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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

#511

Post by zenoware »

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…

> CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING

Why not just give people the abiltiy ot set a default thinking level instead of manually setting it to `max` all the time.

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

#512

Post by jitl »

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.

building for the loud users on a forum is generally a losing move. if we built notion for angry HN users, we'd probably be a great obsidian competitor with end to end encryption, have zero ai features, and make zero money.

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

#513

Post by faitswulff »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #509
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…

> Under the hood, by setting this header we avoid needing thinking summaries, which reduces latency. You can opt out of it with `showThinkingSummaries: true` in your settings.json (see [docs]( https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#available-settings )). Can I just see the actual thinking (not summarized) so that I can see the actual thinking without a latency cost? I do really need to see the thinking in some form…

Anthropic's position is that thinking tokens aren't actually faithful to the internal logic that the LLM is using, which may be one reason why they started to exclude them:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/reasoning-models-dont-say...

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

#514

Post by another_twist »

Is it just me that I simply don't care ? I never one-shot these tasks, always provide a breakdown and always give the AI straightforward tasks that would take too much typing. The approach seems to work just fine regardless of the model. If it gets stuck, I usually take over and do the task myself. Also allows me to plan for throughput rather than latency - i.e. start 2-3 small tasks in parallel and do 1 complicated task or planning myself. It works whether I use codex or claude. I lean more towards codex since its cheaper. Even aider gets good results this way.

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

#515

Post by another_twist »

zamalek wrote: post #417

> Ignores instructions > Claims "simplest fixes" that are incorrect > Does the opposite of requested activities > Claims completion against instructions I thought it was just me. I'm continuously interrupting it with "no, that's not what I said" - being ignored sometimes 3 times; is Claude at the intellectual level of a teenager now? I've noted an increased tendency towards laziness prior to these "simple fix" proble…

I've noticed laziness in claude repeatedly. It sometimes takes the shortest way out even when asked explicitly to do the "right" thing.

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

#516

Post by giancarlostoro »

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 only ever use high effort, the only thing I've run into sometimes I ask Claude to do every item on a list of items, and not stop until they're all done, it finishes maybe 80% of them then says "I've stopped doing things" for no reasonable reason. I don't need it to run for 18 hours nonstop, but 10 or 20 minutes more it would have kept going for wouldn't have hurt, especially when I am usually on Claude Code during off-hours, and on the Max plan.

Part of me wants to give lower "effort" a try, but I always wind up with a mess, I don't even like using Haiku or Sonnet, it feels like Haiku goofs, Haiku and Sonnet are better as subagent models where Opus tells them what to do and they do it from my experience.

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

#517

Post by charlie0 »

anhner wrote: post #456
Rudybega wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

and all are wrong, but some are more useful than others

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

#518

Post by BoorishBears »

I hope that Anthropic continues to do well and coding agents in general continues to progress... but I also hope Claude Code implodes dramatically and completely so we can get a ground up rebuild with sound engineering.

Every week it seems like we're getting closer.

Bonus: A high profile case might end people fixating on how long they can go without writing any code. Which makes about as much sense as a mechanic fixating on how long they go between snapped bolts without a torque wrench.

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

#519

Post by alasano »

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.

Last time he made the front page he said the same things.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46978710

Then proceeded to fix nothing whatsoever.

It really does feel like he's just doing mostly what he wants and talking on behalf of vague made up users while real users complain on GitHub issues.

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

#520

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

Thanks for your report.

> a silently-introduced limitation of the subscription plan

It is a fact that the API consumers aren't affected by this?

> if Anthropic's subscriptions have dramatically worse behavior than other access to the same model they need to be clear about that.

Absolutely agreed.

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