Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Have you set effort to high or max?
Even with high effort, the adaptive thinking can just choose no thinking. See bcherny's post they were replying to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47668520
Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
731–740 of 829 posts
Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
#732When I have 10-20 minutes to spare about doing sort of a one-shot-thoughtful change, I go for Claude Code. Problem is that a) I'm waiting for quite a while and b) My waiting isn't always fruitful because it does get things wrong in which case I correct it and off it goes for another 5-10 minute expedition.
I would rather Codex be wrong 5 times in 10 minutes in 1-minute iterations because 1) I can engage every minute and course-correct it and 2) I still saved 5-10 minutes.
Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
#733Earlier 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...
so not only are the sycophantic, hallucinatory, but now they're also proven to be schizophrenic.
neato.
Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
#734Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not unique to LLMs. Take BASH: you've got `/etc/profile`, `~/.bash_profile,` `~/.bash_login`, `~/.bashrc`, `~/.profile`, environment variables, and shell options.
I would laugh so hard at this, if your attempt at comparison was not so tragic. Bash and other shells are deterministic. Want to set it just for one user ? - use ~/.bashrc . Set it for all users on the system? use /etc/profile.d/ . Want it just temporary for this session? You got it, environment variables. And it is going to work like that every single time. It is deterministic you see.
The non-determinisim in the LLM systems isn't because of the different config uses, that works much like shell configs. The non-determinism is inherent in LLM operations.
Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
#735I'm the author of the report in there. The stop-phrase-guard didn't get attached but here it is: https://gist.github.com/benvanik/ee00bd1b6c9154d6545c63e06a3... You can watch for these yourself - they are strong indicators of shallow thinking. If you still have logs from Jan/Feb you can point claude at that issue and have it go look for the same things (read:edit ratio shifts, thinking character shifts before the red…
> is consumer-hostile thinking I've been saying this with many of my friends but, I feel like it's also probably illegal: you paid for a subscription where you expect X out of, and if they changed the terms of your subscription (e.g. serving worse models) after you paid for it, was that not false advertising? Could we not ask for a refund, or even sue?
probably not. the engineers dont even know how these things work (see: black box) so how could you even prove that its not doing what it's 'supposed' to be doing?
Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
#736I 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 anyth…
> It seems to me, the way you phrase it, that anything a human comes up with when coding must go through an LLM.
This seems like a creative interpretation. I never said anything of the sort.
Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
#737I'm the author of the report in there. The stop-phrase-guard didn't get attached but here it is: https://gist.github.com/benvanik/ee00bd1b6c9154d6545c63e06a3... You can watch for these yourself - they are strong indicators of shallow thinking. If you still have logs from Jan/Feb you can point claude at that issue and have it go look for the same things (read:edit ratio shifts, thinking character shifts before the red…
I can't believe that's where we're at, as software devs. I miss predictable outputs, state machines. All those LLM (prompt) based rules make no sense to me. Same with AI WAL. All of it, at some point, will fail.
Yeah that. After spending years trying to get reproducible builds, I now have a crazy moving target to deal with.
Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
#738Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As you can see from posts on this story, most people believe it reflects what the model is thinking and use it as a guide to that so they can ‘correct’ it. If it is not in fact chain of thought or thinking it should not be called that.
Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
#739Hey 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…
Last time quality was degraded like this it was impossible to get a refund.
Re: Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
#740Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alright, I just tested that setting and it doesn't work. https://i.imgur.com/MYsDSOV.png I tested because I was porting memories from Claude Code to Codex, so I might as well test. I obviously still have subscription days remaining. There is another comment in this thread linking a GitHub issue that discusses this. The GitHub issue this whole HN submission is about even says that Anthropic hides thinking blocks.
How are you porting over your memories, skills, commands (codex doesn't have commands).
I didn't use commands. I only used rules, memories, and skills. I asked Codex to read rules and memories from where Claude Code stores them on the filesystem and merge them into `AGENTS.md` and this actually works better because Anthropic prompts Claude Code to write each memory to a separate file, so you end up having a main MEMORY.md that acts as a kind of directory that lists each individual memory with its file name and brief description, hoping that Claude Code will read them, but the problem is that Claude Code never does. This is the same problem[0] that Vercel had with skills I believe. Skills are easy to port because they appear to use the same format, so you can just do `mv ~/.claude/skills ~/.codex/skills` (or `.agents/skills`).
[0]: https://vercel.com/blog/agents-md-outperforms-skills-in-our-...