wasn't using the service. Haven't heard back from Claude Support in over a month and I am getting a bit frustrated.

Did the receipt show it as being a gift? There's a lot of fraud happening the past few months with Claude Code Gift purchases. Anthropic support is ignoring all of it and just not responding to support requests.

Happened to a close friend of mine. A bit of digging revealed the same pattern with fraudulent gift purchases for several other people before I stopped looking. They were also being ignored by Anthropic support. One since January.

Apparently they're so short on inference resources they can't run their support bots. Maybe banning usage of Claude Code with Claude will allow them to catch up on those gift fraud tickets.

Took a long time for me to reach this level of scathing. It is not unwarranted.

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

#472

Post by marcyb5st »

zmmmmm wrote: post #449

Obviously it's entirely unprovable but it all aligns in very suspicious ways with a compelling narrative: Anthropic simply can't actually scale Claude Code to meet the opportunity right now. Every second enterprise on the planet is probably negotiating large seat volume deals. It's a race for survival against the other players. The sales team is making huge promises engineering and ops can't fulfil. So - they first f…

I believe they can't afford anymore to subsidize inference with VC money or that they are trying to get their balance sheet in order for an IPO.

So they could be trying to tighten the thinking budget (to decrease tokens per request) or to lobotomize the model (to have cheaper tokens). I mean, no-one is really sure how much a 200 dollars/month plan actually costs Anthropic, but the consensus is "more than that" and that might be coming to an end.

This explanation falls well in line with the recent outrage about out of quotas error that people were reporting for the cheaper (or free) plans.

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

#473

Post by potsandpans »

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…

For anyone reading this and wondering where the truth could possibly be:

We can't really know what the truth is, because Anthropic is tightly controlling how you interact with their product and provides their service through opaque processes. So all we can do is speculate. And in that speculation there's a lot of room (for the company) to bullshit or provide equally speculative responses, and (for outsiders) to search for all plausible explanations within the solution space. So there's not much to action on. We're effectively stuck with imprecise heuristics and vibes.

But consider what we do know: the promise is that Anthropic is providing a black-box service that solves large portions of the SDLC. Maybe all of it. They are "making the market" here, and their company growth depends on this bet. This is why these processes are opaque: they have to be. Anthropic, OpenAI and a few others see this as a zero-sum game. The winner "owns" the SDLC (and really, if they get their way the entire PDLC). So the competitive advantage lies in tightly controlling and tweaking their hidden parameters to squeeze as much value and growth as possible.

The downside is that we're handing over the magic for convenience and cost. A lot of people are maybe rightly criticizing the OP of the issue because they're staking their business on Claude Code in a way that's very risky. But this is essentially what these companies are asking for. The business model end game is: here's the token factory, we control it and you pay for the pleasure of using it. Effectively, rent-seeking for software development. And if something changes and it disrupts your business, you're just using it incorrectly. Try turning effort to max.

Reading responses like this from these company representatives makes me increasingly uneasy because it's indicative of how much of writing software is being taken out from under our feet. The glimmer of promise in all of this though is that we are seeing equity in the form of open source. Maybe the answer is: use pi-mono, a smattering of self hosted and open weights models (gemma4, kimi, minimax are extremely capable) and escalate to the private lab models through api calls when encountering hard problems.

Let the best model win, not the best end to end black box solution.

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

#474

Post by dboreham »

p1necone wrote: post #425
noxa wrote: post #179

I'm the author of the report in there. The stop-phrase-guard didn't get attached but here it is: https://gist.github.com/benvanik/ee00bd1b6c9154d6545c63e06a3... You can watch for these yourself - they are strong indicators of shallow thinking. If you still have logs from Jan/Feb you can point claude at that issue and have it go look for the same things (read:edit ratio shifts, thinking character shifts before the red…

The "this test failure is preexisting so I'm going to ignore it" thing has been happening a lot for me lately, it's so annoying. Unless it makes a change and then immediately runs tests and it's obvious from the name/contents that the failing test is directly related to the change that was made it will ignore it and not try to fix.

That said I've worked with several humans who did/said the exact same thing.

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

#475

Post by [deleted] »

stldev wrote: post #340
dc_giant wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#476

Post by bityard »

hyperbovine wrote: post #432
bityard wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my (admittedly limited) experience as well. LLMs are great at initial bring-up, good at finding bugs, bad at adding features. But I'm optimistic that this will gradually improve in time.

The only regularity I can discern in contemporary online debates about LLMs is that for every viewpoint expressed, with probability one someone else will write in with the diametrically opposite experience. Today it’s my turn to be that person. Large scientific code base with a bunch of nontrivial, handwritten modules accomplishing distinct, but structurally similar in terms of the underlying computation, tasks. Poin…

Thanks for the counterpoint, interesting to hear that things are better than I have experienced so far. :)

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

#477

Post by wild_egg »

bazhand wrote: post #438
richardjennings wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

export CLAUDE_CODE_EFFORT_LEVEL=max

Does that apply to subagents?

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

#478

Post by [deleted] »

taylorfinley wrote: post #467
stldev wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've actually switched back to the web chat UI and copying Python files for much of my work because CC has been so nerfed.

[deleted]

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

#479

Post by SkyPuncher »

kator wrote: post #445

I put together a quick audit to check for "early landing" messages[1] using jq, ripgrep, and the messages[2] flagged in the stop guard script. I have noticed a trend in these sessions asking more and more about calling it a day, "it's getting late," and other phrases. I sort of assumed it was some kind of "load shedding" on Anthropic's side. My audit of 80 sessions was interesting. Sorry, I won't share details, but I…

Those load shedding statements are infuriating. I’ve literal had sessions where we just get through planning a giant feature and I say “get started” with the response being “okay, we’ll pic up tomorrow “

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

#480

Post by superfrank »

aerhardt wrote: post #342

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…

I also have both and also use Codex as my daily drive. I still vastly prefer it to CC both for the quality of the code it writes and much better limits, but in this last week, I feel like it's gotten much dumber as well. I normally bounce back and forth between 5.3 Codex high and 5.4 high depending on the task and I've started finding so many mistakes in 5.3 Codex's code which is a major change from even just a few weeks ago. 5.4 high still gets the job done, but even there, I feel like it's taking more steering and input on my part for even simple tasks.
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