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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

#791

Post by rachel_rig »

muyuu wrote: post #650
thatxliner wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I really wonder about this. Is it so bad that they cannot even disclose it? not even an optimistic lie in the ballpark of reality? it's not like they haven't been found cooking the truth repeatedly. I look at the output of Kimi and the costs of running inference on it that i can replicate, and it isn't that bad, although admittedly i don't have to worry anywhere near as much about scaling it and about having to dedic…

[flagged]

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

#792

Post by hedora »

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 tried testing 4.5 opus and 4.6 opus both with “high” thinking. Same box, same repo. I had them plan a moderate complexity refactoring on a small codebase.

Observations:

4.6 had previously failed to the point where I had to wipe context. It must have written memories because it was referring to the previous conversation.

As the article points out, 4.6 went out of its way to be lazy and came up with an unusable plan. It did extra planning to avoid renaming files (the toplevel task description involves reorganizing directories of files).

4.6 took twice as long to respond as 4.5.

I’m treating this as a model regression. 4.6 is borderline unusable. I’ve hit all the issues the article describes.

Also, there needs to be an obvious way to disable memory or something. The current UX is terrible, since once an error or incorrect refusal propagates, there is no obvious recovery path.

Anyway, with think set to high, I see drastically different behavior: much slower and much worse output from 4.6.

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

#793

Post by germandiago »

sigbottle wrote: post #788
rimliu wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do they reason? Where was a video by AI researcher, that showed, that they do not reason but actually come with the result first and then try to invent "reasoning" to match it.

I mean humans do that too, and I don't think it's very unjustified. The "we deduce from a deep base premise P down a chain of inferences" picture is extremely incomplete and has been challenged all over the place - by normal people, by analytic and continental philosophers, by science itself, etc. Not trying to say that LLM's are equivalent to humans but that the concept of reasoning is undefined. And the fact that t…

But humans verify things. AI just fools you and I would say it is the biggest problem.I have with AIs.

They give me stuff that I do not know whether to trust or not and what surprises I will find down the way later.

So now my task is to review everything, remove cruft. It starts to compete against investing my time to deep-think and do it thoughtfully from the get go and come up with something simpler, with less code and/or that I understand better.

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

#794

Post by justinclift »

hedora wrote: post #792
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 tried testing 4.5 opus and 4.6 opus both with “high” thinking. Same box, same repo. I had them plan a moderate complexity refactoring on a small codebase. Observations: 4.6 had previously failed to the point where I had to wipe context. It must have written memories because it was referring to the previous conversation. As the article points out, 4.6 went out of its way to be lazy and came up with an unusable plan.…

> Also, there needs to be an obvious way to disable memory or something.

Memory files are stored in a path under ~/.claude somewhere. It's fairly easy to find (I'm just not typing this on a PC with Claude on it atm), and from memory (heh) it's in Markdown.

If you nuke the memory file(s) then you should be good. Oh, I think the memory files are project or directory scoped from memory (heh again) too, so you should be able to keep/remove things manually without losing important stuff if you want.

> Anyway, with think set to high, I see drastically different behavior: much slower and much worse output from 4.6.

Might be worth trying the CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING setting then?

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

#795

Post by JamesSwift »

JamesSwift wrote: post #768
JamesSwift wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just set that flag and already getting similar poor results. new one: 93b9f545-716c-4335-b216-bf0c758dff7c

And another where claude gets into a long cycle of "wait thats not right.. hold on... actually..." correcting itself in train of thought. It found the answer eventually but wasted a lot of cycles getting there (reporting because this is a regression in my experience vs a couple weeks ago): 28e1a9a2-b88c-4a8d-880f-92db0e46ffe8

Another 1395b7d6-f2f1-4e24-a815-73852bcdeed2

It fails to answer my initial question and tells me what I need to do to check. Then it hallucinates the answer based on not researching anything, then it incorrectly comes to a conclusion that is inaccurate, and only when I further prompt it does it finally reach a (maybe) correct answer.

I havent submitted a few more, but I think its safe to say that disabling adaptive thinking isnt the answer here

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

#796

Post by brainwad »

grey-area wrote: post #738
brainwad wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is the same with human chain of thought, though. Both of them are post-hoc rationalisations justifying "gut feelings" that come from thought processes the human/agent doesn't have introspection into. And yet asking humans or machines to "think out loud" this way does increase the quality of their work.

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

#797

Post by shawnz »

lelanthran wrote: post #686
b112 wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think it's a single axis even in the original poster's conception, since you could be both incorrect and also not pragmatic.

But if a fix needs to be described as pragmatic relative to the alternatives, that's probably because it couldn't be described as correct. Otherwise you wouldn't be talking about how pragmatic it is.

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

#798

Post by kouteiheika »

olejorgenb wrote: post #784
kouteiheika wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can I just see the actual thinking (not summarized) so that I can see the actual thinking without a latency cost? You can't, and Anthropic will never allow it since it allows others to more easily distill Claude (i.e. "distillation attacks"[1] in Anthropic-speak, even though Athropic is doing essentially exactly the same thing[2]; rules for thee but not for me). [1] -- https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-p…

So this means I can not resume a session older than 30 days properly?

I have no idea; you have to check their docs.

AFAIK what they do is that they calculate a hash of the true thinking trace, save it into a database, and only send those hashes back to you (try to man-in-the-middle Claude Code and you'll see those hashes). So then when you send then back your session's history you include those hashes, they look them up in their database, replace them with the real thinking trace, and hand that off to the LLM to continue generation. (All SOTA LLMs nowadays retain reasoning content from previous turns, including Claude.)

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

#799

Post by aveao »

zozbot234 wrote: post #177
matheusmoreira wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope local models advance to the point they can match Opus one day...

If OP is correct, Opus has regressed to a point where local models are already on par with it.

Having tried GLM-5 and Minimax M2.5, alongside regularly using Opus 4.6 (on default thinking): Opus is still much, much better at writing non-garbage code. I haven't yet tried GLM-5.1 though.

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

#800

Post by aveao »

throwaway920102 wrote: post #503
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 wonder if its being trained on the human replies to the model, I sometimes write stuff like that back to Claude after I want to finish for the day myself.

My speculation on this has been that it's potentially a factor against ai psychosis, as psychosis risk (of any psychosis) is significantly elevated with lack of sleep. If you read case studies of ai psychosis, many of them also involve people staying up way too long right before they fall on a bad path.
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