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Claude Code is being dumbed down?

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Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#651

Post by xigoi »

andai wrote: post #632
bcherny wrote: post #386

Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. I wanted to take a sec to explain the context for this change. One of the hard things about building a product on an LLM is that the model frequently changes underneath you. Since we introduced Claude Code almost a year ago, Claude has gotten more intelligent, it runs for longer periods of time, and it is able to more agentically use more tools. This is one of the magical th…

Also open source CC already. And stop banning 3rd party harnesses please. Thanks Anthropic, your actual moat is goodwill. Remember that.

> Anthropic, your actual moat is goodwill.

You mean the company that DDoSed websites to train their model?

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#652

Post by grim_io »

jtrn wrote: post #633
thunfischtoast wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? It's not about subjective claims, it's about a very real feature getting removed (file reads showing the filepath and numbers of lines read).

This is exactly what I am talking about. Let me try to explain. I am interested in the more abstract and general concept of: "People excessively feel that things are worse, even if they are not." And I see this A LOT in the AI/LLM area. For instance, the claim that Claude Code, on the UX/DX side, is dumbed down seems to me absolutely not a reasonable take. The "hiding" of the file name being read is no longer being s…

It's not a narrative, it's an experienced reality.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#653

Post by jtrn »

grim_io wrote: post #652
jtrn wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what I am talking about. Let me try to explain. I am interested in the more abstract and general concept of: "People excessively feel that things are worse, even if they are not." And I see this A LOT in the AI/LLM area. For instance, the claim that Claude Code, on the UX/DX side, is dumbed down seems to me absolutely not a reasonable take. The "hiding" of the file name being read is no longer being s…

It's not a narrative, it's an experienced reality.

I know you think that's a clever comeback, but it's not; it's just a shift in what level of analysis one does.

It's an experienced reality indeed, but THEN you create a narrative based on that. Obviously.

Experienced reality is, by definition, subjective and affected by filters for what you can, and how, experience things.

For instance, you can actually and truly experience something as bad, and then create a narrative around that. And you can be right, or you can be wrong in the narrative. Some narcissists experience themselves as a victim and unfairly treated, but everybody around them thinks the victim narrative is wrong, because they can clearly see that they are primarily at fault for their own situation.

So you just shifted the question to: "Why do people have a bias towards experience something as worsening, regardless of objective measures of quality"?

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#654

Post by wild_egg »

bcherny wrote: post #419
extr wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I mentioned this in the thread (I am the guy in the big GH issue who actually used verbose mode and gave specific likes/dislikes), but I find it frustrating that ctrl+o still seems to truncate at strange boundaries. I am looking at an open CC session right now with verbose mode enabled - works pretty well and I'm glad you're fixing the subagent thing. But when I hit ctrl+o, I only see more detailed output for th…

Yes totally. ctrl+o used to show all messages, but this is one of the tricky things about building in a terminal: because many terminals are quite slow, it is hard to render a large amount of output at once without causing tearing/stutter. That said, we recently rewrote our renderer to make it much more efficient, so we can bump up the default a bit. Let me see what it feels like to show the last 10-20 messages -- fi…

Terminals already solved how to do this decades ago: pagers.

Write the full content to a file and have less display it. That's a single "render" you do once and write to a file.

Your TUI code spawns `less ` and waits. Zero rendering loop overhead, zero tearing, zero stutter. `less` is a 40-year-old tool that exists precisely to solve this problem efficiently.

If you need to stream new content in as the session progresses, write it to the file in the background and the user can use `less +F` (follow mode, like tail -f) to watch updates.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#655

Post by grim_io »

idopmstuff wrote: post #164

I've been on the other side of this as a PM, and it's tough because you can't always say what you want to, which is roughly: This product is used by a lot of users with a range of use cases. I understand this change has made it worse for you, and I'm genuinely sorry about that, but I'm making decisions with much more information than you have and many more stakeholders than just you. > What majority? The change just…

Enshittification is real and PM's are the front line soldiers enabling it.

It may be that a dev implemented it, but it's the PM's job to make up excuses.

What's next? Calling us confused?

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#656

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

collaborative wrote: post #374
NewsaHackO wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I made a similar point about the tone of ChatGPT responses; to me, I can't imagine why someone would want less information when working and tuning an AI model. However, something tells me they actually have hard evidence that users respond better with less information regardless of what the loud minority say online, and are following that.

100%. Metrics don't lie. I've A/B tested this a lot. Attention is a rare commodity and users will zone out and leave your product. I really dislike this fact

> Metrics don't lie

Metrics definitely lie, but generally in a different way to users/others. It's important to not let the metric become the goal, which is what often happens in a metric-heavy environment (certainly Google & FB, not sure about the rest of big tech).

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#657

Post by grim_io »

jtrn wrote: post #653
grim_io wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a narrative, it's an experienced reality.

I know you think that's a clever comeback, but it's not; it's just a shift in what level of analysis one does. It's an experienced reality indeed, but THEN you create a narrative based on that. Obviously. Experienced reality is, by definition, subjective and affected by filters for what you can, and how, experience things. For instance, you can actually and truly experience something as bad, and then create a narrati…

I'm not sure what you are trying to say.

Sometimes people are right about something and sometimes the are not?

That's all I got out of it.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#658

Post by [deleted] »

bcherny wrote: post #386

Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. I wanted to take a sec to explain the context for this change. One of the hard things about building a product on an LLM is that the model frequently changes underneath you. Since we introduced Claude Code almost a year ago, Claude has gotten more intelligent, it runs for longer periods of time, and it is able to more agentically use more tools. This is one of the magical th…

[deleted]

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#659

Post by deaux »

patcon wrote: post #625
deaux wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Boris, by far the most upvoted issue at 2550 on your github is "Support AGENTS.md" with 2550 upvotes. The second highest one has 563. Every single other agent supports AGENTS.md. Care to share why you haven't? > Yoshi and others -- please keep the feedback coming. We want to hear it, and we genuinely want to improve the product in a way that gives great defaults for the majority of users, while being extremely hac…

I'm sorry, this comment is opportunistic and a bit annoying to post here. Saying "keep the feedback coming" is not an invitation to turn this thread into the issue queue

"Opportunistic and annoying" are definitely two of the most suitable adjectives to describe the issue! I'm glad my comment is in character, though unfortunately it doesn't even manage touch the subject matter's levels of opportunism and annoyance.

Re: Claude Code is being dumbed down?

#660

Post by Denzel »

minimaxir wrote: post #525
Denzel wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, very cool! Thank you for sharing some actual projects with the prompts logged. I think you and I have different definitions of “one-shotting”. If the model has to be steered, I don’t consider that a one-shot. And you clearly “broke” the model a few times based on your prompt log where the model was unable to solve the problem given with the spec. Honestly, your experience in these repos matches my daily experi…

I never claimed Opus 4.5 can one-shot things? Even human-written software takes a few iterations to add/polish new features as they come to mind. > And you clearly “broke” the model a few times based on your prompt log where the model was unable to solve the problem given with the spec. That's less due to the model being wrong and more due to myself not knowing what I wanted because I am definitely not a UI/UX person…

Apologies, I may have misinterpreted the passage below from your repo:

> This crate was developed with the assistance of Claude Opus 4.5 initially to answer the shower thought "would the Braille Unicode trick work to visually simulate complex ball physics in a terminal?" Opus 4.5 one-shot the problem, so I decided to further experiment to make it more fun and colorful.

Also, yes, I don’t dispute that human written software takes iteration as well. My point is that the significance of autonomous agentic coding feels exaggerated if I’m holding the LLM’s hand more than I have to hold a senior engineer’s hand.

That doesn’t mean the tech isn’t valuable. The claims just feel over exaggerated.

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