An update on recent Claude Code quality reports • Hacker News Board

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#511

Post by BoorishBears » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 5:16 AM UTC

sobjornstad wrote: post #470

thomassmith65 wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And still are gaslighting: We take reports about degradation very seriously. We never intentionally degrade our models [...] On March 4, we changed Claude Code's default reasoning effort from high to medium Anthropic is the best company of its kind, but that is badly worded PR.

Is adding JPEG compression to your software “intentional degradation” of the software? I wouldn't say providing a selectable option to use a faster, cheaper version of something qualifies as “degradation”. It is certainly true that they did a poor job communicating this change to users (I did not know that the default was “high” before they introduced it, I assumed they had added an effort level both above and below…

Is default enabling JPEG compression to your software's output because the compression saves you money “intentional degradation” of the software?

I would say it does, and I'd loathe to use anything made by people who'd couch that change to defaults as "providing a selectable option to use a faster, cheaper version".

Yuck.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#512

Post by sreekanth850 » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 5:27 AM UTC

Who’s going to pay for the exorbitant number of tokens Claude used without delivering any meaningful outcome? I spent many sessions getting zero results, and when I posted about it on their subreddit, all I got were personal attacks from bots and fanboys. I instantly cancelled my subscription and moved to Codex.

Also, it may be a coincidence, that the article was published just before the GPT 5.5 launch, and then they restored the original model while releasing a PR statement claiming it was due to bugs.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#513

Post by troupo » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 5:36 AM UTC

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #438

abustamam wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> users should be curious and actively attempting to understand how it works Have you ever talked with users? > this is an endless job Indeed. If we spend all our time learning what changed with all our tooling when it changes without proper documentation then we spend all our working lives keeping up instead of doing our actual jobs.

There are general users of the average SaaS, and there are claude code users. There's no doubt in my mind that our expectations should be somewhat higher for CC users re: memory. I'm personally not completely convinced that cache eviction should be part of their thought process while using CC, but it's not _that_ much of a stretch.

Anthropic literally advertises long sessions, 1M context, high reasoning etc.

And then their vibe-coders tell us that we are to blame for using the product exactly as advertised: https://x.com/lydiahallie/status/2039800718371307603 while silently changing how the product works.

Please stop defending hapless innocent corporations.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#514

Post by xpe » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 5:39 AM UTC

thomassmith65 wrote: post #471

xpe wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To my eye, gaslighting is a serious accusation. Wikipedia's first line matches how I think of it: "Gaslighting is the manipulation of someone into questioning their perception of reality." Did I miss something? I'm only looking at primary sources to start. Not Reddit. Not The Register. Official company communications. Did Anthropic tell users i.e. "you are wrong, your experience is not worse."? If so, that would reac…

I'd rather not speak too poorly of Anthropic, because - to the extent I can bring myself to like a tech company - I like Anthropic. That said, the copy uses "we never intentionally degrade our models" to mean something like "we never degrade one facet of our models unless it improves some other facet of our models" . This is a cop out, because it is what users suspected and complained about. What users want - regardl…

It seems to me you dropped the "gaslighting" claim without owning it. I personally find this frustrating. I prefer when people own up to their mistakes. Like many people, to me, "gaslighting" is just not a term you throw around lightly. Then you shifted to "cop out". (This feels like the motte and bailey.) But I don't think "cop out" is a phrase that works either...

Some terms:... The model is the thing that runs inference. Claude Code is not a model, it is harness. To summarize Anthropic's recent retrospective, their technical mistakes were about the harness.

I'm not here to 'defend' Anthropic's mistakes. They messed up technically. And their communication could have been better. But they didn't gaslight. And on balance, I don't see net evidence that they've "copped out" (by which I mean mischaracterized what happened). I see more evidence of the opposite. I could be wrong about any of this, but I'm here to talk about it in the clearest, best way I can. If anyone wants to point to primary sources, I'll read them.

I want more people to actually spend a few minutes and actually give the explanation offered by Anthropic a try. What if isolating the problems was hard to figure out? We all know hindsight is 20/20 and yet people still armchair quarterback.

At the risk of sounding preachy, I'm here to say "people, we need to do better". Hacker News is a special place, but we lose it a little bit every time we don't in a quality effort.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#515

Post by atq2119 » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 5:40 AM UTC

bontaq wrote: post #504

jannyfer wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure that it’s O(N) with caching but this illustrates the N^2 part: https://blog.exe.dev/expensively-quadratic

If there was an exponential cost, I would expect to see some sort of pricing based on that. I would also expect to see it taking exponentially longer to process a prompt. I don't believe LLMs work like that. The "scary quadratic" referenced in what you linked seems to be pointing out that cache reads increase as your conversation continues? If I'm running a database keeping track of a conversation, and each time it w…

Yes, that is indeed O(N^2). Which, by the way, is not exponential.

Also by the way, caching does not make LLM inference linear. It's still quadratic, but the constant in front of the quadratic term becomes a lot smaller.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#516

Post by troupo » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 5:41 AM UTC

bcherny wrote: post #410

artdigital wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also a Claude Code user from day 1 here, back from when it wasn't included in the Pro/Max subscriptions yet, and I was absolutely not aware of this either. Your explanation makes sense, but I naively was also under the impression that re-using older existing conversations that I had open would just continue the conversation as is and not be a treated as a full cache miss. My biggest learning here is the 1 hour ca…

Yep, agree. We added a little "/clear to save XXX tokens" notice in the bottom right, and will keep iterating on this. Thanks for being an early user!

Instead of showing actual usage, costs and cache status you spent two months denying the issue even exists, making the product silently worse, and now you're "iterating on this"

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#517

Post by bcherny » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 5:49 AM UTC

abtinf wrote: post #376

bcherny wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, Boris from the team here. We did both -- we did a number of UI iterations (eg. improving thinking loading states, making it more clear how many tokens are being downloaded, etc.). But we also reduced the default effort level after evals and dogfooding. The latter was not the right decision, so we rolled it back after finding that UX iterations were insufficient (people didn't understand to use /effort to increas…

You didn’t anticipate most people stick with defaults?

We anticipated the default would be the best option for most people. We were wrong, so we reverted the default.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#518

Post by troupo » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 5:50 AM UTC

trinsic2 wrote: post #413

bobkb wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Resuming sessions after more than 1 hour is a very common workflow that many teams are following. It will be great if this is considered as an expected behaviour and design the UX around it. Perhaps you are not realising the fact that Claude code has replaced the shells people were using (ie now bash is replaced with a Claude code session).

I think thats a bad idea. It seems like expecting to have a prompt open like this, accumulating context puts a load on the back end. Its one of those things that is a bad habit. Like trying to maintain open tabs in a browser as a way to keep your work flow up to date when what you really should be doing is taking notes of your process and working from there. I have project folders/files and memory stored for each ses…

> I think thats a bad idea. It seems like expecting to have a prompt open like this, accumulating context puts a load on the back end

Let's see what Boris Cherny himself and other Anthropic vibe-coders say about this:

https://x.com/bcherny/status/2044847849662505288

Opus 4.7 loves doing complex, long-running tasks like deep research, refactoring code, building complex features, iterating until it hits a performance benchmark.

https://x.com/bcherny/status/2007179858435281082

For very long-running tasks, I will either (a) prompt Claude to verify its work with a background agent when it's done... so Claude can cook without being blocked on me.

https://x.com/trq212/status/2033097354560393727

Opus 4.6 is incredibly reliable at long running tasks

https://x.com/trq212/status/2032518424375734646

The long context window means fewer compactions and longer-running sessions. I've found myself starting new sessions much less frequently with 1 million context.

https://x.com/trq212/status/2032245598754324968

I used to be a religious /clear user, but doing much less now, imo 4.6 is quite good across long context windows

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I could go on

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#519

Post by bcherny » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 5:51 AM UTC

dbeardsl wrote: post #162

bcherny wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. Normally, when you have a conversation with Claude Code, if your convo has N messages, then (N-1) messages hit prompt cache -- everything but the latest message. The challenge is: when you let a session idle for >1 hour, when you come back to it and send a prompt, it will be a full cache miss, all N messages. We noticed that this corner case led to outsized token costs for u…

I appreciate the reply, but I was never under the impression that gaps in conversations would increase costs nor reduce quality. Both are surprising and disappointing. I feel like that is a choice best left up to users. i.e. "Resuming this conversation with full context will consume X% of your 5-hour usage bucket, but that can be reduced by Y% by dropping old thinking logs"

Yes! This is what we’re trying next.

Re: An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

#520

Post by tikkabhuna » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 5:53 AM UTC

jeremyjh wrote: post #394

sharts wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t make sense to pay more for cache warming. Your session for the most part is already persisted. Why would it be reasonable to pay again to continue where you left off at any time in the future?

Because it significantly increases actual costs for Anthropic. If they ignored this then all users who don’t do this much would have to subsidize the people who do.

I’m coming at this as a complete Claude amateur, but caching for any other service is an optimisation for the company and transparent for the user. I don’t think I’ve ever used a service and thought “oh there’s a cache miss. Gotta be careful”.

I completely agree that it’s infeasible for them to cache for long periods of time, but they need to surface that information in the tools so that we can make informed decisions.