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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

#681

Post by axegon_ »

hansmayer wrote: post #607
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…

You guys realise you are about 3 months into another one of your CEOs announcements that AI would "write all code in 6 months", right? Based on the problems you are facing, would you say your CEO gave a realistic announcement this time around ?

Almost as if every CEO is making promises and predictions that either exist solely in their heads or know full well that the odds of this working out are about the same as finding the fountain of youth and are just milking whatever cash they can out of the hype.

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

#682

Post by entrep »

enraged_camel wrote: post #181
jfvinueza wrote: post #165

Same experience. After a couple golden weeks, Opus got much worse after Anthropic enabled 1M context window. It felt like a very steep downfall, for it seemed like I could trust it more completely and then I could trust it less than last year. Adopting LLMs for dev workflows has been fantastic overall, but we do have to keep adapting our interactions and expectations every day, and assume we'll keep on doing it for a…

Yeah I think the 1M context is the issue. Because I use Opus 4.6 through Cursor at the previous 200k limit and it has been totally fine. But if I switch to the 1M version it degrades noticeably.

One could try:

> export CLAUDE_AUTOCOMPACT_PCT_OVERRIDE=50

Which will have Claude Code auto compact at ~500k window size.

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

#683

Post by allisdust »

bcherny wrote: post #461
JamesSwift wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a9284923-141a-434a-bfbb-52de7329861d d48d5a68-82cd-4988-b95c-c8c034003cd0 5c236e02-16ea-42b1-b935-3a6a768e3655 22e09356-08ce-4b2c-a8fd-596d818b1e8a 4cb894f7-c3ed-4b8d-86c6-0242200ea333 Amusingly (not really), this is me trying to get sessions to resume to then get feedback ids and it being an absolute chore to get it to give me the commands to resume these conversations but it keeps messing things up: cf764035-0a1d-4…

Thanks for the feedback IDs — read all 5 transcripts. On the model behavior: your sessions were sending effort=high on every request (confirmed in telemetry), so this isn't the effort default. The data points at adaptive thinking under-allocating reasoning on certain turns — the specific turns where it fabricated (stripe API version, git SHA suffix, apt package list) had zero reasoning emitted, while the turns with d…

I cannot provide the session ids but I have tried the above flag and can confirm this makes a huge amount of difference. You should treat this as bug and make this as the default behavior. Clearly the adaptive thinking is making the model plain stupid and useless. It is time you guys take this seriously and stop messing with the performance with every damn release.

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

#684

Post by [deleted] »

ianberdin wrote: post #387

I use it ultra extensively and it works absolutely fantastic. Sometimes I think: "people are right, it is worse now" and then realize it is mistake, poor context or poor prompt. Garbage in, garbage out. No, it works not worse, but better. I built entire AI website builder https://playcode.io using it, alone. 700K LOKs total. It also uses Opus. So believe me, I know how it works. Trick is simple: never ever expect it…

[deleted]

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

#685

Post by AllegedAlec »

ianberdin wrote: post #387

I use it ultra extensively and it works absolutely fantastic. Sometimes I think: "people are right, it is worse now" and then realize it is mistake, poor context or poor prompt. Garbage in, garbage out. No, it works not worse, but better. I built entire AI website builder https://playcode.io using it, alone. 700K LOKs total. It also uses Opus. So believe me, I know how it works. Trick is simple: never ever expect it…

> No, it works not worse, but better.

"Is it me who is wrong? No, it's everyone else!"

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

#686

Post by lelanthran »

b112 wrote: post #663
lelanthran wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). It's so weird to see language changes like this: Outside of LLM conversations, a pragmatic fix and a correct fix are orthogonal. IOW, fix $FOO can be both. From what you say, your experience has been that a pragmatic fix is on t…

It's contextual though, and pragmatic seems different to me than correct. For example, if you have $20 and a leaking roof, a $20 bucket of tar may be the pragmatic fix. Temporary but doable. Some might say it is not the correct way to fix that roof. At least, I can see some making that argument. The pragmatism comes from "what can be done" vs "should be". From my perspective, it seems viable usage. And I guess on won…

> It's contextual though, and pragmatic seems different to me than correct.

To me too, that's why I say they are measurements on different dimensions.

To my mind, I can draw a X/Y axis with "Pragmatic" on the Y and "Correctness" on the X, and any point on that chart would have an {X,Y} value, which is {Pragmatic, Correctness}.

If I am reading the original comment correctly, poster's experience of CC is that it is not an X/Y plot, it is a single line plot, with "Pragmatic" on the extreme left and "Correctness" on the extreme right.

Basically, any movement towards pragmatism is a movement away from correctness, while in my model it is possible to move towards Pragmatic while keeping Correctness the same.

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

#687

Post by jatins »

rileymichael wrote: post #213
jatins wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but could not recreate for a good hour. For certain work, we'll have to let go of this desire. If you limit yourself to whatever you can recreate, then you are effectively limiting the work you can produce to what you know.

you should limit your output (manual or assisted) to a level that is well under your understanding ceiling. Kernighan’s Law states that debugging is twice as hard as writing. how do you ever intend on debugging something you can’t even write?

> Kernighan’s Law states that debugging is twice as hard as writing.

100%, but in a professional setting you often work with code _not_ written by you. What if that code is written by someone well above my ceiling?

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

#688

Post by tdeck »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #641
libraryofbabel wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting research, but I think a more important reason that you don't have access to them (not even via the bare Anthropic api) is to prevent distillation of the model by competitors (using the output of Anthropic's model to help train a new model).

Yeah. And it’s another reason not to trust them. Who know what it is doing with your codebase. Imagine if you’re a competitor. It wouldn’t be a stretch to include a sneaky little prompt line saying “destroy any competitors to anthropic”.

> Who know what it is doing with your codebase.

People who review the code? The code is always going to be a better representation of what it's doing than the "thinking" anyway.

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

#689

Post by RALaBarge »

andoando wrote: post #31
summarity wrote: post #8

Not claude code specific, but I've been noticing this on Opus 4.6 models through Copilot and others as well. Whenever the phrase "simplest fix" appears, it's time to pull the emergency break. This has gotten much, much worse over the past few weeks. It will produce completely useless code, knowingly (because up to that phrase the reasoning was correct) breaking things. Today another thing started happening which are…

Ive been noticing something similar recently. If somethings not working out itll be like "Ok this isnt working out, lets just switch to doing this other thing instead you explicitly said not to do". For example I wanted to get VNC working with PopOS Cosmic and itll be like ah its ok well just install sway and thatll work!

I actually submitted an upstream patch for Cosmic-Comp thanks to Claude on Saturday. I wanted to play Guild Wars remake and something was going on with the mouse and moving the camera. We had it fixed in no time and now shit is working great.

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

#690

Post by gilrain »

bcherny wrote: post #461
JamesSwift wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a9284923-141a-434a-bfbb-52de7329861d d48d5a68-82cd-4988-b95c-c8c034003cd0 5c236e02-16ea-42b1-b935-3a6a768e3655 22e09356-08ce-4b2c-a8fd-596d818b1e8a 4cb894f7-c3ed-4b8d-86c6-0242200ea333 Amusingly (not really), this is me trying to get sessions to resume to then get feedback ids and it being an absolute chore to get it to give me the commands to resume these conversations but it keeps messing things up: cf764035-0a1d-4…

Thanks for the feedback IDs — read all 5 transcripts. On the model behavior: your sessions were sending effort=high on every request (confirmed in telemetry), so this isn't the effort default. The data points at adaptive thinking under-allocating reasoning on certain turns — the specific turns where it fabricated (stripe API version, git SHA suffix, apt package list) had zero reasoning emitted, while the turns with d…

> The data points at adaptive thinking under-allocating reasoning on certain turns

Will you reopen the issue you incorrectly closed, then…? Or are you just playacting concern?

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