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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

#571

Post by thatxliner »

aurareturn wrote: post #538
mikepurvis wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disconcerting for sure, but from a business point of view you can understand where they're at; afaiui they're still losing money on basically every query and simultaneously under huge pressure to show that they can (a) deliver this product sustainably at (b) a price point that will be affordable to basically everyone (eg, similar market penetration to smartphones). The constraints of (b) limit them from raising the p…

afaiui they're still losing money on basically every query Source?

i mean you could just search up "is Anthropic making profit" and most sources will say no.

There's this one source on Reddit which calculated that Anthropic has been subsidizing their costs by 32x

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

#572

Post by brainwad »

grey-area wrote: post #523
faitswulff wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

So like many of the promises from AI companies, reported chain of thought is not actually true (see results below). I suppose this is unsurprising given how they function. Is chain of thought even added to the context or is it extraneous babble providing a plausible post-hoc justification? People certainly seem to treat it as it is presented, as a series of logical steps leading to an answer. ‘After checking that the…

I mean, obviously, it's not going to be a faithful representation of the actual thinking. The model isn't aware of how it thinks any more than you are aware how your neurons fire. But it does quantitatively improve performance on complex tasks.

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

#573

Post by rib3ye »

wonnage wrote: post #328
vecter wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From this reply, it seems that it has nothing to do with `/effort`: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796#issue... I hope you take this seriously. I'm considering moving my company off of Claude Code immediately. Closing the GH issue without first engaging with the OP is just a slap in the face, especially given how much hard work they've done on your behalf.

The OP “bug report” is a wall of AI slop generated from looking at its own chat transcripts

It's only slop if it's wrong or irrelevant.

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

#574

Post by siva7 »

armchairhacker wrote: post #134

Yet https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/ says no issue. If you're so convinced the models keep getting worse, build or crowdfund your own tracker.

why should we trust this random bench? i'm usually more sympathetic towards the "it's you who is holding it wrong" crowd but given how anthropic deceived customers recently and that i am a heavy power user with strong insights into many of these products i also can attest the pattern from the gh issue.

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

#575

Post by pjmlp »

aurareturn wrote: post #543
pjmlp wrote: post #52

I am just waiting for everything to implode so that we can do away with those KPIs.

Well, this event indicates that it won't implode anytime soon. I'm certain that they messed with the model and default settings so they could reduce compute. The world doesn't have enough compute.

Our war mongers are reducing the need for compute even further, if that is the point.

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

#576

Post by stingraycharles »

jacquesm wrote: post #547
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…

Textbook example of how to respond to your customers, kudos.

Is it?

I’m of the opinion that there’s more to it; obviously the thinking tokens aren’t having any reasonable impact on latency, given that bandwidth is hardly the bottleneck.

Seems more and more that Anthropic et al don’t want to give up their secret sauce / internals (which is their full right) and this is a step towards that direction, and it’s being presented as “reduces latency”.

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

#577

Post by stingraycharles »

thomascountz wrote: post #557
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…

This beta header hides thinking from the UI, since most people don't look at it. How is this measured?

And I wonder how redacting them reduces latency, as it sure as hell doesn’t make the responses any faster and bandwidth isn’t the issue here.

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

#578

Post by ozozozd »

rubicon33 wrote: post #86
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #36

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

You will literally build nothing but the most primitive of devices unless you accept black boxes. In fact I'd argue its one of humanities great strengths that we can build on top of the tools others have built, without having to understand them at the same level it took to develop them.

Yeah someone should’ve told that to Donald (Knuth)

/s

For those who don’t know, Knuth implemented the typesetting system TeX just to make sure his book’s typesetting was correct.

You can pretty much only innovate when you reject the blackbox and decide to make a better one.

Otherwise you’re likely implementing something you could probably get off-the-shelf, which is ok, but also something that you could just… not implement.

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

#579

Post by dinobones »

svnt wrote: post #527
Avamander wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the maximum effort mode kind-of wraps around and starts becoming "desperate" to the extent of lazy or a monkey's paw, similar to how lower effort modes or a poor prompt.

I’m going in circles. Let me take a step back and try something completely different. The answer is a clean refactor. Wait, the simplest fix is the same hack I tried 45 minutes ago but in a different context. Let me just try that. Wait,

Wait, the linter re-ordered the file. Let me restore it to the previous state.

whisper: There is no linter.

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

#580

Post by germandiago »

giwook wrote: post #32

I wonder how much of this is simply needing to adapt one's workflows to models as they evolve and how much of this is actual degradation of the model, whether it's due to a version change or it's at the inference level. Also, everyone has a different workflow. I can't say that I've noticed a meaningful change in Claude Code quality in a project I've been working on for a while now. It's an LLM in the end, and even wi…

> I wonder how much of this is simply needing to adapt one's workflows to models as they evolve and how much of this is actual degradation of the model,

I also wonder how much people are willing to adapt to non-reliability for the sake of laziness instead of, at some point, do a proper take the lead and solve a problem if you have the knowledge + realiable resoources.

It seems to me, the way you phrase it, that anything a human comes up with when coding must go through an LLM. There are times it helps, there are tasks it performs, but I also found quite often tasks for which if I had done it myself in the first place I would have skipped a lot of confusion, back and forth, time wasting and would have had a better coded, simpler solution.

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