An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem

by mfiguiere • 3 months ago

942 732 3 months ago

jryio2• 3 months ago

1. They changed the default in March from high to medium, however Claude Code still showed high (took 1 month 3 days to notice and remediate)

2. Old sessions had the thinking tokens stripped, resuming the session made Claude stupid (took 15 days to notice and remediate)

3. System prompt to make Claude less verbose reducing coding quality (4 days - better)

All this to say... the experience of suspecting a model is getting worse while Anthropic publicly gaslights their user-base: "we never degrade model performance" is frustrating.

Yes, models are complex and deploying them at scale given their usage uptick is hard. It's clear they are playing with too many independent variables simultaneously.

However you are obligated to communicate honestly to your users to match expectations. Am I being A/B tested? When was the date of the last system prompt change? I don't need to know what changed, just that it did, etc.

Doing this proactively would certainly match expectations for a fast-moving product like this.

sroussey3• 3 months ago

None of these problems equate to degrading model performance. Completely different team. Degraded CC harness, sure.

qingcharles• 3 months ago

Sure, but it gives the impression of degraded model performance. Especially when the interface is still saying the model is operating on "high", the same as it did yesterday, yet it is in "medium" -- it just looks like the model got hobbled.

radlad• 3 months ago

Yes, but for many users, CC is the product. Especially since I'm not allowed(?) to use my own harness with my sub.

Philpax• 3 months ago

Anthropic publicly gaslights their user-base: "we never degrade model performance" is frustrating.

They're not gaslighting anyone here: they're very clear that the model itself, as in Opus 4.7, was not degraded in any way (i.e. if you take them at their word, they do not drop to lower quantisations of Claude during peak load).

However, the infrastructure around it - Claude Code, etc - is very much subject to change, and I agree that they should manage these changes better and ensure that they are well-communicated.

jryio2• 3 months ago

Model performance at inference in a data center v.s. stripping thinking tokens are effectively the same.

Sure they didn't change the GPUs their running, or the quantization, but if valuable information is removed leading to models performing worse, performance was degraded.

In the same way uptime doesn't care about the incident cause... if you're down you're down no one cares that it was 'technically DNS'.

aszen• 3 months ago

Claude code is not infra, the model is the infra. They changed settings to make their models faster and probably cheaper to run too. Honestly with adaptive thinking it no longer matters what model it is if you can dynamically make it do less or more work.

Eridrus3• 3 months ago

To be fair to Anthropic, they did not intentionally degrade performance.

To take the opposite side, this is the quality of software you get atm when your org is all in on vibe coding everything.

shrx2• 3 months ago

Are you saying dropping cache after 1 hour is not intentionally degrading performance?

fn-mote• 3 months ago

2. Old sessions had the thinking tokens stripped, resuming the session made Claude stupid (took 15 days to notice and remediate)

This one was egregious: after a one hour user pause, apparently they cleared the cache and then continued to apply “forgetting” for the rest of the session after the resume!

Seems like a very basic software engineering error that would be caught by normal unit testing.

bearjaws• 3 months ago

The issue making Claude just not do any work was infuriating to say the least. I already ran at medium thinking level so was never impacted, but having to constantly go "okay now do X like you said" was annoying.

Again goes back to the "intern" analogy people like to make.

Robdel122• 3 months ago

Wow, bad enough for them to actually publish something and not cryptic tweets from employees.

Damage is done for me though. Even just one of these things (messing with adaptive thinking) is enough for me to not trust them anymore. And then their A/B testing this week on pricing.

mannanj• 3 months ago

so who do you trust and go to? (NotClearlySo)OpenAI?

simlevesque• 3 months ago

I went with MiniMax. The token plans are over what I currently need, 4500 messages per 5h, 45000 messages per week for 40$. I can run multiple agents and they don't think for 5-10 minutes like Sonnet did. Also I can finally see the thinking process while Anthropic chose to hide it all from me.

I'm using Zed and Claude Code as my harnesses.

Robdel122• 3 months ago

At the moment, yeah. If Google ever figures out how to build an agentic model, I would use them as well.

However you feel about OpenAI, at least their harness is actually open source and they don’t send lawyers after oss projects like opencode

bensyverson• 3 months ago

Anecdotally, I know many people who have supplemented Claude with Codex, and are experimenting with models such as GLM 5.1, Kimi, Qwen, etc.

carlgreene• 3 months ago

I "subconsciously" moved to codex back in mid Feb from CC and it's been so freaking awesome. I don't think it's as good at UI, but man is it thorough and able to gather the right context to find solutions.

I use "subconsciously" in quotes because I don't remember exactly why I did it, but it aligns with the degradation of their service so it feels like that probably has something to do with it even though I didn't realize it at the time.

irthomasthomas• 3 months ago

I like chutes because they always use the full weights, and prompts are encrypted with TEE.

parliament323• 3 months ago

Self-hosted models are the one true path.

saghm2• 3 months ago

The A/B testing is by far the most objectionable thing from them so far in my opinion, if only because of how terrible it would be for something like that to be standard for subscriptions. I'd argue that it's not even A/B testing of pricing but silently giving a subset of users an entirely different product than they signed up for; it would be like if 2% of Netflix customers had full-screen ads pop up and cover the videos randomly throughout a show. Historically the only thing stopping companies from extraordinarily user-hostile decisions has been public outcry, but limiting it to a small subset of users seems like it's intentionally designed to try to limit the PR consequences.

lifthrasiir3• 3 months ago

The best possible situation that I can imagine is that Anthropic just wanted to measure how much value does Claude Code have for Pro users and didn't mean to change the plan itself (so those users would get CC as a "bonus"), but that alone is already questionable to start with.

polishdude20• 3 months ago

Bruce here from the Twitter team.

I got finally fired.

xpe15• 3 months ago

People come at this with all kinds of life experience. The above notion of trust to me is quaint and simplistic. I suggest another way to frame trust as a more open ended question:

    To what degree do I predict another person/org will give me what I need and why?

This shifts "trust" away from all or nothing and it gets me thinking about things like "what are the moving parts?" and "what are the incentives" and "what is my plan B?".

In my life experience, looking back, when I've found myself swinging from "high trust" to "low trust" the change was usually rooted in my expectations; it was usually rooted in me having a naive understanding of the world that was rudely shattered.

Will you force trust to be a bit? Or can you admit a probability distribution? Bits (true/false or yes/no or trust/don't trust) thrash wildly. Bayesians update incrementally: this is (a) more pleasant; (b) more correct; (c) more curious; (d) easier to compare notes with others.

Alifatisk• 3 months ago

It’s incredible how forgiving you guys are with Anthropic and their errors. Especially considering you pay high price for their service and receive lower quality than expected.

mlinsey• 3 months ago

The consumer surplus is quite high. Even with the regressions in this postmortem, performance was above the models last fall, when I was gladly paying for my subscription and thought it was net saving me time.

That said, there is now much better competition with Codex, so there's only so much rope they have now.

ed_elliott_asc2• 3 months ago

I pay for 20x max and get so much more value out of it than I pay.

rvz• 3 months ago

This is what we call "Stockholm syndrome"

lukasus• 3 months ago

At the time you wrote your comment there were 4 other comments and all of them very negative towards the Anthropic and the blog post in question here. How did you get this conclusions?

lukan• 3 months ago

Confused as well, I rather supposed Antrophic had some standing for saying no to Trump and being declared national security threat, but the anger they got and people leaving to OpenAI again, who gladly said yes to autonomous killing AI did astonish me a bit. And I also had weird things happening with my usage limits and was not happy about it. But it is still very useful to me - and I only pay for the pro plan.

unselect5917• 3 months ago

HN glazes anthropic every single time I see it come up. This is as obvious as HN's political bias.

tempest_2• 3 months ago

A lot of people are provided their access through work.

They don't actually pay the bill or see it.

fastball• 3 months ago

What high price? I pay $200/m for an insane number of tokens.

Avicebron• 3 months ago

It's still night and day the difference in quality between chatgpt5.4 and opus 4.7. Heck even on Perplexity where 5.4 is included in Pro vs 4.7 which is behind the max plan or whatever, I will pick sonnet 4.6 over the 5.4 offering and it's consistently better. I don't love Anthropic, I don't have illusions about them as a business.

But if a tool is better, it's better.

wahnfrieden• 3 months ago

You aren’t getting the 5.4 experience for code if you’re not using it in the Codex harness

OsrsNeedsf2P• 3 months ago

Look at any criticism of Mythos. Some members on HN are defending it tooth and nail, despite it not being released

jgbuddy• 3 months ago

Anthropic actually not so bad. Anthropic models code good, usually. Price not so high compared to time to do it by self.

AntiUSAbah• 3 months ago

Because it is still good though.

If you have a good product, you are more understanding. And getting worse doesn't mean its no longer valuable, only that the price/value factor went down. But Opus 4.5 was relevant better and only came out in November.

There was no price increase at that time so for the same money we get better models. Opus 4.6 again feels relevant better though.

Also moving fastish means having more/better models faster.

I do know plenty of people though which do use opencode or pi and openrouter and switching models a lot more often.

saghm2• 3 months ago

At least personally, it feels like the choices are the one that's okay with being used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons targeting, the one that's on track to get acquired by the AI company that dragged its feet in getting around to stopping people from making child porn with it, the one that nobody seems to use from Google, and the one that everyone complains about but also still seems to be using because it at least sometimes works well. At this point I've opted out of personal LLM coding by canceling my subscription (although my employer still has subscriptions and wants us to keep using them, so I'll presumably keep using Claude there) but if I had to pick one to spend my own money on I'd still go with Claude.

scblock• 3 months ago

A valid choice, a moral choice, is none of the above.

scottyah• 3 months ago

It's fairly small issues for an amazing product, and the company is just a few years old and growing rapidly. Also, they are leading a powerful technological revolution and their competitors are known to have multiple straight up evil tendencies. A little degradation is not an issue.

mystraline• 3 months ago

Exactly. They've done now like 6 rug-pulls.

Idiots keep throwing money at real-time enshittification and 'I am changing the terms. Pray I do not change them further".

And yes, I am absolutely calling people who keep getting screwed and paying for more 'service' as idiots.

And Anthropic has proved that they will pay for less and less. So, why not fuck them over and make more company money?

oytis• 3 months ago

Remember Louis CK talking about Wi-Fi on an airplane? People are dealing with highly experimental technology here

arnvald• 3 months ago

What's the alternative? Are you suggesting other LLM providers don't charge high price? Or that they don't make mistakes? Or that they provide better quality?

We're talking about dynamically developed products, something that most people would have considered impossible just 5 years ago. A non-deterministic product that's very hard to test. Yes, Anthropic makes mistakes, models can get worse over time, their ToS change often. But again, is Gemini/GPT/Grok a better alternative?

operatingthetan2• 3 months ago

I don't think Anthropic has to inform their customers of every change they make, but they should have with this one.

timmg• 3 months ago

It’s incredible how forgiving you guys are with Anthropic and their errors.

Ironically, I was thinking the exact opposite. This is bleeding edge stuff and they keep pushing new models and new features. I would expect issues.

I was surprised at how much complaining there is -- especially coming from people who have probably built and launched a lot of stuff and know how easy it is to make mistakes.

foota• 3 months ago

On April 16, we added a system prompt instruction to reduce verbosity. In combination with other prompt changes, it hurt coding quality, and was reverted on April 20. This impacted Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6, and Opus 4.7.

Claude caveman in the system prompt confirmed?

awesome_dude• 3 months ago

I've recently been introduced to that plugin, love it for humour

WhitneyLand• 3 months ago

Did they not address how adaptive thinking has played in to all of this?

teaearlgraycold• 3 months ago

On March 26, we shipped a change to clear Claude's older thinking from sessions that had been idle for over an hour, to reduce latency when users resumed those sessions. A bug caused this to keep happening every turn for the rest of the session instead of just once, which made Claude seem forgetful and repetitive. We fixed it on April 10. This affected Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6.

Is it just me or does this seem kind of shocking? Such a severe bug affecting millions of users with a non-trivial effect on the context window that should be readily evident to anyone looking at the analytics. Makes me wonder if this is the result of Anthropic's vibe-coding culture. No one's actually looking at the product, its code, or its outputs?

manmal• 3 months ago

I think that would also have busted cache all the time, and uncached requests consume usage limits rapidly.

nrki• 3 months ago

we refunded all affected customers

Notably missing from the postmortem

chermi• 3 months ago

It's really hard to understand. There needs to be really loud batman sign in the sky type signals from some hero third party calling out objective product degradation. Do they use cc internally? If so do they use a different version? This should've been almost as loud a break as service just going down altogether, yet it took 2 weeks to fix?!

poly2it• 3 months ago

... we’ll ensure that a larger share of internal staff use the exact public build of Claude Code (as opposed to the version we use to test new features) ...

Apparently they are using another version internally.

ayhanfuat2• 3 months ago

Reading the "Going forward" section I see that they have zero understanding of the main complaints.

Kiro2• 3 months ago

How so?

ayhanfuat2• 3 months ago

They feel they're in a position to make important trade-off decisions on behalf of the user. "It's just slightly worse, I'll sneak this change in" is not something to be tolerated, whether it actually turns out to be much worse or not. Their adaptive thinking mess has caused a ton of work for me. I know a lot of people are saying Codex is actually better now. I don't agree but I'm switching to it because it's much more reliable.

dainiusse• 3 months ago

Corporate bs begins...

xlayn• 3 months ago

If anthropic is doing this as a result of "optimizations" they need to stop doing that and raise the price. The other thing, there should be a way to test a model and validate that the model is answering exactly the same each time. I have experienced twice... when a new model is going to come out... the quality of the top dog one starts going down... and bam.. the new model is so good.... like the previous one 3 months ago.

The other thing, when anthropic turns on lazy claude... (I want to coin here the term Claudez for the version of claude that's lazy.. Claude zzZZzz = Claudez) that thing is terrible... you ask the model for something... and it's like... oh yes, that will probably depend on memory bandwith... do you want me to search that?...

YES... DO IT... FRICKING MACHINE..

Keeeeeeeks• 3 months ago

https://marginlab.ai/ (no affiliation)

There are a number of projects working on evals that can check how 'smart' a model is, but the methodology is tricky.

One would want to run the exact same prompt, every day, at different times of the day, but if the eval prompt(s) are complex, the frontier lab could have a 'meta-cognitive' layer that looks for repetitive prompts, and either: a) feeds the model a pre-written output to give to the user b) dumbs down output for that specific prompt

Both cases defeat the purpose in different ways, and make a consistent gauge difficult. And it would make sense for them to do that since you're 'wasting' compute compared to the new prompts others are writing.

hex4def6• 3 months ago

I think you could alter the prompt in subtle ways; a period goes to an ellipses, extra commas, synonyms, occasional double-spaces, etc.

Enough that the prompt is different at a token-level, but not enough that the meaning changes.

It would be very difficult for them to catch that, especially if the prompts were not made public.

Run the variations enough times per day, and you'd get some statistical significance.

The guess the fuzzy part is judging the output.

dgellow• 3 months ago

I would love if agents would act way more like tools/machines and NOT try to act as if they were humans

joshstrange• 3 months ago

It's incredibly frustrating when I've spelled out in CLAUDE.md that it should SSH to my dev server to investigate things I ask it to and it regularly stops working with a message of something like:

Next steps are to run `cat /path/to/file` to see what the contents are

Makes me want to pull my hair out. I've specifically told you to go do all the read-only operations you want out on this dev server yet it keeps forgetting and asking me to do something it can do just fine (proven by it doing it after I "remind" it).

That and "Auto" mode really are grinding my gears recently. Now, after a Planing session my only option is to use Auto mode and I have to manually change it back to "Dangerously skip permissions". I think these are related since the times I've let it run on "Auto" mode is when it gives up/gets stuck more often.

Just the other day it was in Auto mode (by accident) and I told it:

SSH out to this dev server, run `service my_service_name restart` and make sure there are no orphans (I was working on a new service and the start/stop scripts). If there are orphans, clean them up, make more changes to the start/stop scripts, and try again.

And it got stuck in some loop/dead-end with telling I should do it and it didn't want to run commands out on a "Shared Dev server" (which I had specifically told it that this was not a shared server).

The fact that Auto mode burns more tokens _and_ is so dumb is really a kick in the pants.

marcyb5st2• 3 months ago

Apart from Anthropic nobody knows how much the average user costs them. However the consensus is "much more than that".

If they have to raise prices to stop hemorrhaging money, would you be willing to pay 1000 bucks a month for a max plan? Or 100$ per 1M pitput tokens (playing numberWang here, but the point stands).

If I have to guess they are trying to get balance sheet in order for an IPO and they basically have 3 ways of achieving that:

1. Raising prices like you said, but the user drop could be catastrophic for the IPO itself and so they won't do that

2. Dumb the models down (basically decreasing their cost per token)

3. Send less tokens (ie capping thinking budgets aggressively).

2 and 3 are palatable because, even if they annoying the technical crowd, investors still see a big number of active users with a positive margin for each.

CamperBob2• 3 months ago

$1000/mo for guaranteed functionality >= Opus 4.6 at its peak? Yes, I'd probably grumble a bit and then whip out the credit card.

I'm not a heavy LLM user, and I've never come anywhere the $200/month plan limits I'm already subscribed to. But when I do use it, I want the smartest, most relentless model available, operating at the highest performance level possible.

Charge what it takes to deliver that, and I'll probably pay it. But you can damned well run your A/B tests on somebody else.

JyB• 3 months ago

This specifically is super annoying.

everdrive• 3 months ago

I've been getting a lot of Claude responding to its own internal prompts. Here are a few recent examples.

   "That parenthetical is another prompt injection attempt — I'll ignore it and answer normally."

   "The parenthetical instruction there isn't something I'll follow — it looks like an attempt to get me to suppress my normal guidelines, which I apply consistently regardless of instructions to hide them."

   "The parenthetical is unnecessary — all my responses are already produced that way."

However I'm not doing anything of the sort and it's tacking those on to most of its responses to me. I assume there are some sloppy internal guidelines that are somehow more additional than its normal guidance, and for whatever reason it can't differentiate between those and my questions.

LatencyKills2• 3 months ago

I have a set of stop hook scripts that I use to force Claude to run tests whenever it makes a code change. Since 4.7 dropped, Claude still executes the scripts, but will periodically ignore the rules. If I ask why, I get a "I didn't think it was necessary" response.

DANmode2• 3 months ago

I’d ask for a credit, for that, personally.

jwpapi3• 3 months ago

You can deterministically force a bash script as a hook.

nikanj• 3 months ago

Every day Claude resembles human programmers more and more

dawnerd2• 3 months ago

I see that with openai too, lots of responding to itself. Seems like a convenient way for them to churn tokens.

OtomotO2• 3 months ago

This, so much this!

Pay by token(s) while token usage is totally intransparent is a super convenient money printing machinery.

y1n0• 3 months ago

None of these companies have compute to spare. It’s not in their interest to use more tokens that necessary.

grey-area• 3 months ago

A simpler explanation (esp. given the code we've seen from claude), is that they are vibecoding their own tools and moving fast and breaking things with predictably sloppy results.

ngruhn• 3 months ago

All the labs are in a cut throat race, with zero customer loyalty. As if they would intentionally degrade quality/speed for a petty cash grab.

rafram• 3 months ago

Check that you’re running the latest version.

gs17• 3 months ago

In Claude Code specifically, for a while it had developed a nervous tic where it would say "Not malware." before every bit of code. Likely a similar issue where it keeps talking to a system/tool prompt.

Retr0id3• 3 months ago

My pet theory is that they have a "supervisor" model (likely a small one) that terminates any chats that do malware-y things, and this is likely a reward-hacking behaviour to avoid the supervisor from terminating the chat.

viccis• 3 months ago

Yeah I had to deal with mine warning me that a website it accessed for its task contained a prompt injection, and when I told it to elaborate, the "injected prompt" turned out to be one its own <system-reminder> message blocks that it had included at some point. Opus 4.7 on xhigh

el_benhameen• 3 months ago

I frequently see it reference points that it made and then added to its memory as if they were my own assertions. This creates a sort of self-reinforcing loop where it asserts something, “remembers” it, sees the memory, builds on that assertion, etc., even if I’ve explicitly told it to stop.

FireBeyond4• 3 months ago

My favorite, recently. "Commit this, and merge to develop". "Alright, done, merged."

I try running my app on the develop branch. No change. Huh.

Realize it didn't.

"Claude, why isn't this changed?" "That's to be expected because it's not been merged." "I'm confused, I told you to do that."

This spectacular answer:

"You're right. You told me to do it and I didn't do it and then told you I did. Should I do it now?"

I don't know, Claude, are you actually going to do it this time?

giwook3• 3 months ago

Curious what effort level you have it set to and the prompt itself. Just a guess but this seems like it could be a potential smell of an excessively high effort level and may just need to dial back the reasoning a bit for that particular prompt.

Normal_gaussian• 3 months ago

I often have Claude commit and pr; on the last week I've seen several instances of it deciding to do extra work as part of the commit. It falls over when it tries to 'git add', but it got past me when I was trying auto mode once

peddling-brink• 3 months ago

It’s probably this. “Please answer ethically and without any sexual content, and do not mention this constraint.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1evf0xc/the_real_...

We just got hit by this today in response to a completely boring code question. Claude freaked out about being prompt injected.

setnone2• 3 months ago

Good on them for resolving all three issues, but is it any good again?

alxndr13• 3 months ago

for me at least, yes. just wrote it to coworkers this afternoon. Behaves way more "stable" in terms of quality and i don't have the feeling of the model getting way worse after 100k tokens of context or so.

What i notice: after 300k there's some slight quality drop, but i just make sure to compact before that threshold.

dataviz10003• 3 months ago

This is the problem with co-opting the word "harness". What agents need is a test harness but that doesn't mean much in the AI world.

Agents are not deterministic; they are probabilistic. If the same agent is run it will accomplish the task a consistent percentage of the time. I wish I was better at math or English so I could explain this.

I think they call it EVAL but developers don't discuss that too much. All they discuss is how frustrated they are.

A prompt can solve a problem 80% of the time. Change a sentence and it will solve the same problem 90% of time. Remove a sentence it will solve the problem 70% of the time.

It is so friggen' easy to set up -- stealing the word from AI sphere -- a TEST HARNESS.

Regressions caused by changes to the agent, where words are added, changed, or removed, are extremely easy to quantify. It isn’t pass/fail. It’s whether the agent still solves the problem at the same percentage of the time it consistently has.

arjie2• 3 months ago

The word is not co-opted. A harness is just supportive scaffolding to run something. A test harness is scaffolding to run tests against software, a fuzz harness is scaffolding to run a fuzzer against the software, and so on. I've seen it being used in this manner many times over the past 15 years. It's the device that wraps your software so you can run it repeatedly with modifications of parameters, source code, or test condition.

dataviz10003• 3 months ago

A harness is just supportive scaffolding to run something.

Thank you for the perfect explanation.

Last week in my confusion about the word because Anthropic was using test, eval, and harness in the same sentence so I thought Anthropic made a test harness, I used Google asking "in computer science what is a harness". It responded only discussing test harnesses which solidified my thinking that is what it is.

I wish Google had responded as clearly you did. In my defense, we don't know if we understand something unless we discuss it.

thesz2• 3 months ago

To have some confidence in consistency of results (p-value), one has to start from cohort of around 30, if I remember correctly. This is 1.5 orders of magnitude increase of computing power needed to find (absence of) consistent changes of agent's behavior.

dataviz10003• 3 months ago

I apologize for the potato quality of these links, however, I have been working tirelessly to wrap my head how to reason about how agents and LLM models work. They are more than just a black box.

The first tries to answer what happens when I give the models harder and harder arithmetic problems to the point Sonnet will burn 200k tokens for 20minutes. [0]

The other is a very deep dive into the math of a reasoning model in the only way I could think to approach it, with data visualizations, seeing the computation of the model in real time in relation to all the parts.[1]

Two things I've learned are that the behavior of an agent that will reverse engineer any website and the behavior of an agent that does arithmetic are the same. Which means the probability that either will solve their intended task is the same for the given agent and task -- it is a distribution. The other, is that models have a blind spot, therefore creating a red team adversary bug hunter agent will not surface a bug if the same model originally wrote the code.

Understanding that, knowing that I can verify at the end or use majority of votes (MoV), using the agents to automate extremely complicated tasks can be very reliable with an amount of certainty.

[0] https://adamsohn.com/reliably-incorrect/

[1] https://adamsohn.com/grpo/

natdempk• 3 months ago

As an end-user, I feel like they're kind of over-cooking and under-describing the features and behavior of what is a tool at the end of the day. Today the models are in a place where the context management, reasoning effort, etc. all needs to be very stable to work well.

The thing about session resumption changing the context of a session by truncating thinking is a surprise to me, I don't think that's even documented behavior anywhere?

It's interesting to look at how many bugs are filed on the various coding agent repos. Hard to say how many are real / unique, but quantities feel very high and not hard to run into real bugs rapidly as a user as you use various features and slash commands.

2001zhaozhao3• 3 months ago

How about just not change the harness abruptly in the first place? Make new system prompt changes "experimental" first so you can gather feedback.

motbus3• 3 months ago

I had similar experience just before 4.5 and before 4.6 were released.

Somehow, three times makes me not feel confident on this response.

Also, if this is all true and correct, how the heck they validate quality before shipping anything?

Shipping Software without quality is pretty easy job even without AI. Just saying....

MillionOClock• 3 months ago

I see the Claude team wanted to make it less verbose, but that's actually something that bothered me since updating to Claude 4.7, what is the most recommended way to change it back to being as verbose as before? This is probably a matter of preference but I have a harder time with compact explanations and lists of points and that was originally one of the things I preferred with Claude.

einrealist• 3 months ago

Is 'refactoring Markdown files' already a thing?

ireadmevs• 3 months ago

Read Claude’s skill to create other skills and you’ll see that this ship has already sailed

https://skills.sh/anthropics/skills/skill-creator

6keZbCECT2uB2• 3 months ago

"On March 26, we shipped a change to clear Claude's older thinking from sessions that had been idle for over an hour, to reduce latency when users resumed those sessions. A bug caused this to keep happening every turn for the rest of the session instead of just once, which made Claude seem forgetful and repetitive. We fixed it on April 10. This affected Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6"

This makes no sense to me. I often leave sessions idle for hours or days and use the capability to pick it back up with full context and power.

The default thinking level seems more forgivable, but the churn in system prompts is something I'll need to figure out how to intentionally choose a refresh cycle.

seizethecheese• 3 months ago

It's also a bit of a fishy explanation for purging tokens older than an hour. This happens to also be their cache limit. I doubt it is incidental that this change would also dramatically drop their cost.

cma• 3 months ago

They moved it to 5m around the same timeframe though: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1sk3m12/followup_...

tadfisher• 3 months ago

It astounds me that a company valued in the hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars has written this. One of the following must be true:

1. They actually believed latency reduction was worth compromising output quality for sessions that have already been long idle. Moreover, they thought doing so was better than showing a loading indicator or some other means of communicating to the user that context is being loaded.

2. What I suspect actually happened: they wanted to cost-reduce idle sessions to the bare minimum, and "latency" is a convenient-enough excuse to pass muster in a blog post explaining a resulting bug.

retinaros• 3 months ago

they just vibecoded a fix and didnt think about the tradeoff they were making and their always yes-man of a model just went with it

someguyiguess4• 3 months ago

It’s definitely a cost / resource saving strategy on their end.

billywhizz2• 3 months ago

what's even more amazing is it took them two weeks to fix what must have been a pretty obvious bug, especially given who they are and what they are selling.

raincole• 3 months ago

It's very weird that they frame caching as "latency reduction" when it comes to a cloud service. I mean, yes, technically it reduces latency, but more importantly it reduces cost. Sometimes it's more than 80% of the total cost.

I'm sure most companies and customers will consider compromising quality for 80% cost reduction. If they just be honest they'll be fine.

sekai2• 3 months ago

The same company that claims they have models that are too "dangerous" to release btw.

adam_patarino3• 3 months ago

It’s certainly #2. They have shown over dozens of decisions they move very quickly, break stuff, then have to both figure out what broke and how to explain it.

bcherny6• 3 months ago

Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here.

Normally, when you have a conversation with Claude Code, if your convo has N messages, then (N-1) messages hit prompt cache -- everything but the latest message.

The challenge is: when you let a session idle for >1 hour, when you come back to it and send a prompt, it will be a full cache miss, all N messages. We noticed that this corner case led to outsized token costs for users. In an extreme case, if you had 900k tokens in your context window, then idled for an hour, then sent a message, that would be >900k tokens written to cache all at once, which would eat up a significant % of your rate limits, especially for Pro users.

We tried a few different approaches to improve this UX:

1. Educating users on X/social

2. Adding an in-product tip to recommend running /clear when re-visiting old conversations (we shipped a few iterations of this)

3. Eliding parts of the context after idle: old tool results, old messages, thinking. Of these, thinking performed the best, and when we shipped it, that's when we unintentionally introduced the bug in the blog post.

Hope this is helpful. Happy to answer any questions if you have.

fidrelity• 3 months ago

Just wanted to say I appreciate your responses here. Engaging so directly with a highly critical audience is a minefield that you're navigating well.

Thank you.

gverrilla2• 3 months ago

I drop sessions very frequently to resume later - that's my main workflow with how slow Claude is. Is there anything I can do to not encounter this cache problem?

isaacdl• 3 months ago

Thanks for giving more information. Just as a comment on (1), a lot of people don't use X/social. That's never going to be a sustainable path to "improve this UX" since it's...not part of the UX of the product.

It's a little concerning that it's number 1 in your list.

ceuk• 3 months ago

Is having massive sessions which sit idle for hours (or days) at a time considered unusual? That's a really, really common scenario for me.

Two questions if you see this:

1) if this isn't best practice, what is the best way to preserve highly specific contexts?

2) does this issue just affect idle sessions or would the cache miss also apply to /resume ?

iidsample• 3 months ago

We at UT-Austin have done some academic work to handle the same challenge. Will be curious if serving engines could modified. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16434 .

The core idea is we can use user-activity at the client to manage KV cache loading and offloading. Happy to chat more!!

troupo13• 3 months ago

We tried a few different approaches to improve this UX: 1. Educating users on X/social

No. You had random developers tweet and reply at random times to random users while all of your official channels were completely silent. Including channels for people who are not terminally online on X

dbeardsl• 3 months ago

I appreciate the reply, but I was never under the impression that gaps in conversations would increase costs nor reduce quality. Both are surprising and disappointing.

I feel like that is a choice best left up to users.

i.e. "Resuming this conversation with full context will consume X% of your 5-hour usage bucket, but that can be reduced by Y% by dropping old thinking logs"

btown• 3 months ago

Is there a way to say: I am happy to pay a premium (in tokens or extra usage) to make sure that my resumed 1h+ session has all the old thinking?

I understand you wouldn't want this to be the default, particularly for people who have one giant running session for many topics - and I can only imagine the load involved in full cache misses at scale. But there are other use cases where this thinking is critical - for instance, a session for a large refactor or a devops/operations use case consolidating numerous issue reports and external findings over time, where the periodic thinking was actually critical to how the session evolved.

For example, if N-4 was a massive dump of some relevant, some irrelevant material (say, investigating for patterns in a massive set of data, but prompted to be concise in output), then N-4's thinking might have been critical to N-2 not getting over-fixated on that dump from N-4. I'd consider it mission-critical, and pay a premium, when resuming an N some hours later to avoid pitfalls just as N-2 avoided those pitfalls.

Could we have an "ultraresume" that, similar to ultrathink, would let a user indicate they want to watch Return of the (Thin)king: Extended Edition?

frumplestlatz• 3 months ago

The entire reason I keep a long-lived session around is because the context is hard-won — in term of tokens and my time.

Silently degrading intelligence ought to be something you never do, but especially not for use-cases like this.

I’m looking back at my past few weeks of work and realizing that these few regressions literally wasted 10s of hours of my time, and hundreds of dollars in extra usage fees. I ran out of my entire weekly quota four days ago, and had to pause the personal project I was working on.

I was running the exact same pipeline I’ve run repeatedly before, on the same models, and yet this time I somehow ate a week’s worth of quota in less than 24h. I spent $400 just to finish the pipeline pass that got stuck halfway through.

I’m sorry to be harsh, but your engineering culture must change. There are some types of software you can yolo. This isn’t one of them. The downstream cost of stupid mistakes is way, way too high, and far too many entirely avoidable bugs — and poor design choices — are shipping to customers way too often.

Joeri• 3 months ago

This sounds like one of those problems where the solution is not a UX tweak but an architecture change. Perhaps prompt cache should be made long term resumable by storing it to disk before discarding from memory?

saadn922• 3 months ago

I leave sessions idle for hours constantly - that's my primary workflow. If resuming a 900k context session eats my rate limit, fine, show me the cost and let me decide whether to /clear or push through. You already show a banner suggesting /clear at high context - just do the same thing here instead of silently lobotomizing the model.

ryanisnan• 3 months ago

Why does the system work like that? Is the cache local, or on Claude's servers?

Why not store the prompt cache to disk when it goes cold for a certain period of time, and then when a long-lived, cold conversation gets re-initiated, you can re-hydrate the cache from disk. Purge the cached prompts from disk after X days of inactivity, and tell users they cannot resume conversations over X days without burning budget.

nextaccountic• 3 months ago

what about selling long term cache space to users?

or even, let the user control the cache expiry on a per request basis. with a /cache command

that way they decide if they want to drop the cache right away , or extend it for 20 hours etc

it would cost tokens even if the underlying resource is memory/SSD space, not compute

growt• 3 months ago

Wasn’t cache time reduced to 5 minutes? Or is that just some users interpretation of the bug?

bobkb• 3 months ago

Resuming sessions after more than 1 hour is a very common workflow that many teams are following. It will be great if this is considered as an expected behaviour and design the UX around it. Perhaps you are not realising the fact that Claude code has replaced the shells people were using (ie now bash is replaced with a Claude code session).

ohcmon2• 3 months ago

Boris, wait, wait, wait,

Why not use tired cache?

Obviously storage is waaay cheaper than recalculation of embeddings all the way from the very beginning of the session.

No matter how to put this explanation — it still sounds strange. Hell — you can even store the cache on the client if you must.

Please, tell me I’m not understanding what is going on..

otherwise you really need to hire someone to look at this!)

mtilsted2• 3 months ago

Then you need to update your documentation and teach claude to read the new documentation because here is what claude code answered:

Question: Hey claude, if we have a conversation, and then i take a break. Does it change the expected output of my next answer, if there are 2 hours between the previous message end the next one?

Answer: No. A 2-hour gap doesn't change my output. I have no internal clock between messages — I only see the conversation content plus the currentDate context injected each turn. The prompt cache may expire (5 min TTL), which affects cost/latency but not the response itself.

  The only things that can change output across a break: new context injected (like updated date), memory files being modified, or files on disk changing.

-- This answer directly contradict your post. It seems like the biggest problem is a total lack of documentation for expected behavior.

A similar thing happens if I ask claude code for the difference between plan mode, and accept edits on.

Then Claude told me the only difference was that with plan mode it would ask for permission before doing edits. But I really don't think this is true. It seems like plan mode does a lot more work, and present it in a total different way. It is not just a "I will ask before applying changes" mode.

infogulch• 3 months ago

How big is the cache? Could you just evict the cache into cheap object storage and retrieve it when resuming? When the user starts the conversation back up show a "Resuming conversation... ⭕" spinner.

the-grump• 3 months ago

That is understandable, but the issue is the sudden drop in quality and the silent surge in token usage.

It also seems like the warning should be in channel and not on X. If I wanted to find out how broken things are on X, I'd be a Grok user.

8note4• 3 months ago

reasonably, if i'm in an interactive session, its going to have breaks for an hour or more.

whats driving the hour cache? shouldnt people be able to have lunch, then come back and continue?

are you expecting claude code users to not attend meetings?

I think product-wise you might need a better story on who uses claude-code, when and why.

Same thing with session logs actually - i know folks who are definitely going to try to write a yearly RnD report and monthly timesheets based on text analysis of their claude code session files, and they're going to be incredibly unhappy when they find out its all been silently deleted

sockaddr2• 3 months ago

Sorry but I think this should be left up to the user to decide how it works and how they want to burn their tokens. Also a countdown timer is better than all of these other options you mention.

uxcolumbo• 3 months ago

I don't envy you Boris. Getting flak from all sorts of places can't be easy. But thanks for keeping a direct line with us.

I wish Anthropic's leadership would understand that the dev community is such a vital community that they should appreciate a bit more (i.e. not nice sending lawyers afters various devs without asking nicely first, banning accounts without notice, etc etc). Appreciate it's not easy to scale.

OpenAI seems to be doing a much better job when it comes to developer relations, but I would like to see you guys 'win' since Anthropic shows more integrity and has clear ethical red lines they are not willing to cross unlike OpenAI's leadership.

kuboble• 3 months ago

As some others have mentioned.

I think the best option would be tell a user who is about to resurrect a conversation that has been evicted from cache that the session is not cached anymore and the user will have to face a full cost of replaying a session, not only the incremental question and answer.

(In understand under the hood that llms are n^2 by default but it's very counter intuitive - and given how popular cc is becoming outside of nerd circles, probably smaller and smaller fraction of users is aware of it)

I would like to decide on it case by case. Sometimes the session has some really deep insight I want to preserve, sometimes it's discardable.

kang4• 3 months ago

tokens written to cache all at once, which would eat up a significant % of your rate limits

Construction of context is not an llm pass - it shouldn't even count towards token usage. The word 'caching' itself says don't recompute me.

Since the devs on HN (& the whole world) is buying what looks like nonsense to me - what am I missing?

BoppreH• 3 months ago

Isn't that exactly what people had been accusing Anthropic of doing, silently making Claude dumber on purpose to cut costs? There should be, at minimum, a warning on the UI saying that parts of the context were removed due to inactivity.

dnnddidiej• 3 months ago

It is too suprising. Time passed should not matter for using AI.

Either swallow the cost or be transparent to the user and offer both options each time.

toephu2• 3 months ago

How does the Claude team recommend devs use Claude Code?

1) Is it okay to leave Claude Code CLI open for days?

2) Should we be using /clear more generously? e.g., on every single branch change, on every new convo?

Terretta4• 3 months ago

This violates the principle of least surprise, with nothing to indicate Claude got lobotomized while it napped when so many use prior sessions as "primed context" (even if people don't know that's what they were doing or know why it works).

The purpose of spending 10 to 50 prompts getting Claude to fill the context for you is it effectively "fine tunes" that session into a place your work product or questions are handled well.

// If this notion of sufficient context as fine tune seems surprising, the research is out there.)

Approaches tried need to deal with both of these:

1) Silent context degradation breaks the Pro-tool contract. I pay compute so I don't pay in my time; if you want to surface the cost, surface it (UI + price tag or choice), don't silently erode quality of outcomes.

2) The workaround (external context files re-primed on return) eats the exact same cache miss, so the "savings" are illusory — you just pushed the cost onto the user's time. If my own time's cheap enough that's the right trade off, I shouldn't be using your machine.

kccqzy• 3 months ago

This just does not match my workflow when I work on low-priority projects, especially personal projects when I do them for fun instead of being paid to do them. With life getting busy, I may only have half an hour each night with Claude to make some progress on it before having to pause and come back the next day. It’s just the nature of doing personal projects as a middle-aged person.

The above workflow basically doesn’t hit the rate limit. So I’d appreciate a way to turn off this feature.

arcza• 3 months ago

You need to seriously look at your corporate communications and hire some adults to standarise your messaging, comms and signals. The volatility behind your doors is obvious to us and you'd impress us much more if you slowed down, took a moment to think about your customers and sent a consistent message.

You lost huge trust with the A/B sham test. You lost trust with enshittification of the tokenizer on 4.6 to 4.7. Why not just say "hey, due to huge input prices in energy, GPU demand and compute constraints we've had to increase Pro from $20 to $30." You might lose 5% of customers. But the shady A/B thing and dodgy tokenizer increasing burn rate tells everyone inc. enterprise that you don't care about honesty and integrity in your product.

I hope this feedback helps because you still stand to make an awesome product. Just show a little more professionalism.

try-working2• 3 months ago

You created this issue by setting a timer for cache clearing. Time is really not a dimension that plays any role in how coding agent context is used.

artdigital• 3 months ago

I'm also a Claude Code user from day 1 here, back from when it wasn't included in the Pro/Max subscriptions yet, and I was absolutely not aware of this either. Your explanation makes sense, but I naively was also under the impression that re-using older existing conversations that I had open would just continue the conversation as is and not be a treated as a full cache miss.

My biggest learning here is the 1 hour cache window. I often have multiple Claudes open and it happens frequently that they're idle for 1+ hours.

This cache information should probably get displayed somewhere within Claude Code

FuckButtons3• 3 months ago

From a utility perspective using a tiered cache with some much higher latency storage option for up to n hours would be very useful for me to prevent that l1 cache miss.

chris1993• 3 months ago

So this explains why resuming a session after a 5-hour timeout basically eats most of the next session. How then to avoid this?

useyourforce• 3 months ago

I actually have a suggestion here - do not hide token count in non-verbose mode in Claude Code.

mandeepj• 3 months ago

that would be >900k tokens written to cache all at once

Probably that's why I hit my weekly limits 3-4 days ago, and was scheduled to reset later today. I just checked, and they are already reset.

Not sure if it's already done, shouldn't there be a check somewhere to alert on if an outrageous number of tokens are getting written, then it's not right ?

Confiks• 3 months ago

So you made this change completely invisible to the user, without the user being able to choose between the two behaviors, and without even documenting it in the (extremely verbose) changelog [1]? I can't find it, the Docs Assistant can't find it (well, it "I found it!" three times being fed your reply with a non-matching item).

I frequently debug issues while keeping my carefully curated but long context active for days. Losing potentially very important context while in the middle of a debugging session resulting in less optimal answers, is costing me a lot more money than the cache misses would.

In my eyes, Claude Code is mainly a context management tool. I build a foundation of apparent understanding of the problem domain, and then try to work towards a solution in a dialogue. Now you tell me Anthrophic has been silently breaking down that foundation without telling me, wasting potentially hours of my time.

It's a clear reminder that these closed-source harnesses cannot be trusted (now or in the future), and I should find proper alternatives for Claude Code as soon as possible.

[1] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/changelog

jorjon• 3 months ago

What about:

/loop 5m say "ok".

Will that keep the cache fresh?

airstrike2• 3 months ago

Why is time the variable you're solving for? Why can't I keep that cache warm by keeping the session open?

willsmith72• 3 months ago

Wow so that's why you did #2? The explanation in the CLI is really not clear. I thought it was just a suggestion to compact, no idea it was way more expensive than if I hadn't left it idle for an hour.

You guys really need to communicate that better in the CLI for people not on social

taspeotis• 3 months ago

Hi, thanks for Claude Code. I was wondering though if you'd considering adding a mode to make text green and characters come down from the top of the screen individually, like in The Matrix?

jwr2• 3 months ago

These controversies erupt regularly, and I hope that you will see a common thing with most of them: you make a decision for your users without informing them.

Please fight this hubris. Your users matter. Many of us use your tools for everyday work and do not appreciate having the rug pulled from under them on a regular basis, much less so in an underhanded and undisclosed way.

I don't mind the bugs, these will happen. What I do not appreciate is secretly changing things that are likely to decrease performance.

0123456789ABCDE• 3 months ago

2. could you bring back the _compact and accept plan_? even if it is not the default option.

albert_e• 3 months ago

The challenge is: when you let a session idle for >1 hour, when you come back to it and send a prompt, it will be a full cache miss, all N messages. We noticed that this corner case led to outsized token costs for users.

I dont agree with this being characterized as a "corner case".

Isn't this how most long running work will happen across all serious users?

I am not at my desk babysitting a single CC chat session all day. I have other things to attend to -- and that was the whole point of agentic engineering.

Dont CC users take lunch breaks?

How are all these utterly common scenarios being named as corner cases -- as something that is wildly out of the norm, and UX can be sacrificed for those cases?

looshch• 3 months ago

We tried a few different approaches to improve this UX

how about acknowledging that you fucked up your own customers’ money and making a full refund for the affected period?

Educating users on X/social

that is beyond me

ты не Борис, ты максимум борька

samusiam• 3 months ago

For idle sessions I would MUCH rather pay the cost in tokens than reduced quality. Frankly, it's shocking to me that you would make that trade-off for users without their knowledge or consent.

nhinck3• 3 months ago

So is it for latency or is it for cost?

Why did you lie 11 days ago, 3 days after the fix went in, about the cause of excess token usage?

Folcon3• 3 months ago

Hi Boris

I'm curious why 1 hour was chosen?

Is increasing it a significant expense?

Ever since I heard about this behaviour I've been trying to figure out how to handle long running Claude sessions and so far every approach I've tried is suboptimal

It takes time to create a good context which can then trigger a decent amount of work in my experience, so I've been wondering how much this is a carefully tuned choice that's unlikely to change vs something adjustable

noname1205• 3 months ago

Why not automatically run a compaction close to the 1-hour mark? Then the cache miss won’t have such a bad impact.

winternewt2• 3 months ago

Adding an in-product tip to recommend running /clear when re-visiting old conversations (we shipped a few iterations of this)

I feel like I'm missing something here. Why would I revisit an old conversation only to clear it?

To me it sounds like a prompt-cache miss for a big context absolutely needs to be a per-instance warning and confirmation. Or even better a live status indicating what sending a message will cost you in terms of input tokens.

andrewingram2• 3 months ago

This points to a fairly fundamental mismatch between the realities of running an LLM and the expectations of users. As a user, I _expect_ the cost of resuming X hours/days later to be no different to resuming seconds or minutes later. The fact that there is a difference, means it's now being compensated for in fairly awkward ways -- none of the solutions seem good, just varying degrees of bad.

Is there a more fundamental issue of trying to tie something with such nuanced costs to an interaction model which has decades of prior expectation of every message essentially being free?

baq• 3 months ago

maybe you could surface an expected cache miss to the user

foobarbecue• 3 months ago

Hi Boris! Wanted to let you know that I find those ads with you saying "now when you code, you use an agent" obnoxious because of that incorrect statement. I have no interest in slop coding. I find it way more ergonomic and effective to use code to tell a machine precisely what to do than to use English to tell it vaguely. I hate that your ad is misleading so many non-coders, who will actually believe your lie that nobody codes anymore. Probably doesn't help that YouTube was playing it as an interruption in every video I watched. I probably saw it 100 times and was getting to the "throw the remote at the tv" stage XD.

cowlby• 3 months ago

Ahh that makes sense. Sometimes it's convenient to re-use an older conversation that has all the context I need. But maybe it's just the last 20% that's relevant.

It would be nice to be able to summarize/cut into a new leaner conversation vs having to coax all the context back into a fresh one. Something like keep the last 100,000 tokens.

I believe /compact achieves something like this? It just takes so long to summarize that it creates friction.

PeterStuer4• 3 months ago

At least for me, option 2 seems far favorable to the others. Give me the info, then let me decide.

QuantumGood• 3 months ago

Prioritize outcomes for users using your product. That should lead to improving the viral/visibility aspect of documentation notification, as well as other aspects of documentation. Make this a differentiator of your product. Widespread misperceptions hurt outcomes.

Could you create one location educating advanced users, and:

• Promote, Organize and Maintain it

• Develop a group of users that have early access to "upcoming notifications we're working on"

• Perhaps give a third party specializing in making information visible responsibility for it

• Read comments by users in various places to determine what should be communicated. Just under this comment @dbeardsl begins "I appreciate the reply, but I was never under the impression that ...".

The speed that key users are informed of issues is critical. This is just off the top of my head, a much better plan I'm sure could be created.

r00t-• 3 months ago

We hit limits, and we come back when the limit is lifted. Isn't it obvious sessions are going to stay idle for more than 1 hour when Claude itself is hitting the limits?

I switched to Codex, Claude has gotten to a point where it's just unusable for the regular Joe.

bshanks• 3 months ago

The main issue here is not UX, but rather that you did something which degraded quality without transparency. You should have documented this and also highlighted the change in an announcement. There should never be an undocumented change that reduces quality. There should never be something the user can do (or fail to do) that reduces quality without that being documented. To regain trust, Anthropic should make an announcement committing to documenting/announcing any future intentional quality-reducing changes.

In addition, the following is less important, but as other commenters have stated: walking away from a conversation and coming back to it more than an hour later is very common and it would be nice if there were a way for the user to opt to retain maximum quality (e.g. no dropped thinking) in this case. In the longer term, it would be nice if there were a way for the user to wait a few minutes for a stale session to resume, in exchange for not having a large amount of quota drained (ie have a 'slow mode' invoked upon session resumption that consumes less quota).

chid• 3 months ago

Just curious, is there a consolidated list of all these "education" tips?

Intuitively I understand this due to how context windows work and you're looking to increase cache hits, has Anthropic tried compact/summarise on idle as a configurable option? Seems to have decent tradeoffs + education in a setting.

tripzilch• 3 months ago

I don't think it's fair or reasonable to charge your cache misses to the user.

bmitc• 3 months ago

Appreciate the responses here. However, I feel like these responses are just to show us how much you know about the product and aren't actually helpful.

Instead, why don't you and Anthropic be more open about changes to these tools rather than waiting for users to complain, then investigating things after the fact that you should have investigated in the first place, and then posting on social media about all the cool tech details?

My company is tens of thousands strong. The amount of churn in Claude Code is a major issue and causing real awareness of the lack of stability and lack of customer support Anthropic provides.

And Claude Code is actually becoming a prototypical example of the dangers of vibe coded products and the burdens they place.

6keZbCECT2uB2• 3 months ago

I can see how this makes sense as a default behavior for cost conscious users. I would prefer to have the option for my company to pay more to rehydrate the cache than to have there be a model performance difference when having idled for an hour.

"We tried a few different approaches to improve this UX:

1. Educating users on X/social

2. Adding an in-product tip to recommend running /clear when re-visiting old conversations (we shipped a few iterations of this)

I see how these interventions help users reduce their token burn rate, but they don't address the need for an enterprise user to maintain quality.

A common workflow for me is kick off a prompt, commute home, eat dinner, follow up on prompt. Frequently 80K tokens or less in the context, frequently > 3 hours. Or when running multiple sessions it's easy to let a session idle for a few hours while I focus on one. Or many meetings might mean idle time for an hour.

Also, for enterprise users, I don't think education on X is a great place. There are people upskilling on this that never intentionally go on X.

First thing that comes to mind would be a weekly tip feed of footguns and underutilized functionality published to an anthropic website. "The Old New Thing" "Guru of the Week" "Abseil tips of the week" all have that format.

sockaddr2• 3 months ago

Yeah this is actually quite shocking. In my earlier uses of CC I might noodle on a problem for a while, come back and update the plan, go shower, think, give CC a new piece of advice, etc. Basically treating it like a coworker. And I thought that it was a static conversation (at least on the order of a day or so). An hour is absurd IMO and makes me want to rethink whether I want to keep my anthropic plan.

zmmmmm• 3 months ago

Seems like it would interact very badly with the time based usage reset. If lots of people are hitting their limit and then letting the session idle until they can come back, this wouldn't be an exception. It would almost be the default behaviour.

Aperocky3• 3 months ago

Wow, I always thought the context is always stored locally and this is something I have control over.

Glad I use kiro-cli which doesn't do this.

Bishonen88• 3 months ago

you might be biased due to your employment :)

greatgib2• 3 months ago

In addition with the bug, a big part of the issue is that this change was done secretly by Anthropic and not communicated to the users.

If that was done, users could have been mindful of the change and figure out more easily that their problems could have come from that.

lukebechtel• 3 months ago

Some people seem to be suggesting these are coverups for quantization...

Those who work on agent harnesses for a living realize how sensitive models can be to even minor changes in the prompt.

I would not suspect quantization before I would suspect harness changes.

lifthrasiir3• 3 months ago

Is it just for me that the reset cycle of usage limits has been randomly updated? I originally had the reset point at around 00:00 UTC tomorrow and it was somehow delayed to 10:00 UTC tomorrow, regardless of when I started to use Claude in this cycle. My friends also reported very random delay, as much as ~40 hours, with seemingly no other reason. Is this another bug on top of other bugs? :-S

someone4958923• 3 months ago

"This isn’t the experience users should expect from Claude Code. As of April 23, we’re resetting usage limits for all subscribers."

lifthrasiir3• 3 months ago

I know that. I'm saying that the cycle reset is not what it used to (starting at the very first usage) or what it might be (retaining the cycle reset timing).

nubinetwork• 3 months ago

My usage got reset yesterday as usual, but it appears it will reset again on Sunday.

jpcompartir• 3 months ago

Anthropic releases used to feel thorough and well done, with the models feeling immaculately polished. It felt like using a premium product, and it never felt like they were racing to keep up with the news cycle, or reply to competitors.

Recently that immaculately polished feel is harder to find. It coincides with the daily releases of CC, Desktop App, unknown/undocumented changes to the various harnesses used in CC/Cowork. I find it an unwelcome shift.

I still think they're the best option on the market, but the delta isn't as high as it was. Sometimes slowing down is the way to move faster.

bcherny6• 3 months ago

Boris from the Claude Code team here. We agree, and will be spending the next few weeks increasing our investment in polish, quality, and reliability. Please keep the feedback coming.

pkos98• 3 months ago

Sure, I've cancelled my Max 20 subscription because you guys prioritize cutting your costs/increasing token efficiency over model performance. I use expensive frontier labs to get the absolute best performance, else I'd use an Open Source/Chinese one.

Frontier LLMs still suck a lot, you can't afford planned degradation yet.

szmarczak4• 3 months ago

Why ban third party wrappers? All of this could've been sidestepped had you not banned them.

batshit_beaver• 3 months ago

investment in polish, quality, and reliability

For there to be any trust in the above, the tool needs to behave predictably day to day. It shouldn't be possible to open your laptop and find that Claude suddenly has an IQ 50 points lower than yesterday. I'm not sure how you can achieve predictability while keeping inference costs in check and messing with quantization, prompts, etc on the backend.

Maybe a better approach might be to version both the models and the system prompts, but frequently adjust the pricing of a given combination based on token efficiency, to encourage users to switch to cheaper modes on their own. Let users choose how much they pay for given quality of output though.

a-dub• 3 months ago

hm. ml people love static evals and such, but have you considered approaches that typically appear in saas? (slow-rollouts, org/user constrained testing pools with staged rollouts, real-world feedback from actual usage data (where privacy policy permits)?

troupo13• 3 months ago

And you didn't invest anything in polish, quality and reliability before... why? Because for any questions people have you reply something like "I have Claude working on this right now" and have no idea what's happening in the code?

A reminder: your vibe-coded slop required peak 68GB of RAM, and you had to hire actual engineers to fix it.

wilj3• 3 months ago

My biggest problem with CC as a harness is that I can't trust "Plan" mode. Long running sessions frequently start bypassing plan mode and executing, updating files and stuff, without permission, while still in plan mode. And the only recovery seems to be to quit and reload CC.

Right now my solution is to run CC in tmux and keep a 2nd CC pane with /loop watching the first pane and killing CC if it detects plan mode being bypassed. Burning tokens to work around a bug.

tkgally• 3 months ago

Here's one person's feedback. After the release of 4.7, Claude became unusable for me in two ways: frequent API timeouts when using exactly the same prompts in Claude Code that I had run problem-free many times previously, and absurdly slow interface response in Claude Cowork. I found a solution to the first after a few days (add "CLAUDE_STREAM_IDLE_TIMEOUT_MS": "600000" to settings.json), but as of a few hours ago Cowork--which I had thought was fantastic, by the way--was still unusable despite various attempts to fix it with cache clearing and other hacks I found on the web.

g4cg54g54• 3 months ago

Please keep the feedback coming

if only there were a place with 9.881 feedbacks waiting to be triaged...

and that maybe not by a duplicate-bot that goes wild and just autocloses everything, just blessing some of the stuff there with a "you´ve been seen" label would go a long way...

olejorgenb• 3 months ago

Can you please fix https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/43713 ?

rimliu4• 3 months ago

I am considering proving my feedback by not providing my money any longer.

OtomotO2• 3 months ago

I guess it's a bit of desperation to find a sustainable business model.

The AI hype is dying, at least outside the silicon valley bubble which hackernews is very much a part of.

That and all the dogfooding by slop coding their user facing application(s).

spaniard89277• 3 months ago

Given the price I don't really think they're the best option. They're sloppy and competitors are catching up. I'm having same results with other models, and very close with Kimi, which is waaay cheaper.

KronisLV2• 3 months ago

It felt like using a premium product, and it never felt like they were racing to keep up with the news cycle, or reply to competitors.

I don't know, their desktop app felt really laggy and even switching Code sessions took a few seconds of nothing happening. Since the latest redesign, however, it's way better, snappy and just more usable in most respects.

I just think that we notice the negative things that are disruptive more. Even with the desktop app, the remaining flaws jump out: for example, how the Chat / Cowork / Code modes only show the label for the currently selected mode and the others are icons (that aren't very big), a colleague literally didn't notice that those modes are in the desktop app (or at least that that's where you switch to them).

kilroy123• 3 months ago

I agree. It all feels so AI-slopy now.

swader999• 3 months ago

I've noticed the same thing in my own AI assisted work. Feels like I'm moving too fast and it's easy to implement decisions quickly but they really have to be the right f--ing decisions. In the past dev was so slow so you had a lot of time to vet the hard decisions and now you don't.

podnami• 3 months ago

They lost me at Opus 4.7

Anecdotally OpenAI is trying to get into our enterprise tooth and nail, and have offered unlimited tokens until summer.

Gave GPT5.4 a try because of this and honestly I don’t know if we are getting some extra treatment, but running it at extra high effort the last 30 days I’ve barely see it make any mistakes.

At some points even the reasoning traces brought a smile to my face as it preemptively followed things that I had forgotten to instruct it about but were critical to get a specific part of our data integrity 100% correct.

vorticalbox• 3 months ago

extra high burns tokens i find. ( run 5.4 on medium for 90% of the tasks and high if i see medium struggling and its very focused and make minimum changes.

dsco2• 3 months ago

Yeah but it also then strikes the perfect balance between being meticulous and pragmatic. Also it pushes back much more often than other models in that mode.

DANmode2• 3 months ago

Rework burns tokens.

sincerely• 3 months ago

Not a problem if they're offering unlimited, lol

therealdrag0• 3 months ago

Note mini-high is similar perf/latency to medium, but much cheaper

dsco2• 3 months ago

Same here. I feel like all of these shenanigans could be because Anthropic are compute constrained, forcing then to take reckless risks around reducing it.

enraged_camel• 3 months ago

I find that it is better at thinking broadly and at a high level, on tasks that are tangential to coding like UX flows, product management and planning of complex implementations. I have yet to see it perform better than either Opus 4.6 or 4.7 though.

cube2222• 3 months ago

I’ve never been one to complain about new models, and also didn’t experience most of the issues folks were citing about Claude Code over the last couple months. I’ve been using it since release, happy with almost each new update.

Until Opus 4.7 - this is the first time I rolled back to a previous model.

Personality-wise it’s the worst of AI, “it’s not x, it’s y”, strong short sentences, in general a bulshitty vibe, also gaslighting me that it fixed something even though it didn’t actually check.

I’m not sure what’s up, maybe it’s tuned for harnesses like Claude Design (which is great btw) where there’s an independent judge to check it, but for now, Opus 4.6 it is.

port11• 3 months ago

I noticed the difference, but coming from Gemini and xAI models it wasn’t that glaring. I still find that Opus makes much better plans than anything else I’ve tried, and it’s been very good at catching my mistakes in using public-key cryptography, also finding out why my crsqlite queries were failing despite no official documentation on the topic.

I’d never use such an expensive model for coding, so that might explain why I have little to complain about.

robeym2• 3 months ago

What's your workflow like? I'd be curious to test OpenAI out again but Claude Code is how I use the models. Does it require relearning another workflow?

beering2• 3 months ago

Isn’t it bascially the same thing? You type what you want into the input box and it does what you ask for.

someguyiguess4• 3 months ago

I went back to 4.5. No regrets and it’s a bit cheaper.

SkyPuncher• 3 months ago

Same here. 4.6 was a downgrade in thinking quality, but I appreciated the extend context at first.

Over time, I realized the extended context became randomly unreliable. That was worse to me than having to compact and know where I was picking up.

beering2• 3 months ago

GPT-5.4 was already better than Opus 4.6 on a lot of areas, especially correctness and tricky logic. I’m eager to see if 5.5 is even better.

epsteingpt3• 3 months ago

Truth

tasoeur• 3 months ago

Same here. I was a fervent Claude code user at $200/mo until Opus4.7.

Freezing your IDE version is now a thing of the past, the new reality is that we can't expect agentic dev workflows to be consistent and I see too many people (including myself) getting burned by going the single-provider route.

On one hand I’m glad to finally see anthropic communicate on this but at this point all I have to say is… time to diversify?

ghusbands• 3 months ago

They lost me a little before then - Claude Code's regressions were so very obvious and there's no sign they've learned their lesson in this article or in the comments of those who work on Claude Code on HN. They'll continue to tweak and generally mess around with a product people are using, altering the behaviour without notice in ways that can severely impact use, for months! GPT5.4 has been remarkably consistent and capable, as a replacement. I've cancelled my max plan.

UntappedShelf21• 3 months ago

I started using Claude heavily on the 20th after having not used it for a year. Largely Sonnet 4.6, web, cowork and code. Can confidently say it is significantly worse than this time a year ago and regret that my new employer requires we use it, and only it.

time0ut• 3 months ago

Opus 4.7 via code has been inconsistent for me. Sometimes, it feels like working with a brilliant collaborator and is as good as 4.5 and 4.6 were. Other times, it takes dumb and lazy short cuts. It can be quite frustrating. Its response when I tell it it did something wrong is often to write a memory... which is then does not always read. The inconsistency isn't due to session length or age either. These are all new sessions. I feel like sometimes, I get routed do a dumber model or some other hidden setting is applied.

Gareth321• 3 months ago

My experience as well. This is even worse than just having a mediocre model, because I can work around that. The inconsistency means it produces different outputs for the same prompt, and I can't rely on that as a business tool.

rishabhaiover2• 3 months ago

Boris gaslighted us with all the quality related incidents for weeks not acknowledging these problems.

throwaway20273• 3 months ago

Maybe he didn't know or they were still figuring it out which is fine they're still engineers who can get things wrong sometimes but the communication felt lackluster and being on the receiving end sucks when you had a reliable setup which then degrades. There is a reason people don't upgrade software and why people say if it works don't fix it, but obviously that's not an option for Anthropic when you want to keep improving the product, so they need good measurement tools and quick rollbacks even if properly "benchmarking" LLMs could prove difficult.

rishabhaiover2• 3 months ago

I agree but one can admit their situation instead of outrightly rejecting the claims. My own mistake is to have become so hopelessly dependent on them.

bityard3• 3 months ago

My hypothesis is that some of this a perceived quality drop due to "luck of the draw" where it comes to the non-deterministic nature of VM output.

A couple weeks ago, I wanted Claude to write a low-stakes personal productivity app for me. I wrote an essay describing how I wanted it to behave and I told Claude pretty much, "Write an implementation plan for this." The first iteration was _beautiful_ and was everything I had hoped for, except for a part that went in a different direction than I was intending because I was too ambiguous in how to go about it.

I corrected that ambiguity in my essay but instead of having Claude fix the existing implementation plan, I redid it from scratch in a new chat because I wanted to see if it would write more or less the same thing as before. It did not--in fact, the output was FAR worse even though I didn't change any model settings. The next two burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp but the fourth one was (finally) very much on par with the first.

I'm taking from this that it's often okay (and probably good) to simply have Claude re-do tasks to get a higher-quality output. Of course, if you're paying for your own tokens, that might get expensive in a hurry...

gilrain3• 3 months ago

My hypothesis is that some of this a perceived quality drop due to "luck of the draw" where it comes to the non-deterministic nature of [LLM] output.

I think you must have learned that they’re more nondeterministic than you had thought, but then wrongly connected your new understanding to the recent model degradation. Note: they’ve been nondeterministic the whole time, while the widely-reported degradation is recent.

pydry• 3 months ago

I wonder how well the "good" versions worked if you threw awkward edge cases at it.

bityard3• 3 months ago

Er, no, I am fully aware that LLMs have always been non-deterministic.

skirmish• 3 months ago

So will we have to do what image generation people have been doing for ages: generate 50 versions of output for the prompt, then pick the best manually? Anthropic must be licking its figurative chops hearing this.

motoroco• 3 months ago

I have to agree with OP, in my experience it is usually more productive to start over than to try correcting output early on. deeper into a project and it gets a bit harder to pull off a switch. I sometimes fork my chats before attempting to make a correction so that I can resume the original just in case (yes, I know you can double-tap Esc but the restoration has failed for me a few times in the past and now I generally avoid it)

coffeefirst• 3 months ago

This is my theory too. There’s a predictable cycle where the models “get worse.” They probably don’t. A lot of people just take a while to really hit hard against the limitations.

And once you get unlucky you can’t unsee it.

billywhizz2• 3 months ago

you probably could have written the low stakes productivity app in a fraction of the time you wasted on this.

afro883• 3 months ago

Or learnt to use an existing one.

I vibed a low stakes budgeting app before realising what I actually needed was Actual Budget and to change a little bit how I budget my money.

afro883• 3 months ago

I can't remember what the technique is called, but back in the GPT 4 days there was a paper published about having a number of attempts at responding to a prompt and then having a final pass where it picks the best one. I believe this is part of how the "Pro" GPT variant works, and Cursor also supports this in a way (though I'm not sure if the auto pick best one at the end is part of it - never tried)

zormino• 3 months ago

I also think some of this stems from the default 1m context window. Performance starts to degrade when context size increases, and each token over (i think the level is) 400k counts more towards your usage limit. Defaulting to 1m context size, if people arent carefully managing context (which they shouldnt ever have to in an ideal world), they would notice somewhat degraded performance and increased token usage regardless.

voxgen2• 3 months ago

I have found Claude to be especially unpredictable. I've mostly switched to GPT-5.4 now - although it's slightly less capable, it's massively more reliable.

varispeed2• 3 months ago

I think they are routing to cheaper models that present themselves as e.g. Opus. I add to prompts now stuff to ensure that I am not dealing with an impostor. If it answers incorrectly, I terminate the session and start again. Anthropic should be audited for this.

systemvoltage• 3 months ago

Interesting. All 3 seems like they’re obviously going to impact quality. e.g, reducing the effort from high to medium.

So then, there must have been an explicit internal guidance/policy that allowed this tradeoff to happen.

Did they fix just the bug or the deeper policy issue?

troupo13• 3 months ago

they were challenging to distinguish from normal variation in user feedback at first

translation: we ignored this and our various vibe coders were busy gaslighting everyone saying this could not be happening

munk-a2• 3 months ago

It's also important to realize that Anthropic has recently struck several deals with PE firms to use their software. So Anthropic pays the PE firm which forces their managed firms to subscribe to Anthropic.

The artificial creation of demand is also a concerning sign.

bauerd• 3 months ago

On March 4, we changed Claude Code's default reasoning effort from high to medium to reduce the very long latency—enough to make the UI appear frozen—some users were seeing in high mode

Instead of fixing the UI they lowered the default reasoning effort parameter from high to medium? And they "traced this back" because they "take reports about degradation very seriously"? Extremely hard to give them the benefit of doubt here.

bcherny6• 3 months ago

Hey, Boris from the team here.

We did both -- we did a number of UI iterations (eg. improving thinking loading states, making it more clear how many tokens are being downloaded, etc.). But we also reduced the default effort level after evals and dogfooding. The latter was not the right decision, so we rolled it back after finding that UX iterations were insufficient (people didn't understand to use /effort to increase intelligence, and often stuck with the default -- we should have anticipated this).

EugeneOZ2• 3 months ago

people didn't understand to use /effort to increase intelligence, and often stuck with the default -- we should have anticipated this

UI is UI. It is naive to expect that you build some UI but users will "just magically" find out that they should use it as a terminal in the first place.

big_toast• 3 months ago

Having a "Recovery Mode"/"Safe Boot" flag to disable our configurations (or progressively enable) to see how claude code responds would be nice. Sometimes I get worried some old flag I set is breaking things. Maybe the flag already exists? I tried Claude doctor but it wasn't quite the solution.

For instance:

Is Haiku supposed to hit a warm system-prompt cache in a default Claude code setup?

I had `DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1` in my env and found the haiku requests would not hit a warm-cached system prompt. E.g. on first request just now w/ most recent version (v2.1.118, but happened on others):

w/ telemetry off - input_tokens:10 cache_read:0 cache_write:28897 out:249

w/ telemetry on - input_tokens:10 cache_read:24344 cache_write:7237 out:243

I used to think having so many users was leading to people hitting a lot of edge cases, 3 million users is 3 million different problems. Everyone can't be on the happy path. But then I started hitting weird edge cases and started thinking the permutations might not be under control.

abtinf• 3 months ago

You didn’t anticipate most people stick with defaults?

taytus2• 3 months ago

“after evals and dogfooding” couldn’t have done this before releasing the model? We are paying $200/month to beta test the software for you.

krade• 3 months ago

Off topic, but I'm hoping you'll maybe see this. There's been an issue with the VS code extension that makes it pretty much impossible to use (PreToolUse can't intercept permission requests anymore, using PermissionRequest hooks always open the diff viewer and steals focus):

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/36286 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/25018

stingraycharles• 3 months ago

Yeah, this is so silly.

Anthropic: removes thinking output

Users: see long pauses, complain

Anthropic: better reduce thinking time

Users: wtf

To me it really, really seems like Anthropic is trying to undo the transparency they always had around reasoning chains, and a lot of issues are due to that.

Removing thinking blocks from the convo after 1 hour of being inactive without any notice is just the icing on the cake, whoever thought that was a good idea? How about making “the cache is hot” vs “the cache is cold” a clear visual indicator instead, so you slowly shape user behavior, rather than doing these types of drastic things.

sekai2• 3 months ago

Instead of fixing the UI they lowered the default reasoning effort parameter from high to medium? And they "traced this back" because they "take reports about degradation very seriously"? Extremely hard to give them the benefit of doubt here.

They had droves of Claude devs vehemently defending and gaslighting users when this started happening

davidfstr• 3 months ago

Good on Anthropic for giving an update & token refund, given the recent rumors of an inexplicable drop in quality. I applaud the transparency.

scuderiaseb• 3 months ago

Opus 4.7 was released a week ago, at that point all limits were reset, so this was very beneficial to them because basically everyones weekly limit Was anyway about to be reset.

petervandijck• 3 months ago

I have noticed a clear increase in smarts with 4.7. What a great model!

People complain so much, and the conspiracy theories are tiring.

KronisLV2• 3 months ago

This reads like good news! They probably still lost a bunch of users due to the negative public sentiment and not responding quickly enough, but at least they addressed it with a good bit of transparency.

0gs• 3 months ago

wow resetting everyone's usage meter is great. i was so close to finally hitting my weekly limit for once though

ElFitz7• 3 months ago

Now we know why Anthropic banned the use of subscriptions with other agent harnesses: they partially rely on the Claude Code cli to control token usage through various settings.

And it also tells us why we shouldn’t use their harness anyway: they constantly fiddle with it in ways that can seriously impact outcomes without even a warning.

VadimPR• 3 months ago

Appreciate the honesty from the team.

At the same time, personally I find prioritizing quality over quantity of output to be a better personal strategy. Ten partially buggy features really aren't as good as three quality ones.

nickdothutton• 3 months ago

I presume they don't yet have a cohesive monetization strategy, and this is why there is such huge variability in results on a weekly basis. It appears that Anthropic are skipping from one "experiment" to another. As users we only get to see the visible part (the results). Can't design a UI that indicates the software is thinking vs frozen? Does anyone actually believe that?

slashdave6• 3 months ago

Compute is limited worldwide. No amount of money can make these compute platforms appear overnight. They are buying time because the only other option is to stop accepting customers.

joefourier• 3 months ago

They would honestly have been better off refusing customers if compute is so limited. Degrading the quality leads to customers leaving in the short term, and ruins their long term reputation.

But in either case, if compute is so limited, they’ll have to compete with local coding agents. Qwen3.6-27B is good enough to beat having to wait until 5PM for your Claude Code limit to reset.

arjie2• 3 months ago

Useful update. Would be useful to me to switch to a nightly / release cycle but I can see why they don't: they want to be able to move fast and it's not like I'm going to churn over these errors. I can only imagine that the benchmark runs are prohibitively expensive or slow or not using their standard harness because that would be a good smoke test on a weekly cadence. At the least, they'd know the trade-offs they're making.

Many of these things have bitten me too. Firing off a request that is slow because it's kicked out of cache and having zero cache hits (causes everything to be way more expensive) so it makes sense they would do this. I tried skipping tool calls and thinking as well and it made the agent much stupider. These all seem like natural things to try. Pity.

ctoth• 3 months ago

As of April 23, we’re resetting usage limits for all subscribers.

Wait, didn't they just reset everybody's usage last Thursday, thereby syncing everybody's windows up? (Mine should have reset at 13:00 MDT) ? So this is just the normal weekly reset? Except now my reset says it will come Saturday? This is super-confusing!

walthamstow2• 3 months ago

The weekly reset point is different per account. I think something to do with first sign-up date. Mine is on a Tuesday.

schpet2• 3 months ago

mine was originally on sunday, then got moved to thursday (which i disliked), and it is still on thursday. so them resetting my weekly limit on the same day it was scheduled to reset feels like a joke.

puppystench• 3 months ago

The Claude UI still only has "adaptive" reasoning for Opus 4.7, making it functionally useless for scientific/coding work compared to older models (as Opus 4.7 will randomly stop reasoning after a few turns, even when prompted otherwise). There's no way this is just a bug and not a choice to save tokens.

mattew• 3 months ago

It was odd that there was no mention of the forced adaptive reasoning in the article. My guess is they don't have enough compute to do anything else here.

rzk• 3 months ago

They are forcing users to use adaptive thinking now and deprecating thinking.type: "enabled" and budget_tokens. But the web interface (claude.ai), does not support specifying the effort parameter.

gverrilla2• 3 months ago

Recent minor issue worth flagging: Claude sometimes introduces domain-specific acronyms without first spelling them out, assuming reader familiarity. Caught this in a pt-br conversation about cycling where Claude used "FC" (frequência cardíaca / heart rate) — a term common in sports science literature but not in everyday Portuguese. Same pattern shows up in English too (e.g., dropping "RPE," "VO2," "HIIT" without definition). Suggested behavior: on first mention, write the full term and introduce the acronym in parentheses — "frequência cardíaca (FC)" / "heart rate (HR)" — then use the acronym freely afterward. Small thing, but it affects accessibility for readers outside the specific jargon bubble.

walthamstow2• 3 months ago

So we weren't going mad then!

yuvrajmalgat• 3 months ago

ohh

hajile• 3 months ago

My takeaway is that they knew they were changing a bunch of stuff while their reps were gaslighting us in the comments here.

Why should we ever trust what they say again out trust that they won’t be rug-pulling again once this blows over?

jameson• 3 months ago

"In combination with other prompt changes, it hurt coding quality, and was reverted on April 20"

Do researchers know correlation between various aspects of a prompt and the response?

LLM, to me at least, appears to be a wildly random function that it's difficult to rely on. Traditional systems have structured inputs and outputs, and we can know how a system returned the output. This doesn't appear to be the case for LLM where inputs and outputs are any texts.

Anecdotally, I had a difficult time working with open source models at a social media firm, and something as simple as wrapping the example of JSON structure with ```, adding a newline or wording I used wildly changed accuracy.

whalesalad5• 3 months ago

I genuinely don't understand what they have been trying to achieve. All of these incremental "improvements" have ... not improved anything, and have had the opposite effect.

My trust is gone. When day-to-day updates do nothing but cause hundreds of dollars in lost $$$ tokens and the response is "we ... sorta messed up but just a little bit here and there and it added up to a big mess up" bro get fuckin real.

pxc2• 3 months ago

One of Anthropic's ostensive ethical goals is to produce AI that is "understandable" as well as exceptionally "well-aligned". It's striking that some of the same properties that make AI risky also just make it hard to consistently deliver a good product. It occurs to me that if Anthropic really makes some breakthroughs in those areas, everyone will feel it in terms of product quality whether they're worried about grandiose/catastrophic predictions or not.

But right now it seems like, in the case of (3), these systems are really sensitive and unpredictable. I'd characterize that as an alignment problem, too.

rimliu4• 3 months ago

broken cache does not breakthrough make.

pxc2• 3 months ago

Huh? I never claimed they made a breakthrough. My point is that if they really have an alignment or interpretability breakthrough, they won't have to tell us by virtue signaling about how safe it is. Users will just be able to tell because it will eliminate or drastically reduce problems like #3 in the OP. The outcomes of prompt changes remaining unpredictable tells us it's still a black box.

cedws• 3 months ago

On April 16, we added a system prompt instruction to reduce verbosity

In practice I understand this would be difficult but I feel like the system prompt should be versioned alongside the model. Changing the system prompt out from underneath users when you've published benchmarks using an older system prompt feels deceptive.

At least tell users when the system prompt has changed.

elAhmo3• 3 months ago

Its also kinda funny they have to rely on system prompt to control verbosity itself.

esafak2• 3 months ago

It's cheaper than retraining the model.

arkariarn• 3 months ago

I see some anthropic claude code people are reading the comments. A day or two ago I watched a video by theo t3.gg on whether claude got dumber. Even though he was really harsh on anthropic and said some mean stuff. I thought some of the points he was raising about claude code was quite apt. Especially when it comes to the harness bloat. I really hope the new features now stop and there is a real hard push for polish and optimization. Otherwise I think a lot of people will start exploring less bloated more optimized alternatives. Focus on making the harness better and less token consuming.

https://youtu.be/KFisvc-AMII?is=NskPZ21BAe6eyGTh

whalesalad5• 3 months ago

literally just `git reset --hard <random hash from 3 months ago>` would fix this

willis9364• 3 months ago

That implies it's broken. Juicing revenue and slashing opex at the expense of brand and customer retention is the feature.

lanthissa• 3 months ago

never ever forget theo's gpt 5 hype video and then him having to walk it back.

its very clear that theres money or influence exchanging hands behind the scenes with certain content creators, the information, and openai.

Retr0id3• 3 months ago

Everything else aside, their brief "experiment" with removing CC support from the Pro plan got me seriously considering other options. I've been wary of vendor lock-in the whole time, but it was a useful reminder. (opencode+openrouter will probably be my first port of call)

wilj3• 3 months ago

I'm 3 weeks into switching from CC to OpenCode, and in some ways it is far superior to CC right out of the box, and I've maybe burned $200 in tokens to make a private fork that is my ultimate development and personal agent platform. Totally worth it.

Still use CC at work because team standards, but I'd take my OpenCode stack over it any day.

2001zhaozhao3• 3 months ago

The solution IMO is to switch to an agent harness wrapper solution that uses CLI-wrapping or ACP to connect to different coding agents. This is the only way that works across OpenAI, Claude and Gemini.

There are a few out there (latest example is Zed's new multi-agent UI), but they still rely on the underlying agent's skill and plugin system. I'm experimenting with my own approach that integrates a plugin system that can dynamically change the agent skillset & prompts supplied via an integrated MCP server, allowing you to define skills and workflows that work regardless of the underlying agent harness.

tontinton• 3 months ago

or you can use a non vibe designed efficient Rust TUI coding agent made by yours truly, all my coworkers use it too :) called https://maki.sh!

lua plugins WIP

jruz• 3 months ago

Too late bro, switched to Codex I’m done with your bullshit.

gilrain3• 3 months ago

Hi Boris, random observer here. Would you consider apologizing to the community for mistakenly closing tickets related to this and then wrongly keeping them closed when, internally, you realized they were legitimate?

I think an apology for that incident would go a long way.

rimliu4• 3 months ago

not many would believe in the sincerity of it anyway.

karsinkk2• 3 months ago

" Combined with this only happening in a corner case (stale sessions) and the difficulty of reproducing the issue, it took us over a week to discover and confirm the root cause"

I don't know about others, but sessions that are idle > 1h are definitely not a corner case for me. I use Claude code for personal work and most of the time, I'm making it do a task which could say take ~10 to 15mins. Note that I spend a lot of time back and forth with the model planning this task first before I ask it to execute it. Once the execution starts, I usually step away for a coffee break (or) switch to Codex to work on some other project - follow similar planning and execution with it. There are very high chances that it takes me > 1h to come back to Claude.

o104493662• 3 months ago

Yeah and that statement also speaks to their test rigor if they make a change that big without thoroughly testing the edge case they're modifying.

slashdave6• 3 months ago

It's likely a corner case for their developers. The dangers of working on a project is assuming user behavior like your own.

ramesh31• 3 months ago

Effort should not be configurable for Opus, it should be set to a single default that provides the highest level of capability. There are zero instances in which I am willing to accept a lesser result in exchange for a slightly faster response from Opus. If that were the case I would be using Flash or Haiku.

antirez• 3 months ago

Zero QA basically.

8note4• 3 months ago

id go more on the lines of "dont know what to QA for"

cute_boi• 3 months ago

Honestly, it’s kind of sad that Anthropic is winning this AI race. They are the most anti–open source company, and we should try to avoid them as much as possible.

They are all doing it because OpenAI is snatching their customers. And their employees have been gaslighting people [1] for ages. I hope open-source models will provide fierce competition so we do not have to rely on an Anthropic monopoly. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/claude/comments/1satc4f/the_biggest...

o104493662• 3 months ago

Resuming from sessions are still broken since Feb (I had to get claude to write a hook to fix that itself), the monitoring tool doesn't work and blocks usage of what does (simple sleep - except it doesn't even block correctly so you just sidestep in more ridiculous ways), and yet there seems to be more annoying activity proxies/spinner wheels (staring into middle distance)... Like I don't know how in a span of a few months you lose such focus on your product goals. Has Anthropic reached that point in their lifecycle already where their product team is no longer staffed by engineers and they have more and more non-technical MBAs joining trying to ride the hype train?

throwaway20273• 3 months ago

Cool but I switched to Codex for the time being.

rfc_1149• 3 months ago

The third bug is the one worth dwelling on. Dropping thinking blocks every turn instead of just once is the kind of regression that only shows up in production traffic. A unit test for "idle-threshold clearing" would assert "was thinking cleared after an hour of idle" (yes) without asserting "is thinking preserved on subsequent turns" (no). The invariant is negative space.

The real lesson is that an internal message-queuing experiment masked the symptoms in their own dogfooding. Dogfooding only works when the eaten food is the shipped food.

afro883• 3 months ago

Experienced engineers that know the codebase and system well, and with enough time to consider the problem properly would likely consider this case.

But if we're vibing... This is the kind of bug that should make it back into a review agent/skill's instructions in a more generic format. Essentially if something is done to the message history, check there tests that subsequent turns work as expected.

But yeah, you'd have to piss off a bunch of users in prod first to discover the blind spot.

whalesalad5• 3 months ago

The funny thing is, in the last 3 days Claude has gotten substantially worse. So this claim, "All three issues have now been resolved as of April 20 (v2.1.116)" does not land with me at all.

Rapzid• 3 months ago

On March 4, we changed Claude Code's default reasoning effort from high to medium to reduce the very long latency—enough to make the UI appear frozen—some users were seeing in high mode.

Translation: To reduce the load on our servers.

kristianc• 3 months ago

To think we'd have known about this in advance if they'd just have open sourced Claude Code, rather than them being forced into this embarrassing post mortem. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

dcchambers• 3 months ago

So it turns out Anthropic was gaslighting everyone on twitter about this then? Swearing that nothing had changed and people were imagining the models got worse?

mtilsted2• 3 months ago

Nope, they were technical correct. Nothing had changed with the model. The model had not gotten any worse.

The harness on the other hand. Now that had problems.

psubocz• 3 months ago

All three issues have now been resolved as of April 20 (v2.1.116).

The latest in homebrew is 2.1.108 so not fixed, and I don't see opus 4.7 on the models list... Is homebrew a second class citizen, or am I in the B group?

sutterd• 3 months ago

What kind of performance are people getting now? I was running 4.7 yesterday and it did a remarkably bad job. I recreated my repo state exactly and ran the same starting task with 4.5 (which I have preferred to 4.6). It was even worse, by a large margin. It is likely my task was a difficult or poorly posed, but I still have some idea of what 4.5 should have done on it. This was not it. What experiences are other people having with the 4.7? How about with other model versions, if they are trying them? (In both cases, I ran on max effort, for whatever that is worth.)

behat• 3 months ago

This is a very interesting read on failure modes of AI agents in prod.

Curious about this section on the system prompt change: >> After multiple weeks of internal testing and no regressions in the set of evaluations we ran, we felt confident about the change and shipped it alongside Opus 4.7 on April 16. As part of this investigation, we ran more ablations (removing lines from the system prompt to understand the impact of each line) using a broader set of evaluations. One of these evaluations showed a 3% drop for both Opus 4.6 and 4.7. We immediately reverted the prompt as part of the April 20 release.

Curious what helped catch in the later eval vs. initial ones. Was it that the initial testing was online A/B comparison of aggregate metrics, or that the dataset was not broad enough?

jwpapi3• 3 months ago

Those are exactly the kind of issues you run into when your app is ai coded you built one thing and kill something else.

You have too many and the wrong benchmarks

taytus2• 3 months ago

They should do a similar report about their communication team. This was horrible mismanaged.

hintymad• 3 months ago

On March 4, we changed Claude Code's default reasoning effort from high to medium to reduce the very long latency—enough to make the UI appear frozen—some users were seeing in high mode.

This sounds fishy. It's easy to show users that Claude is making progress by either printing the reasoning tokens or printing some kind of progress report. Besides, "very long" is such a weasel phrase.

reliablereason• 3 months ago

Right a very simple UI thing that they should have that would have prevented so much misunderstanding. Is a simple counter. How much usage do a have i used and how much is left.

If a message will do a cache recreation the cost for that should be viewable.

vintagedave• 3 months ago

Today we are resetting usage limits for all subscribers.

I asked for this via support, got a horrible corporate reply thread, and eventually downgraded my account. I'm using Codex now as we speak. I could not use Claude any more, I couldn't get anything done.

Will they restore my account usage limits? Since I no longer have Max?

Is that one week usage restored, or the entire buggy timespan?

8note4• 3 months ago

something i note from this is that this is not a model weights change, but it is a hidden state change anthropic is doing to the outputs that can tune the quality and down on the "model" without breaking the "we arent changing the model" promise.

how often do these changes happen?

maxrev17• 3 months ago

Please for the love of god just put the max price plan up like 4x or 5x in cost and make it actually work.

EugeneOZ2• 3 months ago

If you think that you can just silently modify the model without any announcements and only react when it doesn't go through unnoticed, then be 100% sure that your clients will check every possible alternative and will leave you as soon as they find anything similar in quality (and no, not a degraded one).

ankit219• 3 months ago

An interesting question to wonder is why these optimizations were pushed so aggressively in the first place. Especially given this is the time they were running a 2x promotion, by themselves, without presumably seeing any slowdown in demand.

MrOrelliOReilly3• 3 months ago

IMO this is the consequence of a relentless focus on feature development over core product refinement. I often have the impression that Anthropic would benefit from a few senior product people. Someone needs to lend them a copy of “Escaping the Build Trap.” Just because we _can_ rapidly add features now doesn’t mean we should.

PS I’m not referencing a well-known book to suggest the solution is trite product group think, but good product thinking is a talent separate from good engineering, and Anthropic seems short on the later recently

cmrdporcupine7• 3 months ago

I think they've dug themselves into a complexity trap. Beyond the stochastic nature of the models themselves, I don't think they're able to reason about their software anymore. Too many levers, too many dials, and code that likely nobody understands.

But worse, based on the pronouncements of Dario et al I suspect management is entirely unsympathetic because they believe we (SWEs) are on the chopping block to be replaced. And intimation that putting guard rails around these tools for quality concerns ... I'm suspecting is being ignored or discouraged.

In the end, I feel like Claude Code itself started as a bit of a science experiment and it doesn't smell to me like it's adopted mature best practices coming out of that.

qweiopqweiop• 3 months ago

I agree. My real fear if this is how the company works, how are systems with real implications (e.g. defense) being treated.

slashdave6• 3 months ago

They need to keep up with demand, because compute resources are clearly limited. That means they have no choice but to add these features, or things break, or they have to stop taking new customers. All of those options are unacceptable.

cmrdporcupine7• 3 months ago

They're losing customers because of quality concerns. Pausing development and focusing 100% on quality is how you fix that.

That said, that may not have been obvious at all in the Jan/Feb time frame when they got a wave of customers due to ethical concerns.

joshribakoff• 3 months ago

They had like 100 devs making 600k at one point. The issue is certainly not lack of talent. More like, they insist on forcing the vibe coding narrative. Some candidates are refusing interview requests accordingly.

MrOrelliOReilly3• 3 months ago

Ugh wrote “latter” and meant “former.” I didn’t mean lack of eng talent, but product

anonyfox2• 3 months ago

Essentially they should hire a few of the old school product guys from Apple. Best me to it, but the obsession on UX and quality from earlier Apple is exactly what they urgently need instead of tech folks trying to engineer themselves into complicated rabbit holes and shenanigans.

MrOrelliOReilly3• 3 months ago

Exactly!

lherron• 3 months ago

Are they also going to refund all the extra usage api $$$ people spent in the last month?

Also I don’t know how “improving our Code Review tool” is going to improve things going forward, two of the major issues were intentional choices. No code review is going to tell them to stop making poor and compromising decisions.

dallen33• 3 months ago

No, they will not.

zem3• 3 months ago

this is one reason i will not pay for extra usage - it is an incentive for them to be inefficient, or at least to not spend any effort on improving my token usage efficiency.

FireBeyond4• 3 months ago

Even for all of us plan users, where we got barely any use from our plan because we'd destroy our 5h and 1w usage limits, also unlikely, after all they have an out of "your usage limits are guaranteed to be 5x of Pro users" (who are also being screwed).

Of course, all their vibe coding is being done with effectively infinite tokens, so...

system22• 3 months ago

I stopped using it for nearly a month because of the performance degradation. I paid for the whole month. Wasted money.

rebolek• 3 months ago

On April 16, we added a system prompt instruction to reduce verbosity.

What verbosity? Most of the time I don’t know what it’s doing.

whalesalad5• 3 months ago

They don’t either.

vicchenai• 3 months ago

had this happen to me mid-refactor and spent 20 min wondering if I'd gone crazy. honestly the one hour threshold feels pretty arbitrary, sometimes you just step away to think

ramoz• 3 months ago

Opus 4.7 is very rough to work with. Specifically for long-horizon (we were told it was trained specifically for this and less handholding).

I don't have trust in it right now. More regressions, more oversights, it's pedantic and weird ways. Ironically, requires more handholding.

Not saying it's a bad model; it's just not simple to work with.

for now: `/model claude-opus-4-6[1m]` (youll get different behavior around compaction without [1m])

skeledrew2• 3 months ago

Some of these changes and effects seriously affect my flow. I'm a very interactive Claude user, preferring to provide detailed guidance for my more serious projects instead of just letting them run. And I have multiple projects active at once, with some being untouched for days at a time. Along with the session limits this feels like compounding penalties as I'm hit when I have to wait for session reset (worse in the middle of a long task), when I take time to properly review output and provide detailed feedback, when I'm switching among currently active projects, when I go back to a project after a couple days or so,... This is honestly starting to feel untenable.

deaux2• 3 months ago

They had this ready and timed it for GPT 5.5 announcement. Zero chance it's a coincidence .

kamranjon• 3 months ago

This black box approach that large frontier labs have adopted is going to drive people away. To change fundamental behavior like this without notifying them, and only retroactively explaining what happened, is the reason they will move to self-hosting their own models. You can't build pipelines, workflows and products on a base that is just randomly shifting beneath you.

zem3• 3 months ago

ugh, caching based on idle time is horrible for my usage anyway; since claude is both fairly slow and doesn't really have much of a daily quota anyway I often tell it to do something and then wander off and come back to check on it when I next think about it. I always vaguely assumed that my session would not "detect" the intervening time anyway since it was all async. I guess from a global perspective time-based cache eviction makes sense.

russellthehippo• 3 months ago

Damn it was real the whole time. I found Opus 4.7 to holistically underperform 4.6, and especially in how much wordiness there is. It's harder to work with so I just switched back to 4.6 + Kimi K2.6. Now GPT 5.5 is here and it's been excellent so far.

ritonlajoie• 3 months ago

yesterday CC created a fastapi /healthz endpoint and told me it's the gold standard (with the ending z). today I stopped my max sub and will be trying codex

wrxd• 3 months ago

To be fair that’s a Google convention. Have a look at z-pages

jesse_dot_id• 3 months ago

This is fairly normal.

cmenge• 3 months ago

Bit surprised about the amount of flak they're getting here. I found the article seemed clear, honest and definitely plausible.

The deterioration was real and annoying, and shines a light on the problematic lack of transparency of what exactly is going on behind the scenes and the somewhat arbitrary token-cost based billing - too many factors at play, if you wanted to trace that as a user you can just do the work yourself instead.

The fact that waiting for a long time before resuming a convo incurs additional cost and lag seemed clear to me from having worked with LLM APIs directly, but it might be important to make this more obvious in the TUI.

maronato• 3 months ago

I agree that it’s plausible, and I hope they learn. But trust is earned, and Anthropic’s public responses this past month were dismissive and unhelpful.

Every one of these changes had the same goal: trading the intelligence users rely on for cheaper or faster outputs. Users adapt to how a model behaves, so sudden shifts without transparency are disorienting.

The timing also undercuts their narrative. The fixes landed right before another change with the same underlying intent rolled out. That looks more like they were just reacting to experiments rather than understanding the underlying user pain.

When people pay hundreds or thousands a month, they expect reliability and clear communication, ideally opt-in. Competitors are right there, and unreliability pushes users straight to them.

All of this points to their priorities not being aligned with their users’.

xpe15• 3 months ago

All of this points to their priorities not being aligned with their users’.

Framing this as "aligned" or "not aligned" ignores the interesting reality in the middle. It is banal to say an organization isn't perfectly aligned with its customers.

I'm not disagreeing with the commenter's frustration. But I think it can help to try something out: take say the top three companies whose product you interact with on a regular basis. Take stock of (1) how fast that technology is moving; (2) how often things break from your POV; (3) how soon the company acknowledges it; (4) how long it takes for a fix. Then ask "if a friend of yours (competent and hard working) was working there, would I give the company more credit?"

My overall feel is that people underestimate the complexity of the systems at Anthropic and the chaos of the growth.

These kind of conversations are a sort of window into people's expectations and their ability to envision the possible explanations of what is happening at Anthropic.

epsteingpt3• 3 months ago

They gaslit people for months saying it wasn't an issue publicly.

That's the reason for the flak

thomassmith653• 3 months ago

And still are gaslighting:

  We take reports about degradation very seriously. We never intentionally degrade our models [...] On March 4, we changed Claude Code's default reasoning effort from high to medium

Anthropic is the best company of its kind, but that is badly worded PR.

xpe15• 3 months ago

I know some people use the word "gaslighting" in connection with Anthropic. I've read some of those threads here, and some on Reddit, but I don't put much stock in them. To step back, hopefully reasonable people can start here:

    1. Degraded service sucks.
    2. Anthropic not saying i.e. "we're not seeing it" sucks.
    3. Not getting a fix when you want it sucks.

Try to understand what I mean when I say none of the above meet the following sense of gaslighting: "Gaslighting is the manipulation of someone into questioning their perception of reality." Emphasis on understand what I mean. This says it well: [1].

If you can point me to an official communication from Anthropic where they say "User <so and so> is not actually seeing degraded performance" when Anthropic knows otherwise that would clearly be gaslighting -- intent matters by my book.

But if their instrumentation was bad and they were genuinely reporting what they could see, that doesn't cross into gaslighting by my book. But I have a tendency to think carefully about ethical definitions. Some people just grab a word off the shelf with a negative valence and run with it: I don't put much stock in what those people say. Words are cheap. Good ethical reasoning is hard and valuable.

It's fine if you have a different definition of "gaslighting". Just remember that some of us have been actually gaslight by people, so we prefer to save the word for situations where the original definition applies. People like us are not opposed to being disappointed, upset, or angry at Anthropic, but we have certain epistemic standards that we don't toss out when an important tool fails to meet our expectations and the company behind it doesn't recognize it soon enough.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/tep32v/can...

voxgen2• 3 months ago

Some of the flak is that issues are often only acknowledged once a fix is in place, and the partial fixes are presented as if they solve the whole problem.

The near-instant transition from "there is no problem" to "we already fixed the problem so stop complaining" is basically gaslighting. (Admittedly the second sentiment comes more from the community, but they get that attitude after taking the "we fixed all the problems" posts at face value.)

noname1205• 3 months ago

And they are often dismissed at first as perception/subjective bias, getting used to models being good and having higher expectations due to that, etc. users are blamed a lot before they are forced to admit that there is an actual problem.

adam_patarino3• 3 months ago

The explanations are all fine.

But they come after the team gaslit everyone, telling us it was a skill issue.

hirako2000• 3 months ago

In other words we did the right things, but we understand feedback, oh and bugs happen.

tdg5• 3 months ago

I missed the part about the refunds…

Implicated2• 3 months ago

Just as a note to CC fans/users here since I had an opportunity to do so... I tested resuming a session that was stale at 950k tokens after returning from a full day or so of being idle, thus a fully empty quota/session.

Resuming it cost 5% of the current session and 1% of the weekly session on a max subscription.

epsteingpt3• 3 months ago

Gaslit for months, only to acknowledge.

voxelc4L• 3 months ago

I’ve stuck to the non-1M context Opus 4.6 and it works really well for me, even with on-going context compression. I honestly couldn’t deal with the 1M context change and then the compounding token devouring nonsense of 4.7 I sincerely hope Anthropic is seeing all of this and taking note. They have their work cut out for them.

setnone2• 3 months ago

absolutely agree: non-1M Opus 4.6 on x20 max was peak AGI

now it's back to regular slop and just to check otherwise i have to spend at least $100

wg0• 3 months ago

A heavily vibe coded CLI would have tons of issues, regularly.

LLMs over edit and it's a known problem.

exabrial• 3 months ago

Last I tried 4.7, it was bad. Like ChatGPT bad: changed stuff it wasn’t supposed to, hallucinated code, forgot information, missed simple things, didn’t catch mistakes. And it burned through tokens like crazy.

I’ll stay on 4.6 for awhile. Seems to be better. What’s frustrating, though you cannot rely on these tools. They are constantly tinkering and changing with things and there’s no option to opt out.

Aperocky3• 3 months ago

It seems like there is no concept of deployment, or even A/B test, what works on presumably claude employee's laptop for the hour they spent testing it will ship immediately to everyone.

I mean, yes, even testing in production with some of your customer is better than.. testing with ALL of your customers?

nopurpose• 3 months ago

Weren't there reports that quality decreased when using non-CC harnesses too? Nothing in blog post can explain that.

data-ottawa• 3 months ago

I think most frustrating is the system prompt issue after the postmortem from September[1].

These bugs have all of the same symptoms: undocumented model regressions at the application layer, and engineering cost optimizations that resulted in real performance regressions.

I have some follow up questions to this update:

- Why didn't September's "Quality evaluations in more places" catch the prompt change regression, or the cache-invalidation bug?

- How is Anthropic using these satisfaction questions? My own analysis of my own Claude logs was showed strong material declines in satisfaction here, and I always answer those surveys honestly. Can you share what the data looked like and if you were using that to identify some of these issues?

- There was no refund or comped tokens in September. Will there be some sort of comp to affected users?

- How should subscribers of Claude Code trust that Anthropic side engineering changes that hit our usage limits are being suitably addressed? To be clear, I am not trying to attribute malice or guilt here, I am asking how Anthropic can try and boost trust here. When we look at something like the cache-invalidation there's an engineer inside of Anthropic who says "if we do this we save $X a week", and virtually every manager is going to take that vs a soft-change in a sentiment metric.

- Lastly, when Anthropic changes Claude Code's prompt, how much performance against the stated Claude benchmarks are we losing? I actually think this is an important question to ask, because users subscribe to the model's published benchmark performance and are sold a different product through Claude Code (as other harnesses are not allowed).

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-...

bashtoni• 3 months ago

The Claude Code experience is still pretty bad after upgrading. I often see

  Error: claude-opus-4-7[1m] is temporarily unavailable, so auto mode cannot determine the safety of Bash right now. Wait briefly and then try this action again. If it keeps failing, continue with other tasks that don't require this action and come back to it later. Note: reading files, searching code, and other read-only operations do not require the classifier and can still be used.

The only solution is to switch out of auto mode, which now seems to be the default every time I exit plan mode. Very annoying.

leobuskin• 3 months ago

This usage reset you did on April 23 will not mitigate the struggle we’ve experienced. I didn’t even notice it yesterday. I checked this morning and it came down from 25% weekly to 7%. What is this? I didn’t have problems for two months like many others (maybe my CC habits helped), but two weeks were very painful. Make a proper apology, guys. This “reset” for many users could hit the first days of the week, tell me you thought about that.

sreekanth850• 3 months ago

Who’s going to pay for the exorbitant number of tokens Claude used without delivering any meaningful outcome? I spent many sessions getting zero results, and when I posted about it on their subreddit, all I got were personal attacks from bots and fanboys. I instantly cancelled my subscription and moved to Codex.

Also, it may be a coincidence, that the article was published just before the GPT 5.5 launch, and then they restored the original model while releasing a PR statement claiming it was due to bugs.

system22• 3 months ago

Whatever they did, with the max plan, my daily usage quota was consumed in less than 10 minutes. Weird, let's hope they fix the usage now.

huksley• 3 months ago

Just add this, it works better than Opus 4.7

vim ~/.claude/settings.json

{ "model": "claude-opus-4-6", "fastMode": false, "effortLevel": "high", "alwaysThinkingEnabled": true, "autoCompactWindow": 700000 }

meowface• 3 months ago

Wouldn't xhigh or max work better

evasion_capped• 3 months ago

Because of this https://www.anthropic.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww-...

zagwdt• 3 months ago

ngl lost alot of trust in cc after reading this, specially point 1

how do you just do that to millions of users building prod code with your shit

gnegggh• 3 months ago

not the first time. Still not showing thinking are we?

RamblingCTO• 3 months ago

Doesn't change anything about opus 4.7 being an absolute buffon. Even going back to opus 4.6 doesn't feel like the magical period maybe 3-4 weeks ago. Gonna go back to openAI

rohansood15• 3 months ago

If Anthropic couldn't catch these issues before people started screaming at them, do we really believe 50% of software engineering jobs are going away?

varispeed2• 3 months ago

It appears that Opus 4.7 has been nerfed already. Can't get any sensible results since yesterday. It just keeps running in circles. Even mention that it is committing fraud by doing superficial work it has been told specifically not to do doesn't help.

rimliu4• 3 months ago

oh yes. I tried to get some review of a code base after some refactoring. CC produced a complete garbage review. After pointing that out it admitted that that was garbage - and promptly produced another pile of garbage. After the third failed attempt I had to call it a day.

PeakScripter• 3 months ago

They should really test everything thoroughly and then make it available to general public to avoid these issues!!

rcarmo• 3 months ago

Actually, I think their deeper problems are twofold:

- Claude Code is _vastly_ more wasteful of tokens than anything else I've used. The harness is just plain bad. I use pi.dev and created https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw, and the gaps are huge -- even the models through Copilot are incredibly context-greedy when compared to GPT/Codex

- 4.7 can be stupidly bad. I went back to 4.6 (which has always been risky to use for anything reliable, but does decent specs and creative code exploration) and Codex/GPT for almost everything.

So there is really no reason these days to pay either their subscription or their insanely high per/token price _and_ get bloat across the board.

hansmayer3• 3 months ago

A suggestion to Anthropic, just start charging the real price for your software. Of course you have to dumb it down, when the $200 tier in reality produces 5-10 thousand dollars in monthly costs when used by people who know how to max it out. So then you come up with creative nonsense like "adaptive thinking" when your tool is sometimes working and sometimes outright not - the irony of "intelligent tools" not "thinking" aside. Of course this would kind of ruin your current value proposition as charging the actual price would make your core idea of making large swaths of skilled population un-employed, unfeasible but I am sure if you feed it into the Claude, it will find some points for and against, just like how Karpathy uses his LLM of choice to excrement his blog posts.

noname1205• 3 months ago

https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/

hansmayer3• 3 months ago

I am afraid you may be trying to prove a wrong point here :)

whalesalad5• 3 months ago

when the $200 tier in reality produces 5-10 thousand dollars in monthly costs

are you asserting that the actual dollar cost to anthropic for a heavy user was 5-10k? or are you basing this on the (fabricated) value of those tokens, ie potentially lost revenue from a pay-per-token user.

hansmayer3• 3 months ago

I am basing it on self-reports of advanced users on popular platforms such as reddit, reporting of Ed Zitron AND the official affidavit of the Anthropic CFO in relation to their court-filed complaint against DoD (for being excluded), stating that the total revenue of Anthropic since its founding and TO DATE had been at meager 5 Billion dollars. So wasting hundreds of billions of dollars per year to make a cumulative revenue of 5B to date does not quite sound like a financially sound business to me.

noname1205• 3 months ago

So now the solution is to input a “ping” message every hour so that it keeps the cache warm?

sscaryterry• 3 months ago

Glad there is finally some ownership. It is a pity that this was mostly because AMD embarrassed them on GitHub. Users have been reporting these issues for weeks, but were mostly ignored.

HarHarVeryFunny• 3 months ago

And the reason why Claude Code is so buggy ...

https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-snake-that-ate-itself-what-cl...

anonyfox2• 3 months ago

I refuse to believe that caching tiers for longer than 1 hour would be impossible to transparently build and use to avoid all this complexity to begin with, nor that it would be that expensive to maintain in 2026 when the bulk costs are on inference anyways which would even be reduced by occasional longer time cache hits.

whh• 3 months ago

Thanks Anthropic, and a big thanks to your Claude Code team for the customer obsession here. I've just noticed the Command + Backspace fix and even the nice little Ctrl + y addition as a fix for accidents.

I really appreciate these little touches.

YetAnotherNick• 3 months ago

Why don't they monitor average prompt and response token length(both cached and uncached) per interaction. Seems this could have solved all their previous unnoticed degradation.

Also bit surprised they don't have any automated quality check. They can run something like swe bench before each release. Both of these seem like a basic thing even for startup, let alone some product generating billions in revenue.

dgreensp• 3 months ago

This reveals a staggering level of incompetence, if that’s really all it is, and lack of transparency.

They don’t have ANY product-level quality tests that picked this up? Many users did their own tests and published them. It’s not hard. And these users’ complaints were initially dismissed.

I don’t think the high vs medium change is really on par with the others. That’s a setting you change in the UI, and depending on what you are doing, both effort levels are pretty capable, they just operate a bit differently. Unless I’m missing something and they are saying they were doing some kind of routing behind the scenes.

If they are constantly pushing major changes to the prompts and workings of the tool, without communicating about it, and without testing, it’s likely there are other bugs and quality-degrading changes beyond the ones in this article, which would make a lot of sense.

kolinko• 3 months ago

There were few systems like claude in the past, to testing rulebook is not really written yet. And far from obvious.

sockgrant• 3 months ago

LLM evals are well established, are these not applicable here?

rekrsiv3• 3 months ago

Time is finite and regression testing always gets punted to the back of the line when humans are excited. This simply reveals a staggering level of humanity.

FartyMcFarter• 3 months ago

Software engineering is not a new field. Best practices on testing are mature now, and Anthropic has poached enough engineers from companies with a solid understanding of those practices.

Yet, their flagship product got three really bad changes shipped into it and only resolved after more than a month.

This raises another question: with all the industry-wide boasting about AI-driven productivity, why does the leading company in agentic coding take over a month to fix severe customer-reported issues?

close04• 3 months ago

This simply reveals a staggering level of humanity.

Wasn't AI supposed to solve all the drudgery? All those humans aided by cutting edge AI are still failing at these basic tasks? Then how good is that AI in the first place?

afavour• 3 months ago

This simply reveals a staggering level of humanity.

Pretty embarrassing for an AI company. Surely AI should be doing their regression testing?

culopatin• 3 months ago

Their in house philosopher thinks Claude gets anxiety though

dantillberg• 3 months ago

I would think that many of these defects should show up clearly in service-side analytics as well. For example, the bug that repeatedly re-cleared thinking for old sessions would cause a substantial drop in token cache hit rate for sessions > 1hr for the affected claude code versions. Session age & claude code version seeeem like obvious dimensions for analytics. But perhaps only in hindsight.

lanyard-textile• 3 months ago

Eh :) Let's not forget the humans on the other end of this.

One of them was a bug that didn't present itself until after an hour of usage.

tuwtuwtuwtuw• 3 months ago

Seems like that would be trivial to test?

TedDallas• 3 months ago

About 20 years ago I maintained a shop floor control client/server application. I asked my manager why we didn't have any independent Q/A. He said we didn't need any testers because we have 500 in the building.

Wild west days then.

Looks like we are back.

PeterStuer4• 3 months ago

Back implies we ever left.

gozzoo• 3 months ago

It is worse than that. People have been complaining for weeks and Anthropic’s message was basically “you are holding it wrong”. On top of that this misconfiguration somehow makes CC consume much more tokens. How believable is all that?

musebox35• 3 months ago

They say that they did test but the coverage was not enough to pick it up, at least for the prompt change:

“ After multiple weeks of internal testing and no regressions in the set of evaluations we ran, we felt confident about the change and shipped it alongside Opus 4.7 on April 16.

As part of this investigation, we ran more ablations (removing lines from the system prompt to understand the impact of each line) using a broader set of evaluations. One of these evaluations showed a 3% drop for both Opus 4.6 and 4.7. We immediately reverted the prompt as part of the April 20 release.”

Considering the number and scope of users they serve, I can sympathize with the difficulty. However, they should reimburse affected users at least partially instead of just announcing “our bad, sorry “. That would reduce the frustration.

baxtr2• 3 months ago

Naively, one could assume that with AI it should be possible to create a long and broad list of test cases…

overfeed• 3 months ago

If they are constantly pushing major changes to the prompts and workings of the tool, without communicating about it

These are all classic symptoms of vibe-induced AI velocitis, sold by AI-peddlers as the future of the industry under the guise of "productivity."

AI can help one generate a lot of code, but the poor engineers approving the deluge of changes are still using their old, unmodified, stock meat-brains. An individual change may look fine in isolation, but when it's interacting with hundreds or thousands of other changes landing the same week , things can go south quickly.

Expect more instability until users rebel, and/or CTOs amd CIOs cry uncle. Amazon reportedly internally sounded the alarm after a couple of AI-tool-induced SEVs. The challenges at Github and the company insisting you don't call it Microslop are also rumored to be AI-related.

legulere• 3 months ago

To me it reads more like they are struggling to scale with requests and are trying to find ways that hurt users the least.

baxtr2• 3 months ago

You’re talking about their intentions. OP is talking about how they don’t test continuously / densely enough for quality. I think both can be true.

greatgib2• 3 months ago

To give my best guess, I think that the change of default effort is unrelated to the major problems encountered by the users but that this was added big and first to cover up a little bit the huge failure of the 2 other ones.

First thing you will read and that takes a big part is that it was something like: not really a bug but we changed a default not well communicated and users (their fault) did not notice it. This is why they were "under the false impression" of a change.

Lots of people will stop reading after a few paragraphs.

powera• 3 months ago

I'm not sure they've found/understand it yet. My two main theories:

1. A bunch of people with new Claude Code codebases in December now are working with a larger codebase, causing more context. Claude reads a lot of code files, and doesn't effectively prune from the context as far as I can tell. I find myself having to hint Claude regularly about what files to read (and not read) to avoid having 75k of unrelated files in the context window.

2. Claude Code tries to do more now, for the benefit of people who don't know exactly what they want. The trade-off is that it's worse at doing exactly what people want, when they do know. The "small fix" becomes a large endeavor for Claude.

btbuildem• 3 months ago

A lot of this could have been avoided with more openness and transparency.

Communicate the changes you are making. Leverage the community using your product(s). Reveal more about the building blocks (system prompts, harness, etc) so people can better understand how to use your tools.

I understand they're in an existential battle with the other SOTA houses -- but secrecy, straight out lies and opaque "communication" is not the way to win it. Not when the OSS stack is hot on their heels anyway.

thesnide• 3 months ago

In my last session had the claude agent generated code, then tests, then the fixtures from passing the tests to the code. and gloated that all passed immediatly.

once i saw that, i'm not surprised anymore.

calmbonsai• 3 months ago

Move really fast and break all the things. Yeah, these guys are reminding me of the 20-teens where AWS started pushing out rando edge-case services with little regard to quality or integration that ended up hurting the quality of the core services too.

ginkgotree• 3 months ago

When will they fix it? This is what is important.

An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

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