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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

#591

Post by dreadnip »

notatallshaw wrote: post #361
rafaelmn wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ticket is AI generated but from what I've seen these guys have a harness to capture/analyze CC performance, so effort was made on the user side for sure.

The note at the end of the post indicates the user asked Claude to review their own chat logs. It's impossible to tell if Claude used or built a a performance harness or just wrote those numbers based on vibes.

The whole issue is very obviously LLM generated nonsense. The stats are way too specific and reinforce the user’ bias in typical hallucinated fashion.

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

#592

Post by [deleted] »

PeterStuer wrote: post #587

Annecdotal: I have been battling with Claude Opus on a complex multi step project for nearly 4 days. The initial research plan was sound. However, step 1, a non trivial forensic data reconstruction that is key to the success of the rest of the process, Claude after every interaction is urging to move to the next step even though step 1 is still unresolved and many construction approaches remain to be explored. It cam…

[deleted]

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

#593

Post by rstuart4133 »

noisy_boy wrote: post #507
kator wrote: 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…

I just saw it this weekend; "It is quite late and we have accomplished a lot. Get some rest and we can pick it up later". Not bad advice but then not it's place. Also trying to steer me away from a tough issue towards a low hanging fruit.

I got a similar response. It looked wrong on several levels. So I asked it: if it knew the current time, and if it hard learnt when I retire.

It claimed it didn't know either.

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

#594

Post by sumedh »

joshribakoff wrote: post #390

> We exclusively use 1M internally, so we're dogfooding it all day That is so out of touch. Customers do not exclusively use 1M. This is like a fronted developer shipping tons of unused Mb and being oblivious because they are on fast internet themselves.

They should ideally have automated tests with the option models and smaller context window to check there are no regressions.

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

#596

Post by healthy_throw »

Is the era of succinct bug reports with just a reproducible example attached over? Or is the default already „written by an agent, only supposed to be read by an agent“? Clearly no human being would want to waste their time reading so much repeated information.

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

#597

Post by gck1 »

faitswulff wrote: post #513
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

That probably matters for some scenarios, but I have yet to find one where thinking tokens didn't hint at the root cause of the failure.

All of my unsupervised worker agents have sidecars that inject messages when thinking tokens match some heuristics. For example, any time opus says "pragmatic", its instant Esc Esc > "Pragmatic fix is always wrong, do the Correct fix", also whenever "pre-existing issue" appears (it's never pre-existing).

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

#599

Post by triage8004 »

CjHuber wrote: post #551
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 honestly am very disappointed with this. I've only learned about CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING and showThinkingSummaries: true from this post. I've been wondering for a while where the summaries went and am always hoping like roulette that it thinks a lot. No wonder if there suddently is an "adaptive thinking" mode. I would have opted out 2 months ago if it was documented or communicated in any way publicly…

I'm now confused because I used to use ultrathink, went away as well as the chain of reasoning prompts, recently changed to high or extra thinking, now this is back?

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

#600

Post by richardjennings »

Avamander wrote: post #424
richardjennings wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was not aware the default effort had changed to medium until the quality of output nosedived. This cost me perhaps a day of work to rectify. I now ensure effort is set to max and have not had a terrible session since. Please may I have a "always try as hard as you can" mode ?

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 think over-thinking is only solved by thinking more, not less. This is only viable once some intelligence threshold is reached, which I think Anthropic has borderline achieved.
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