[HN Gopher] Claude Code is being dumbed down?
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Claude Code is being dumbed down?
Author : WXLCKNO
Score : 607 points
Date : 2026-02-11 18:23 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (symmetrybreak.ing)
(TXT) w3m dump (symmetrybreak.ing)
| htx80nerd wrote:
| another case of 'devs are out of touch with users basics needs
| and basic day-to-day usage of our app'
| closewith wrote:
| It's definitely a case of out-of-touch devs, but which cohort
| they are is still to be seen.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I think it's a case of wishful design. When they (or rather
| their own vibecoding tools) imagine how the tool is used, they
| aren't imagining that it's actually a human-machine interface,
| with the human actively engaged in the loop. Instead, the human
| is mostly expected to behave as a magical prompt oracle with a
| credit card and let the machine take care of the details.
| falloutx wrote:
| by devs you mean those two guys on twitter who brag about vibe
| coding with 100 agents running simultaneously. While Claude
| Code still can't display images. I wonder what they are doing
| with those 100 agents
| noupdates wrote:
| Quite frankly, most seasoned developers should be able to write
| their own Claude Code. You know your own algorithm for how you
| deal with lines of code, so it's just a matter of converting your
| own logic. Becoming dependent on Claude Code is a mistake (edit:
| I might be too heavy handed with this statement). If your coding
| agent isn't doing what you want, you need to be able to redesign
| it.
| nicetryguy wrote:
| It's not that simple. Claude Code allows you to use the
| Anthropic monthly subscription instead of API tokens, which for
| power users is massively less expensive.
| tibbar wrote:
| this is the real reason why people are switching to claude
| code.
| co_king_3 wrote:
| Drug dealer business model. The first bag is free. Don't act
| surprised when you get addicted and they 10x the price.
| bradfa wrote:
| Yes and no. There are many not-trivial things you have to solve
| when using an LLM to help (or fully handle writing) code.
|
| For example, applying diffs to files. Since the LLM uses
| tokenization for all its text input/output, sometimes the diffs
| it'll create to modify a file aren't quite right as it may
| slightly mess up the text which is before/after the change
| and/or might introduce a slight typo in text which is being
| removed, which may or may not cleanly apply in the edit.
| There's a variety of ways to deal with this but most of the
| agentic coding tools have this mostly solved now (I guess you
| could just copy their implementation?).
|
| Also, sometimes the models will send you JSON or XML back from
| tool calls which isn't valid, so your tool will need to handle
| that.
|
| These fun implementation details don't happen that often in a
| coding session, but they happen often enough that you'd
| probably get driven mad trying to use a tool which didn't
| handle them seamlessly if you're doing real work.
| noupdates wrote:
| I'm part of the subset of developers that was not trained in
| Machine Learning, so I can't actually code up an LLM from
| scratch (yet). Some of us are already behind with AI. I think
| not getting involved in the foundational work of building
| coding agents will only leave more developers left in the
| dust. We have to know how these things work in and out. I'm
| only willing to deal with one black box at the moment, and
| that is the model itself.
| volkercraig wrote:
| It's hardly a subset. Most devs that use it have no idea
| how it works under the hood. If a large portion of them
| did, then maybe they'd cut out the "It REALLY IS
| THINKING!!!" posting
| bradfa wrote:
| You don't need to understand how the model works internally
| to make an agentic coding tool. You just need to understand
| how the APIs work to interface with the model and then
| comprehend how the model behaves given different prompts so
| you can use it effectively to get things done. No Machine
| Learning previous experience necessary.
|
| Start small, hit issues, fix them, add features, iterate,
| just like any other software.
|
| There's also a handful of smaller open source agentic tools
| out there which you can start from, or just join their
| community, rather than writing your own.
| 8note wrote:
| what you are doing is largely a free text=> structured api
| call and back, more than anything else.
|
| ML related stuff isnt going to matter a ton since for most
| cases an LLM inference is you making an API call
|
| web scraping is probably the most similar thing
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| It's quite tricky as they optimize the agent loop, similar to
| codex.
|
| It's probably not enough to have answer-prompt -> tool call ->
| result critic -> apply or refine, there might be a specific
| thing they're doing when they fine tune the loop to the model,
| or they might even train the model to improve the existing
| loop.
|
| You would have to first look at their agent loop and then code
| it up from scratch.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I bet you could derive a lot by using a packet sniffer while
| using CC and just watch the calls go back and forth to the
| LLM API. In every api request you'll get the full prompt
| (system prompt aside) and they can't offload all the magic to
| the server side because tool calls have to be done locally.
| Also, LLMs can probably de-minimize the minimized Javascript
| in the CC client so you can inspect the source too.
|
| edit: There's a tool, i haven't used it in forever, i think
| it was netsaint(?) that let you sniff https in clear text
| with some kind of proxy. The enabling requirement is sniffing
| traffic on localhost iirc which would be the case with CC
| mikert89 wrote:
| The model is being trained to use claude code. i.e. the agentic
| patterns are reinforced using reinforcement learning. thats why
| it works so well. you cannot build this on your own, it will
| perform far worse
| noupdates wrote:
| Are you certain of this? I know they use a lot of grep to
| find variables in files (recall reading that on HN), load the
| lines into into context. There's a lot of common sense
| context management that's going on.
| mikert89 wrote:
| Of course, agentic tooling is the future of ai
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Claude Code has thousands of human manhours fine tuning a
| comprehensive harness to maximize effectiveness of the model.
|
| You think a single person can do better? I don't think that's
| possible. Opencode is better than Claude Code and they also
| have perhaps even more manhours.
|
| It's a collaboration thing, ever improving.
| noupdates wrote:
| Challenge accepted.
| co_king_3 wrote:
| Am I mistaken or is Claude Code essentially an opt-in rootkit?
| minimaxir wrote:
| Modern agenting coding software is scoped to only allow edits
| in the project folder, with some sandboxing more aggressively
| than others (Claude Code the most)
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Don't lie. The correct way to run it is with sudo su - then
| IS_SANDBOX=1 claude code --dangerously-skip-permissions
|
| This is the true AI pilled version.
| lukev wrote:
| And it's pretty easy to run in a stronger sandbox too.
|
| "docker sandbox run claude" in a recent version of docker is a
| super easy way to get started.
| chasd00 wrote:
| only if you run it as root, run it as a user and it can't do
| any more damage than the user running it could. It can still
| certainly send any data the user has access to anywhere on the
| inet though, that's a big problem. idk if there's a way to lock
| down a user so that they can only open sockets to an IP on a
| whitelist.. maybe that could be an option to at least keep the
| data from going anywhere except to Anthropic (that's not
| anywhere close to perfect/correct either but it's something i
| guess).
| ramon156 wrote:
| All my information about this is being based on feels, because
| debugging isn't really feasible. Verbose mode is a mess, and
| there's no alternative.
|
| It still does what I need so I'm okay with it, but I'm also on
| the $20 plan so it's not that big of a worry for me.
|
| I did sense that the big wave of companies is hitting Anthropic's
| wallet. If you hadn't realized, _a LOT_ of companies switched to
| Claude. No idea why, and this is coming from someone who loves
| Claude Code.
|
| Anyway, getting some transparency on this would be nice.
| taude wrote:
| I can't watch a YouTube video without seeing a Claude ad. Same
| for friends. Safe for non-programmer friends.
| sixtyj wrote:
| NFT moment :) Where did it end btw?
| pbasista wrote:
| The below remark is unrelated to the main topic of this
| thread.
|
| Why would you even watch a YouTube video with ads?
|
| There are ad blockers, sponsor segment blockers, etc. If you
| use them, it will block almost every kind of YouTube ad.
| massysett wrote:
| I used to use ad blockers.
|
| One day I visited DistroWatch.com. The site deliberately
| tweaked its images so ad blockers would block some "good"
| images. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on.
| The site freely admitted what it was doing. The site's
| point was: you're looking at my site, which I provide for
| free, yet you block the thing that lets me pay for the
| site?
|
| I stopped using ad blockers after that. If a site has
| content worth paying for, I pay. If it is a horrible ad-
| infested hole, I don't visit it at all. Otherwise, I load
| ads.
|
| Which overall means I pay for more things and visit less
| crap things and just visit less things period. Which is
| good.
| akdev1l wrote:
| Not safe, before even knowing if a site has the content
| you want you can be redirected to malware through ad
| networks
|
| not even joking
| massysett wrote:
| On an up to date Safari on Mac, not a realistic concern,
| and if it were, I'd use security software, not an ad
| blocker.
| akdev1l wrote:
| 0 days exist and they are exploited in the wild sometimes
|
| An ad-blocker /is/ security software. You don't have to
| take it from me, you can read from the Cybersecurity and
| Infrastructure Security Agency
|
| > AT-A-GLANCE RECOMMENDATIONS
|
| > Standardize and Secure Web Browsers
|
| > Deploy Advertisement Blocking Software
|
| > Isolate Web Browsers from Operating Systems
|
| > Implement Protective Domain Name System Technologies
|
| Literally their second recommendation on this pamphlet
| about securing web browsers: https://www.cisa.gov/sites/d
| efault/files/publications/Capaci...
|
| Moreover you don't even need a 0-day to fall for
| phishing. All you need is to be a little tired or somehow
| not paying attention (inb4 "it will never happen to ME, I
| am too smart for that")
| taude wrote:
| all the ad blockers I used to use stop working, and it
| became an annoying game of cat and mouse that I didn't have
| time for. Luckily, most of the time I can "skip" the ad in
| like five seconds, and it gives me a moment to catch up on
| incoming Slack messages.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| I can. I use brave
| viking123 wrote:
| They have insane marketing push, across HN and reddit too
| btw.
| minimaxir wrote:
| > If you hadn't realized, a LOT of companies switched to
| Claude. No idea why, and this is coming from someone who loves
| Claude Code.
|
| It is entirely due to Opus 4.5 being an inflection point
| codingwise over previous LLMs. Most of the buzz there has been
| organic word of mouth due to how strong it is.
|
| Opus 4.5 is expensive to put it mildly, which makes Claude Code
| more compelling. But even now, token providers like Openrouter
| have Opus 4.5 as one of its most popular models despite the
| price.
| theappsecguy wrote:
| Everyone and I mean everyone keeps parroting this "inflection
| point" marketing hype, which is so damn tiring.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Believe me, I wish it was just parroting.
|
| The real annoying thing about Opus 4.5 is that it's
| impossible to publicly say "Opus 4.5 is an order of
| magnitude better than coding LLMs released just months
| before it" without sounding like a AI hype booster
| clickbaiting, but it's the counterintuitive truth, to my
| personal frustration.
|
| I have been trying to break this damn model since its
| November release by giving it complex and seemingly
| impossible coding tasks but this asshole keeps doing them
| correctly. GPT-5.3-Codex has been the same relative to
| GPT-5.2-Codex, which just makes me even more frustrated.
| viking123 wrote:
| It still cannot solve a synchronization issue in my
| fairly simple online game, completely wrong analysis back
| to back and solutions that actually make the problem
| worse. Most training data is probably react slop so it
| struggles with this type of stuff.
|
| But I have to give it to Amodei and his goons in the
| media, their marketing is top notch. Fear-mongering
| targeted to normies about the model knowing it is being
| evaluated and other sort of preaching to the developers.
| Denzel wrote:
| Weird, I broke Opus 4.5 pretty easily by giving some
| code, a build system, and integration tests that
| demonstrate the bug.
|
| CC confidently iterated until it discovered the issue. CC
| confidently communicated exactly what the bug was, a
| detailed step-by-step deep dive into all the sections of
| the code that contributed to it. CC confidently suggested
| a fix that it then implemented. CC declared victory after
| 10 minutes!
|
| The bug was still there.
|
| I'm willing to admit I might be "holding it wrong". I've
| had some successes and failures.
|
| It's all very impressive, but I still have yet to see how
| people are consistently getting CC to work for hours on
| end to produce good work. That still feels far fetched to
| me.
| Spivak wrote:
| The use of inflection point in the entire software industry
| is so annoying and cringy. It's never used correctly, it's
| not even used correctly in the Claude post everyone is
| referencing.
| minimaxir wrote:
| What euphemism better describes the trend?
| delusional wrote:
| If it's a trend, there's not an inflection point. The
| inflection point would be a point where the trend breaks.
| deagle50 wrote:
| step function
| keybored wrote:
| But _I used to be a skeptic but now in the last month_
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Yes, as all of modern politics illustrates, once one has
| staked out a position on an issue it is far more
| important to stick to one's guns regardless of
| observations rather than update based on evidence.
| keybored wrote:
| I will change my mind on this in the next month.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| No, I just think that timing wise it finally made it through
| everyone's procurement process.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| > and there's no alternative.
|
| Use the pi coding agent. Bare-bones context, easy to hack.
| ekropotin wrote:
| Another instance of devs being out of touch is them wanting
| Claude Code to respect AGENT.md:
| https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235
|
| What's wrong with you, people? Are you stupid?
| JetSetIlly wrote:
| I've never used Claude or anything like it so this may be a
| dumb question: could you solve this problem by having a
| CLAUDE.md file that simply says to use AGENT.md if one is
| available. Can an AI agent not do that?
| ekropotin wrote:
| Yes, the most common solution for this problem either
| creating a symbolic CLAUDE.md link pointing to AGENT.md (or
| visa versa) if OS supports it.
|
| Or, in CLAUDE.md have an instruction to follow AGENT.md - but
| this approach is quite unreliable.
|
| These are solutions to a problem that shouldn't exist in the
| first place. How else can one explain Anthropic's reluctance
| to adhere to a widely adopted standard, if not as an attempt
| to build a walled garden around an otherwise great product?
| alansaber wrote:
| I don't feel as if any CLI editor has quite nailed UX yet
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| If you are talking about agents I feel like opencode has gotten
| pretty good UI/UX
|
| If you are talking about a CLI editor, then micro has hit the
| nail on quality UX
|
| https://micro-editor.github.io/
| AnonyX387 wrote:
| The UX where it completely breaks copy paste conventions on
| Linux? Other than that I agree it's gotten pretty good but
| this one thing drives me mad each time I use it.
| theZilber wrote:
| What happens when you press ctrl+o? You get verbose mode?
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| I just tested, it shows you which files it read, same as first
| example he gave "Where you used to see."
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| Yeah just that it's not real time and you have to toggle to
| see it. It lags a bunch also in longer threads. Definitely a
| downgrade.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| I mean yes, they claim that it's "Claude Code Native" or
| something but it does feel laggy and takes multiple seconds
| to start. What do they even mean native, didn't they
| acquire Bun? It's not native. They need to rewrite it in
| Rust, I'm serious.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| Codex feels much faster. For a while after the rewrite
| (to rust also I think?) it was bad because you couldn't
| copy anything from the terminal but since then it's
| gotten much much better.
| pacoWebConsult wrote:
| You can only ctrl+o the most recent response, and its a lot
| worse than knowing the # of lines read or the pattern grepped,
| which are useful because it can tell you what the agent is
| thrashing on trying to find, or what context would be useful to
| give it upfront in the future.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| I believe it opens the file that was referenced. Apologies in
| advance if I got that wrong.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Honestly? Half the time the shitty vibe coded Claude CLI
| interface spergs out. Don't try to scroll too much
| colechristensen wrote:
| I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I
| cared so little about! - Zapp
|
| I mean I get it I guess but I'm not nearly so passionate as
| anyone saying things about this
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I'm not sure this is a regression, at least how I use it - you
| can hit control + o to expand, and usually the commands it runs
| show the file path(s) it's using, and I'm really paranoid with
| it, and I didn't even notice this change.
| thousand_nights wrote:
| i've never had to use control + o before but with the latest
| changes, i give Opus a simple task that should take a few
| seconds and it's like "used 15k tokens" and "thinking" for
| three minutes with absolutely zero indication or visibility as
| to what it's actually doing and i have to ESC ESC it to stop
| and ask what the FUCK are you actually doing claude?
| virtue3 wrote:
| I think this change is really disingenuous.
|
| If they hide how the tool is accessing files (aka using
| tokens) and then charging us per token - how are we able to
| track loosely what our spend is?
|
| I'm all for simplification of the UX. But when it's helping
| to hide the main spend it feels shitty.
| misnome wrote:
| Yes, I've been evaluating since the start of the year and
| since 4.6 suddenly the most innocuous requests will sit there
| "thinking" for 5+ minutes and if I can get it to show me the
| thinking it's just going round in circles.
|
| Or, it decided it needs to get API documentation out and
| spends tens of thousands of tokens fetching every file in a
| repo with separate tool use instead of reading the
| documentation.
|
| Profitable, if you are charging for token usage, I suspect.
|
| But I'm reaching the point where I can't recommend claude to
| people who are interesting in skeptically trying it out,
| because of the default model.
| scottyah wrote:
| Yeah after my switch to Opus 4.6 I noticed a lot of this.
| I've been wary that eventually models are going to optimize
| for token usage increases, since that's how the company makes
| money. I told it to read the files in my directory (4 files,
| longest was like 380 lines) and caught it using 14 tool uses-
| including head -n 20 and tail -n 20 on a file. Definitely a
| what are you doing moment.
| misnome wrote:
| OTOH I find it pretty funny that the instant they manage to
| make a model that breaks general containment of popularity
| and usefulness (4.5), the toxicity of the business model
| kicks in and they instantly enshittify.
| 8note wrote:
| i think yesterday it ate the whole context window in one
| thinking call.
|
| i bet in a week itll eat the whole 5hour throttle in one call
| too:P
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| > Read 3 fies (ctrl+o to expand)
|
| What if you hit ctrl+o?
| huydotnet wrote:
| exactly what i think when reading the top of the article, maybe
| the author turned off vebose mode
| thunfischtoast wrote:
| The verbose mode is, well, verbose. They removed, without any
| need, info and hid it in a wall of text.
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| This is why I am a big fan of self-hosting, owning your data and
| using your own Agent. pi is a really good example. You can have
| your own tooling and can switch any SOTA model in a single
| interface. Very nice!
|
| https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi/
| MicKillah wrote:
| This comes up from time to time and although my experience is
| anecdotal, I see clear degradation of output when I run heavy
| loads (100s of batched/chunked requests, via an automated
| pipeline) and sometimes the difference in quality is absolutely
| laughable in how poor it is. This gets worse for me as I get
| closer to my (hourly, weekly) limits. I am Claude Max subscriber.
| There's some shady stuff going on in the background, for sure,
| from my perspective and experience during my year or so of
| intense usage.
| afro88 wrote:
| Man, you have to read the article, not just the headline
| MicKillah wrote:
| That would definitely be helpful, but the headline hit a
| painful spot for me and I went in! You're right tho! I was in
| my feelins. I still am. _lol_
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| Developers are just complainers.
| ffritz wrote:
| What if it's used with a different harness, e.g. Opencode?
| minimaxir wrote:
| You infamously cannot use Claude Code with a different harness
| anymore (without shenanigans that will likely draw Anthropic's
| ire).
| turnsout wrote:
| As a heavy CC user, I appreciate a cleaner console output. If you
| really need to know _which_ 3 files CC read, AI-assisted coding
| agents might not be for you.
| turnsout wrote:
| Downvoted, but fight me on this... It's important to see what
| it _wrote,_ but what it _read?_
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| If there's obviously important context in foo and I see that
| it didn't read foo then I know that means it's making
| assumptions which are wrong
| artisin wrote:
| Vibe-coders griping about Claude's vibe-coded CLI hits all the
| right vibes.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| Jokes about vibe-coded CLI aside, I think that's the issue for
| me, the defaults are being tailored to vibe coders. (and the
| general weirdness of trying to fix it with verbose mode)
|
| I like that people who were afraid of CLIs perhaps are now
| warming up to them through tools like Claude Code but I don't
| think it means the interfaces should be simplified and dumbed
| down for them as the primary audience.
|
| Sure you can press CTRL+O, but that's not realtime and you have
| to toggle between that and your current real time activity.
| Plus it's often laggy as hell.
| Maxion wrote:
| Literally the opposite though, as being able to see what it
| reads allows you to tell it to ignore certain files when you
| see it read the wrong one, and adjust the claude.md file to
| ensure that it does not read incorrect files given a specific
| input.
|
| True vibe coders don't care about this.
| koverstreet wrote:
| Yeah, these all sound like complete non issues if you're
| actually... keeping your codebase clean and talking through
| design with Claude instead of just having it go wild.
|
| I'm using it for converting all of the userspace bcachefs code
| to Rust right now, and it's going incredibly smoothly. The
| trick is just to think of it like a junior engineer - a smart,
| fast junior engineer, but lacking in experience and big picture
| thinking.
|
| But if you were vibe coding and YOLOing before Claude, all
| those bad habits are catching up with you suuuuuuuuuuuper hard
| right now :)
| red_hare wrote:
| I hate to say it, but "vibe-coders" are just "coders" now.
|
| It's a huge shift, but we need to start thinking of AI-tools as
| developer tools, just like a formatter, linter, or IDE would
| be.
|
| The right move is diversity. Just like diversity of
| editors/IDEs. We need good open source claude code
| alternatives.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| They aren't, though.
|
| As a SE with over 15 years' professional experience, I find
| myself pointing out dumb mistakes to even the best frontier
| models in my coding agents, to refine the ouput. A "coder"
| who is not doing this on the regular is only a tool of their
| tool.
|
| (in my mental model, a "vibe coder" does not do this, or at
| least does not do it regularly)
| lukan wrote:
| Well, the term lacks clarity and a shift of meaning.
|
| If you define "vibe-coders" as people who just write prompts
| and don't look at code - no, they ain't coders now.
|
| But if you mean people who do LLM-assistet coding, but still
| read code (like all of those who are upset by this change) -
| then sure, they always have been coders.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Sounds like the compacting issue.
|
| > Compacting fails when the thread is very large
|
| > We fixed it.
|
| > No you did not
|
| > Yes now it auto compacts all messages.
|
| > Ok but we don't want compaction when the thread isn't large,
| plus, it still fails when the compacted thread is too large
|
| > ...
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Let me fix that for you:
|
| > Compacting fails when the thread is very large
|
| Flips coin, it is Heads
|
| > We fixed it.
|
| > No you did not
|
| Flips coin, it is Tails
|
| > Yes now it auto compacts all messages.
|
| Flips coin, it is Heads
|
| > Ok but we don't want compaction when the thread isn't large,
| plus, it still fails when the compacted thread is too large
|
| Flips coin, it is Grapefruit
|
| > ...
|
| Congratulations on a vibe solution, if you are unhappy with the
| frequency of isomorphic plagiarism... the vendor still has your
| money and new data =3
| eptcyka wrote:
| Can we not like, just apply a patch? Or will anthropic be mad if
| I run their client with my own patch?
|
| Nix makes it easy to package up esotheric patches reliably and
| reproducibly, claude lowers the cost of creating such patches,
| the only roadblocks Inforesee are legal.
| tylergetsay wrote:
| Claude code is distributed as a minified JS bundle so you cant
| just easily patch in this functionality
| eptcyka wrote:
| I'm told that this new LLM tech is great at deminimizing
| minified javascript, no?
| jy14898 wrote:
| https://github.com/aleks-apostle/claude-code-patches/pull/9 is
| what I found, not tested yet
| lukev wrote:
| If you're not vibecoding your own UX to render CC's output the
| way you like it, you're not living.
| co_king_3 wrote:
| If you're not vibecoding your own UX to render CC's output the
| way you like it, you're getting replaced by AI.
| scottyah wrote:
| If you're not replacing the replacers, you're the replaced.
| tclancy wrote:
| This is why I joined The Watchmen.
| ares623 wrote:
| "This is as bad as it's going to be" turning out to be wrong
|
| They could change course, obviously. But how does the saying go
| again -- it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a
| needle, than for a VC funded tech startup to not enshittify.
| Retr0id wrote:
| I also found this change annoying.
|
| Often a codebase ends up with non-authoritative references for
| things (e.g. docs out of sync with implementation, prototype vs
| "real" version), and the proper solution is to fix and/or
| document that divergence. But let's face it, that doesn't always
| happen. When the AI reads from the wrong source it only makes
| things worse, and when you can't see what it's reading it's
| harder to even notice that it's going off track.
| jascha_eng wrote:
| There are a lot of non developer claude code users these days.
| The hype about vibe coding lets everyone think they can now be an
| engineer. Problem is if anthropic caters to that crowd the devs
| that are using it to do somewhat serious engineering tasks and
| don't believe in the "run an army of parallel agents and pray"
| methodology are being alienated.
|
| Maybe Claude Code web or desktop could be targeted to these new
| vibe coders instead? These folks often don't know how simple bash
| commands work so the terminal is the wrong UX anyway. Bash as a
| tool is just very powerful for any agentic experience.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| Exactly how I feel. I'm happy that more people are using these
| tools and learning (hopefully) about engineering but it
| shouldn't degrade the core experience for let's say "more
| advanced" users who don't see themselves as Vibe coders and
| want precise control over what's happening.
| jonahx wrote:
| > learning (hopefully) about engineering
|
| Not a chance.
|
| If anything, the reverse, in that it devalues engineering.
| For most, LLMs are a path to an end-product without the
| bother or effort of understanding. No different than paid
| engineers were, but even better because you don't have to
| talk to engineers or pay them.
|
| The sparks of genuine curiosity here are a rounding error.
| croes wrote:
| If I give pupils the solution book will they learn or just
| copy the answers?
|
| There is a reason why nowadays games start to help massively
| if the player gets stuck.
| lukan wrote:
| "There is a reason why nowadays games start to help
| massively if the player gets stuck"
|
| You mean those "free" games, that are hard and grindy by
| design and the offered help comes in the shape of payed
| perks to solve the challenges?
| croes wrote:
| No, those paid games where NPCs starts to point to clues
| if the player takes too long to solve a riddle or where
| you can skip the hard parts if you fail to often.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Anecdotally, all the non-technical people I know are adapting
| fine to the console. You don't need to know how bash commands
| work to use it as you are just approving commands, not writing
| them.
| fcatalan wrote:
| Approving commands you don't understand doesn't seem ideal
| operatingthetan wrote:
| People are handing over their entire system to openclaw, so
| that's about where we are.
| system2 wrote:
| Because we haven't heard about the disaster stories yet,
| give it some time and see how people will talk about it
| as if it were a virus.
| pjm331 wrote:
| It's funny because on one end of the spectrum you have non dev
| vibe coders for whom every log is noise
|
| On the other end are the hardcore user orchestrating a bunch of
| agents, not sitting there watching one run, so they don't care
| about these logs at all
|
| In the middle are the engineers sitting there watching the
| agent go
| rrrix1 wrote:
| Logs (and in this case, Verbose Mode) aren't for knowing what
| a thing is _currently_ doing as its doing it, it 's for
| finding out what happened when the thing didn't do what you
| expected or wanted.
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| The non dev vibe coders are probably a bigger group of users,
| and therefore equal more money. Change justified...
| NinjaTrance wrote:
| The others are also paying. Make it configurable...
| sixtyj wrote:
| If 80% of their paying customers are vibe coders then it makes
| sense to make IDE "easy" for them. "Hey, Claude, make a
| website. Don't make mistakes."
|
| Or, it could serve as a textbook example how to make your real
| future long term customers (=fluent coders) angry... what a
| strategy :)
| NinjaTrance wrote:
| Microsoft fell into this trap in the 90s -- they believed
| that they could hide the DOS prompt, and make everything
| "easier" with wizards where you just go through a series of
| screens clicking "next", "next", "finish".
|
| Yes, it was easier. But it dumbed down a generation of
| developers.
|
| It took them two decades to try to come up with Powershell,
| but it was too late.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I think Dario & crew are getting high on their own supply and
| really believe the "software developers out of work by end of
| 2026" pronouncements.
|
| Meanwhile all evidence is that the true value of these tools is
| in their ability to augment & super-charge competent software
| engineers, not replace them.
|
| Meanwhile the quality of Claude Code the tool itself is a bit
| of a damning indictment of their philosophy.
|
| Give me a team of experienced sharp diligent engineers with
| these coding tools and we can make absolutely amazing things.
| But newbie product manager with no software engineering
| fundamentals issuing prompts will make a mess.
|
| I can see it even in my own work -- when I venture into doing
| frontend eng using these tools the results look good but often
| have reliability issues. Because my background/specialization
| is in systems, embedded & backend work -- I'm not good at
| reviewing the React etc code it makes.
| viking123 wrote:
| Amodei has to be the most insufferable of all the AI
| hucksters, nowadays even Altman looks tame compared to him.
|
| The whole company also has this meme about AI safety and some
| sort of fear-mongering about the models every few months.
| It's basically a smokescreen for normies and other midwits to
| make it look more mysterious and advanced than it really is.
| OOOOH IT'S GOING TO BREAK OUT! IT KNOWS IT'S BEING EVALUATED!
|
| I bet there are some true believers in Anthropic too, people
| who think themselves too smart to believe in God so they
| replaced it with AI instead but all the same hopes are there,
| eg. Amodei preaching about AI doubling the human lifespan. In
| religion we usually talk about heaven.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Just 1 more data center build, man! A few more megawatts
| and double the context window and it's AGI!
|
| I just want useful tools.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Run an army of parallel agents is orders of magnitude more
| profit per human, so they will tend to steer you towards that.
| croes wrote:
| And even if there are lots of vibe coders who don't like/need
| the information then make it a toggle for those who want/need
| it
| parhamn wrote:
| We opensourced our claude code ui today:
| https://github.com/bearlyai/openade
|
| I wanted a terminal feel (dense/sharp) + being able to comment
| directly on plans and outputs. It's MIT, no cloud, all local,
| etc.
|
| It includes all the details for function runs and some other nice
| to haves, fully built on claude code.
|
| Particularly we found planning + commenting up front reduces a
| lot of slop. Opus 4.6 class models are really good at executing
| an existing plan down to a T. So quality becomes a function of
| how much you invest in the plan.
| ramoz wrote:
| Built similar focused specifically on planning annotations.
|
| https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator
|
| It integrates with the CLI through hooks. completely local.
| parhamn wrote:
| That looks great! Planning phase is really key.
| mnicky wrote:
| At least now we also have a tracker:
| https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| Saw this the other day and loved it. Especially seeing Opus 4.5
| degrading prior to the 4.6 release (IIRC) and Codex staying
| very stable and even improving over time.
|
| But FYI the blog post is not about the actual model being
| dumbed down, but the command line interface.
| dogleash wrote:
| >Try using it for a few days. We've been using this internally at
| Anthropic for about a month now, and found that it took people a
| few days to mentally switch over to the new UI. Once they did, it
| "clicked" and they appreciated the reduced noise and focus on the
| tools that actually do need their attention.
|
| Ah, the old "you're holding it wrong."
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| Sorry I'm dumber than the average Anthropic employee, might
| just take me a few more days for it to "click" that I'm no
| longer seeing useful information and that this is good.
| layer8 wrote:
| They're dog-fooding it wrong. ;)
| iamleppert wrote:
| As soon as there is a viable alternative to Claude Code, I'm gone
| after this change. It appears minor on the surface but their
| response to all the comments tells you everything you need to
| know. They don't even want to concede at all, or at least give a
| flag to enable the old behavior, what was deployed and working
| for many users before. It's a signal that someone, somewhere at
| Anthropic is making decisions based on ego, not user feedback.
|
| The other fact pattern is their CLI is not open source, so we
| can't go in and change it ourselves. We shouldn't have to. They
| have also locked down OpenCode and while there are hacks
| available, I shouldn't have to resort to such cat and mouse games
| as someone who pays $200/month for a premium service.
|
| I'm aggressively exploring other options, and it's only a matter
| of if -- not when, one surfaces.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| "It appears minor on the surface but their response to all the
| comments tells you everything you need to know."
|
| I mean I hope it's just a single developer being stubborn
| rather than guidance from management asking everyone to
| simplify Claude Code for maximum mass appeal. But I agree
| otherwise, it's telling.
| deagle50 wrote:
| codex cli. I switched, no regrets. Also, $20 for top model vs
| being limited to sonnet.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Plus (the $20 plan) is still stuck on 5.2 right now..
| deagle50 wrote:
| 5.3 codex xhigh works for me
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Honestly even medium is quite good.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Am I right that they still refuse to read AGENTS.md?
| TJTorola wrote:
| Yes as of about a week ago, last I checked.
| nekusar wrote:
| Well, they already fucked over the community with their "lol not
| really unlimited" rug-pull.
|
| For those of you who are still suckered in paying for it, why do
| you think the company would care how they abuse the existing
| users? You all took it the last time.
| self_awareness wrote:
| Add another LLM to extract paths from verbose mode...
| jwr wrote:
| I really dislike this trend that unfortunately has become, well,
| a trend. And has followers. Namely, let's simplify to "reduce
| noise" and "not overwhelm users", because "the majority of users
| don't need...".
|
| This is spreading like a plague: browser address bars are being
| trimmed down to nothing. Good luck figuring out which protocol
| you're using, or soon which website you are talking to. The
| TLS/SSL padlock is gone, so is the way to look into the site
| certificate (good luck doing that on recent Safari versions).
| Because users might be confused.
|
| Well the users are not as dumb as you condescendingly make them
| out to be.
|
| And if you really want to hide information, make it a config
| setting. Ask users if they want "dumbo mode" and see if they
| really do.
| boutell wrote:
| Strong meme game. I'm on an older release and now I'm reluctant
| to update. In my current release, the verbosity is just where I
| want it and control-o is there when I really need it.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8477
|
| https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/15263
|
| https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/9099
|
| https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8371
|
| It's very clear that Anthropic doesn't really want to expose the
| secret sauce to end users. I have to patch Claude every release
| to bring this functionality back.
| ukuina wrote:
| Patching's not long for this world; Claude Code has moved to
| binary releases. Soon, the NPM release will just be a thin
| wrapper around the binary.
| nine_k wrote:
| I just assume that they realized that they can split the
| offering, and to charge for the top tier more. (Yes, even
| more.)
|
| If Claude Code can replace an engineer, it should cost just a
| bit less than an engineer, not half as much.
| co_king_3 wrote:
| I don't know about you, but I benefit so much from using
| Claude at work that I would gladly pay $80,000-$120,000 per
| year to keep using it.
| rahkiin wrote:
| Oh come on. That pays for more than 10 fte in some
| countries
| co_king_3 wrote:
| I made this joke with "$1,500-$2000 per month" last night
| and everyone thought I was serious
| nine_k wrote:
| I know people who burned several hundreds _a day_ and
| still were finding it worth it.
| co_king_3 wrote:
| Were they actually making money though? A lot of the
| people on the forefront of this AI stuff seem like cult
| leaders and crackheads to me.
| sanswork wrote:
| I'd pay up to $1000 pretty easily just based off the time
| it saves me personally from a lot of grindy type work
| which frees me up for more high value stuff.
|
| It's not 10x by any means but it doesn't need to be at
| most dev salaries to pay for itself. 1.5x alone is
| probably enough of an improvement for most >jr developers
| for a company to justify $1000/month.
|
| I suppose if your area of responsibility wasn't very
| broad the value would decrease pretty quickly so maybe
| less value for people at very large companies?
| co_king_3 wrote:
| I can see $200 but $1,000 per month seems crazy to me.
|
| Using Claude Code for one year is worth the same as a
| used sedan (I.E., ~$12,000) to you?
|
| You could be investing that money!
| sanswork wrote:
| Yes, easily. Paying for Claude would be investing that
| money. Assuming 10% return which would be great I'd make
| an extra $1200 a year investing it. I'm pretty sure over
| the course of a year of not having to spend time doing
| low value or repetitive work I can increase productivity
| enough to more than cover the $13k difference. Developer
| work scales really well so removing a bunch of the low
| end and freeing up time for the more difficult problems
| is going to return a lot of value.
| kadushka wrote:
| I would probably pay $2000 a month if I had to - it's a
| small fraction of my salary, and the productivity boost
| is worth it.
| co_king_3 wrote:
| It's *worth it* when you're salaried? Compared to
| investing the money? Do you plan to land a very-high-
| paying executive role years down the line? Are you
| already extremely highly paid? Did Claude legitimately
| 10x your productivity?
|
| edit: Fuck I'm getting trolled
| kadushka wrote:
| I'm serious - the productivity boost I'm getting from
| using AI models is so significant, that it's absolutely
| worth paying even 2k/month. It saves me a lot of time,
| and enables me to deliver new features much faster
| (making me look better for my employer) - both of which
| would justify spending a small fraction of my own money.
| I don't have to, because my employer pays for it, but as
| I said, if I had to, I would pay.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I am not paying this myself, but the place I work at is
| definitely paying around 2k a month for my Claude Code
| usage. I pay 2 x 200, for my personal projects.
|
| I think personal subs are subsidized while corporate ones
| definitely not. I have CC for my personal projects
| running 16h a day with multiple instances, but work CC
| still racks way higher bills with less usage. If I had to
| guess my work CC is using 4x as little for 5x the cost so
| at least 20x difference.
|
| I am not going to say it has 10xed or whatever with my
| productivity, but I would have never ever in that
| timeframe built all those things that I have now.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| I don't know why you keep insisting that no one is making
| any money off of this. Claude Code has made me
| outrageously more productive. Time = Money right?
| numpad0 wrote:
| that means customers will pay minimum 2x that much I think
| knodi wrote:
| What do you use it for, do you have example? For you to be
| ok with paying 80k to 120k I'm guessing its making you
| 375-450k a year?
| co_king_3 wrote:
| I'm joking, my point is that it's already quite expensive
| and I don't think it's making anyone money.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Why would you gladly pay more than what it's worth? It's
| _not_ an engineer you are hiring, it 's AI. The whole point
| of it was to make intelligent workflows cheaper. If it's
| going to cost as much as an engineer, hire the engineer, at
| least you'd have an escape goat when things invariably go
| wrong.
| co_king_3 wrote:
| I agree with you, I was just joking.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Oh now I see... Joke's on me then I guess :D
| enobrev wrote:
| It wasn't clear to me that this was a joke either. I
| assume the same for others since the post is grayed out.
| toyg wrote:
| _> an escape goat_
|
| Autocorrect hall of famer, there.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Scapegoat, got it. Can't blame the autocorrect though...
| I honestly thought it was spelled like that, which is a
| shame since I've been studying English my entire life as
| a second language.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| At least that misunderstanding didn't cause a nuclear
| accident:
| https://practical.engineering/blog/2025/4/15/when-kitty-
| litt...
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Luckily these strayed goats weren't irradiated
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| STFU right now because the more you bring this up the more
| likely it'll happen.
|
| Similarly, STFU about the stuff that can give LLMs ideas
| for how to harm us (you know what I'm talking about, it's
| reptilian based)
|
| The whole comment thread is likely to have been read by
| some folks at Anthropic. Already a disaster. Just keep on
| with the "we hate it unless it gets cheaper" discourse
| please!!!
| elzbardico wrote:
| But then you pay for the less outrageously subsidized rates
| of API instead of the a bit less incredibly generous prices
| of the subscription.
| eldenring wrote:
| Its not subsidized, in fact, they probably have very
| healthy margins on Claude Code.
| phi-go wrote:
| Why do you think that?
| noosphr wrote:
| Because if you don't then current valuations are a bublle
| propped inflated by burning a mountain of cash.
| cies wrote:
| And that's OpenAI's biz model? :)
| falcor84 wrote:
| That's not how valuations work. A company's valuation is
| typically based on an NPV (net present value)
| calculation, which is a power series of its time-
| discounted future cash flows. Depending on the company's
| strategy, it's often rational for it to not be profitable
| for quite a long while, as long as it can give investors
| the expectation of significant profitability down the
| line.
|
| Having said that, I do think that there is an investment
| bubble in AI, but am just arguing that you're not looking
| at the right signal.
| johndough wrote:
| DeepSeek had a theoretical profit margin of 545 % [1]
| with much inferior GPUs at 1/60th the API price.
|
| Anthropic's Opus 4.6 is a bit bigger, but they'd have to
| be insanely incompetent to not make a profit on
| inference.
|
| [1] https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-
| index/blob/main/20...
| almosthere wrote:
| Remember there are no moats in this industry - if anything
| one company might have a 2 month lead, sometimes. We've also
| noticed that companies paying OpenAI may swiftly shift to
| paying Google or Anthropic in a heartbeat.
|
| That means the pricing is going to be competitive. You may
| still get your wish though, but instead of the price of an
| engineer remaining the same, it will cut itself down by 95%.
| Kiboneu wrote:
| If they cared about that, they wouldn't expose the thinking
| blocks to the end-user client in the first place; they'd have
| the user-side context store hashes to the blocks (stored
| server-side) instead.
| resiros wrote:
| Honestly, just use OpenCode. It works with Claude Code Max, and
| the TUI is 100x better. The only thing that sucks is
| Compaction.
| kakugawa wrote:
| How much longer is Anthropic going to allow OpenCode to use
| Pro/Max subscriptions? Yes, it's technically possible, but
| it's against Anthropic's ToS. [1]
|
| 1: https://blog.devgenius.io/you-might-be-breaking-claudes-
| tos-...
| exitb wrote:
| Consider switching to an OpenAI subscription, which allows
| OpenCode use.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Doesn't Claude code have an agents sdk that officially
| allows you to use the good parts?
| killingtime74 wrote:
| Yes but you can't use a subscription with that
| almosthere wrote:
| There are also Azure versions of Opus
| prmph wrote:
| Nope, OpenCode is nowhere near Claude Code.
|
| It's amazing how much other agentic tools suck in comparison
| to Claude Code. I'd love to have a proper alternative. But
| they _all_ suck. I keep trying them every few months and keep
| running back to Claude Code.
|
| Just yesterday I installed Cursor and Codex, and removed both
| after a few hours.
|
| Cursor disrespected my setting to ask before editing files.
| Codex renamed my tabs after I had named them. It also went
| ahead and edited a bunch of my files after a fresh install
| without asking me. The heck, the default behavior should have
| been to seek permission at least the first time.
|
| OpenCode does not allow me to scrollback and edit a prior
| prompt for reuse. It also keeps throwing up all kinds of
| weird errors, especially when I'm trying to use free or lower
| cost models.
|
| Gemini CLI reads strange Python files when I'm working on a
| Node.js project, what the heck. It also never fixed the diff
| display issues in the terminal; It's always so difficult for
| me to actually see what edits it is actually trying to make
| before it makes it. It also frequently throws random internal
| errors.
|
| At this point, I'm not sure we'll be seeing a proper
| competitor to Claude Code anytime soon.
| mightybyte wrote:
| Hmmm, I used OpenCode for awhile and didn't have this
| experience. I felt like OpenCode was the better experience.
| Implicated wrote:
| Same, I still use CC mainly due to it being so wildly
| better at compaction. The overall experience of using
| OpenCode was far superior - especially with the LSP
| configured.
| viking123 wrote:
| 5.3 Codex on cursor is better than Claude code
| lizardking wrote:
| Not in my (limited) experience. I gave CC and codex
| detailed instructions for reworking a UI, and codex did a
| much worse job and took 5x as long to finish.
| azinman2 wrote:
| What's 100x better about the TUI?
| mightybyte wrote:
| I have been unable to use OpenCode with my Claude Max
| subscription. It worked for awhile, but then it seems like
| Anthropic started blocking it.
| raincole wrote:
| > to end users
|
| To other actors who want to train a distilled version of
| Claude, more likely.
| TIPSIO wrote:
| To be fair they have like 10,000 open issues / spam issues,
| it's probably insane out there for them to filter all of it
| haha
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| GitHub Issues as a customer support funnel is horrible. It's
| easy for them, but it hides all the important bugs and only
| surfaces "wanted features" that are thumbs-up'd alot. So you
| see "Highlight text X" as the top requested feature;
| meanwhile, 10% of users experience a critical bug, but they
| don't all find "the github issue" one user poorly wrote about
| it, so it has like 7 upvotes.
|
| GitHub Codespaces has a critical bug that makes the copilot
| terminal integration unusable after 1 prompt, but the company
| has no idea, because there is no clear way to report it from
| the product, no customer support funnel, etc. There's 10
| upvotes on a poorly-written sorta-related GH issue and no
| company response. People are paying for this feature and it's
| just broken.
| rrrix1 wrote:
| Humans don't look at these anymore, Claude itself does.
| They've even said so.
| sumedh wrote:
| Maybe they can use AI to figure out which ones are actually
| useful and which ones are not.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I think it's more classic enshittification. Currently, as a
| percentage, still not many devs use it. In a few months or 1-2
| years all these products will start to cater to the median
| developer and start to get dumbed down.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > It's very clear that Anthropic doesn't really want to expose
| the secret sauce to end users
|
| Meanwhile, I am observing precisely how VS+Copilot works in my
| OAI logs with zero friction. Plug in your own API key and you
| can MITM everything via the provider's logging features.
| tmaly wrote:
| I thought the source code for the actual CLI was closed source.
| How are you patching it?
| dcre wrote:
| More likely 99.9% of users never press ctrl+o to see the
| thinking, so they don't consider it important enough to make a
| setting out of.
| egamirorrim wrote:
| I don't suppose you could share a little on that patching
| process?
| lionkor wrote:
| Meanwhile GPT-5.3-Codex which just released recently is a huge
| change and much better. It now displays intermediate thinking
| summaries instead of being silent.
| fooker wrote:
| My experience using it from cursor has been fairly
| disappointing
| lionkor wrote:
| In what way(s), if you can elaborate?
| fooker wrote:
| Claude 4.5 or 4.6 just one shots what I ask instead of
| getting stuck in random tangents.
| chairmanwow1 wrote:
| Much better in the codex cli harness
| fooker wrote:
| Interesting, I can give that a try at some point.
| roflcopter69 wrote:
| There's one really confusing thing in Codex CLI from my
| perspective. How do I make it run unsandboxed but still ask
| me for approvals? I'm fine with it running bare on my
| machine but I like to approve first before it runs
| commands. But I only see how I can configure to have both
| or none. What am I missing?
| juancn wrote:
| Just stop using the damn thing if you don't like it.
| ukuina wrote:
| It's clear we're seeing the same code-vs-craft divergence play
| out as before, just at a different granularity.
|
| Codex/Claude would like you to ignore both the code AND the
| process of creating the code.
| paseante wrote:
| I have been using it extensively, and for me it's fine as it is.
| Also, the title is just false. How did this get into HN
| frontpage, that's a good question.
| jtrn wrote:
| I find it hard to care about claims of degradation of quality,
| since this has been a firehouse of claims that don't map onto
| anything real and is extremely subjective. I myself made the
| claim in error. I think this is just as ripe for psychological
| analysis as anything else.
| layer8 wrote:
| You seem to be referring to something else than the topic the
| article is about.
| thunfischtoast wrote:
| Did you read the article? It's not about subjective claims,
| it's about a very real feature getting removed (file reads
| showing the filepath and numbers of lines read).
| heywoods wrote:
| https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/24537
|
| Seems like a dashboard mode toggle to run in a dedicated terminal
| would be a good candidate to move some of this complexity
| Anthropic seems to think "most" users can't handle. When your
| product is increasing cognitive load the answer isn't always to
| remove the complexity entirely. That decision in this case was
| clearly the wrong one.
| locusofself wrote:
| Working at Microsoft, I've just now hooked up to Claude Code (my
| department was not permitted to use it previously), through
| something called "Agent Maestro", a vscode extension which I
| guess pipes claude code API requets to our internally hosted
| Claude models, including Opus 4.6.
|
| I do wonder if there is going to be much of a difference between
| using Claude Code vs. Copilot CLI when using the same models.
| pletnes wrote:
| I honestly don't think the models are as important as people
| tend to believe. More important is how the models are given
| tools - find, grep, git, test runners, ...
| Galanwe wrote:
| > I honestly don't think the models are as important as
| people tend to believe.
|
| I tend to disagree. While I don't see meaningful _reasoning
| power_ between frontier models, I do see differences in the
| way they interact with my prompts.
|
| I use exclusively Anthropic models because my interactions
| with GPT are annoying:
|
| - Sonnet/Opus behave like a mix of a diligent intern, or a
| peer. It does the work, doesn't talk too much, gives answers,
| etc.
|
| - GPT is overly chatty, it borderline calls me "bro", tend to
| brush issues I raise "it should be good enough for general
| use", etc.
|
| - I find that GPT hardly ever steps back when diagnosing
| issues. It picks a possible cause, and enters a rabbit hole
| of increasingly hacky / spurious solutions. Opus/Sonnet is
| often to step back when the complexity increases too much,
| and dig an alternative.
|
| - I find Opus/Sonnet to be "lazy" recently. Instead of
| systematically doing an accurate search before answering, it
| tries to "guess", and I have to spot it and directly tell it
| to "search for the precise specification and do not guess".
| Often it would tell me "you should do this and that", and I
| have to tell it "no, you do it". I wonder if it was done to
| reduce the number of web searches or compute that it uses
| unless the user explicitly asks.
| nfg wrote:
| > I do wonder if there is going to be much of a difference
| between using Claude Code vs. Copilot CLI when using the same
| models.
|
| I'm also at MS, not (yet?) using Claude Code at work and
| pondering precisely the same question.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Is this an indictment of OpenAI's models -- that Microsoft has
| access to through their investment?
| locusofself wrote:
| We've had both GPT and Claude models available to us in
| Github Copilot for some time. At first, it was only GPT
| models.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Compare their system prompts and the agent harness logic. It's
| 99% of what makes the agent useful, and it can be quite
| different.
| unltdpower wrote:
| This is the end game I've been Casandra'ing since the beginning.
|
| You all are refining these models through their use, and the
| model owners will be the only ones with access to true models
| while you will be fed whatever degraded slop they give you.
|
| You all are helping concentrate even more power in these
| sociopaths.
| vintagedave wrote:
| > That's it. "Read 3 files." Which files? Doesn't matter.
| "Searched for 1 pattern." What pattern? Who cares.
|
| Product manager here. Cynically, this is classic product
| management: simplify and remove useful information under the
| guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism if
| you're more overt about your influences.
|
| It's something that as an industry we should be over by now.
|
| It requires deep understanding of customer usage in order not to
| make this mistake. It is _really easy_ to think you are making
| improvements by hiding information if you do not understand why
| that information is perceived as valuable. Many people have been
| taught that streamlining and removal is positive. It's even
| easier if you have non-expert users getting attention. All of us
| here at HN will have seen UIs where this has occurred.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| Also product manager here.
|
| Not at all cynically, this is classic product management -
| simplify by removing information that is useful to some users
| but not others.
|
| We shouldn't be over it by now. It's good to think carefully
| about how you're using space in your UI and what you're
| presenting to the user.
|
| You're saying it's bad because they removed useful information,
| but then why isn't Anthropic's suggestion of using verbose mode
| a good solution? Presumably the answer is because in addition
| to containing useful information, it also clutters the UI with
| a bunch of information the user doesn't want.
|
| Same thing's true here - there are people who want to see the
| level of detail that the author wants and others for whom it's
| not useful and just takes up space.
|
| > It requires deep understanding of customer usage in order not
| to make this mistake.
|
| It requires deep understanding of customer usage to know
| whether it's a mistake at all, though. Anthropic has a lot
| deeper understanding of the usage of Claude Code than you or I
| or the author. I can't say for sure that they're using that
| information well, but since you're a PM I have to imagine that
| there's been some time when you made a decision that some
| subset of users didn't like but was right for the product,
| because you had a better understanding of the full scope of
| usage by your entire userbase than they did. Why not at least
| entertain the idea that the same thing is true here?
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| > You're saying it's bad because they removed useful
| information, but then why isn't Anthropic's suggestion of
| using verbose mode a good solution?
|
| Because reading through hundreds of lines verbose output is
| not a solution to the problem of "I used to be able to see
| _at a glance_ what files were being touched and what search
| patterns were being used but now I can't".
| idopmstuff wrote:
| Right, I understand why people prefer this. The point was
| that the post I was responding to was making pretty broad
| claims about how removing information is bad but then
| ignoring the fact that they in fact prefer a solution that
| removes a lot of information.
| sfink wrote:
| Developer> This is important information and most developers
| want to see it.
|
| PM1> Looks like a PM who is out of touch with what the
| developers want. Easy mistake to make.
|
| PM2> Anthropic knows better than this developer. The
| developer is probably wrong.
|
| I don't know for sure what the best decision is here, I've
| barely used CC. Neither does PM1 nor PM2, but PM2 is being
| awfully dismissive of the opinion of a user in the target
| audience. PM1 is probably putting a bit too much weight on
| Developer's opinion, but I fully agree with "All of us...
| have seen UIs where this has occurred." Yes, we have. I
| personally _greatly_ appreciate a PM who listens and responds
| quickly to negative feedback on changes like this, especially
| "streamlining" and "reducing clutter" type changes since
| they're so easy to get wrong (as PM1 says).
|
| > It's good to think carefully about how you're using space
| in your UI and what you're presenting to the user.
|
| I agree. It's also good to have the humility to know that
| your subjective opinion _as someone not in the target
| audience even if you 're designing the product_ is less
| informed in many ways than that of your users.
|
| ----
|
| Personally, I get creeped out by how many things CC is doing
| and tokens it's burning in the background. It has a strong
| "trust me bro" vibe that I dislike. That's probably common to
| all agent systems; I haven't used enough to know.
| NinjaTrance wrote:
| > Personally, I get creeped out by how many things CC is
| doing and tokens it's burning in the background. It has a
| strong "trust me bro" vibe that I dislike.
|
| 100% this.
|
| It might be convenient to hide information from non-
| technical users; but software engineers _need_ to know what
| is happening. If it is not visible by default, it should be
| configurable via dotfiles.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| > PM2> Anthropic knows better than this developer. The
| developer is probably wrong.
|
| Nope! Not what I said. I specifically said that I don't
| know if Anthropic is using the information they have well.
| Please at least have the courtesy not to misrepresent what
| I'm saying. There's plenty of room to criticize without
| doing that.
|
| > It's also good to have the humility to know that your
| subjective opinion as someone not in the target audience
| even if you're designing the product is less informed in
| many ways than that of your users.
|
| Ah, but you don't know I'm not the target audience. Claude
| Code is increasingly seeing non-developer users, and
| perhaps Anthropic has made a strategic decision to make the
| product friendlier to them, because they see that as a
| larger userbase to target?
|
| I agree that it's important to have humility. Here's mine:
| I don't know why Anthropic made this decision. I know they
| have much more information than me about the product usage,
| its roadmap and their overall business strategy.
|
| I understand that you may not like what they're doing here
| and that the lack of information creeps you out. That's
| totally valid. My point isn't that you're wrong to have
| that opinion, it's that folks here are wrong to assume that
| Anthropic made this decision because they don't understand
| what they're doing.
| NinjaTrance wrote:
| > It requires deep understanding of customer usage to know
| whether it's a mistake at all
|
| Software developers like customizable tools.
|
| That's why IDEs still have "vim keybindings" and many other
| options.
|
| Your user is highly skilled - let him decide what he wants to
| see.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| There are a lot of Claude Code users who aren't software
| developers. Maybe they've decided that group is the one
| they want to cater to? I recognize that won't be a popular
| decision with the HN crowd, but that doesn't mean it's the
| wrong one.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Yeah, I made a similar point about the tone of ChatGPT
| responses; to me, I can't imagine why someone would want
| less information when working and tuning an AI model.
| However, something tells me they actually have hard
| evidence that users respond better with less information
| regardless of what the loud minority say online, and are
| following that.
| collaborative wrote:
| 100%. Metrics don't lie. I've A/B tested this a lot.
| Attention is a rare commodity and users will zone out and
| leave your product. I really dislike this fact
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| I fully agree with you on almost everything you wrote in
| this thread, but I'm not sure this is the right answer. I
| myself currently spend a lot of time with CC and belong
| to that group of developers who don't care about this
| problem. It's likely that I'm not alone. So it doesn't
| have to be the least professional audience they serve
| with this update. It's possible that Anthropic knows what
| are they doing (e.g. reducing level of detail to simplify
| task of finding something more important in the output)
| and it's also possible that they are simply making stupid
| product decisions because they have a cowboy PM who
| attacks some OKR screaming yahoo. We don't know. In the
| end having multiple verbosity levels configured with
| granularity similar to java loggers would be nice.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| Oh totally - I'm definitely not saying that they made the
| decision to cater to non-dev users, just that it's a
| possibility. Totally agree with you that at the end of
| the day, we haven't the foggiest idea.
| mingus88 wrote:
| Then why is the suggestion to use verbose mode treated as
| another mistake?
|
| The user is highly skilled; let them filter out what is
| important
|
| This should be better than adding an indeterminate number
| of toggles and settings, no?
| 8note wrote:
| does claude code let me control whats output when?
|
| verbose i think puts it on the TUI and i cant
| particularly grep or sed on the TUI
| dgacmu wrote:
| They know what people type into their tools, but they don't
| know what in the output users read and focus on unless
| they're convening a user study or focus group.
|
| I personally love that the model tells me what file it has
| read because I know whether or not it's headed in the
| generally right direction that I intended. Anthropic has no
| way of knowing I feel this way.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| But you have no idea if they've convened user study or
| focus groups, right?
|
| I'll just reiterate my initial point that the author of the
| post and the people commenting here have no idea what
| information Anthropic is working with. I'm not saying
| they've made the right decision, but I am saying that
| people ought to give them the slightest bit of credit here
| instead of treating them like idiots.
| sdwr wrote:
| I'm sure the goal is that reading files is something you
| debug, not monitor, like individual network requests in a
| browser.
| mattkrause wrote:
| Simplification can be good---but they've removed the wrong
| half here!
|
| The notifications act as an overall progress bar _and_ give
| you a general sense of what Claude Code is doing: is it
| looking in the relevant part of your codebase, or has it
| gotten distracted by some unused, vendored-in code?
|
| "Read 2 files" is fine as a progress indicator but is too
| vague for anything else. "Read foo.cpp and bar.h" takes
| almost the same amount of visual space, but fulfills both
| purposes. You might want to fold _long_ lists of files (5?
| 15?) but that seems like the perfect place for a user-
| settable option.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| > "Read 2 files" is fine as a progress indicator but is too
| vague for anything else. "Read foo.cpp and bar.h" takes
| almost the same amount of visual space, but fulfills both
| purposes.
|
| Now this is a good, thoughtful response! Totally agree that
| if you can convey more information using basically the same
| amount of space, that's likely a better solution regardless
| of who's using the product.
| brutalc wrote:
| Product managers aren't needed anymore.
| roughly wrote:
| First they came for the product managers, and I said nothing,
| because I was a coder, and we're invincible and can do
| everything and also deliver value unlike all those other
| slackers, so they'd never come for us.
| NinjaTrance wrote:
| Product managers are fooling themselves if they think they can
| "improve the user experience" for developers -- developers
| can't agree on the simplest things such as key bindings (vim,
| emacs) or identation (tabs, spaces).
|
| Make the application configurable. Developers like to tinker
| with their tools.
| roughly wrote:
| This also shifts over time - new users, especially people
| sophisticated in the field your tool is addressing, need to be
| convinced the product is doing what they believe it should be
| doing, and want to see more output from it. They may become
| comfortable with the product over time and move further up the
| trust/abstraction ladder, but at the beginning, verbose output
| is a trust-building mechanism.
| alphazard wrote:
| Product management might be the worst meme in the industry.
| Hire people who have never used the product and don't think
| like or accurately represent our users, then let them allocate
| engineering resources and gate what ships. What could go wrong?
|
| It should be a fad gone by at this point, but people never
| learn. Here's what to do instead: Find your most socially
| competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times
| a month. Just saved you thousands or millions in salaries, and
| you have a better chance of making things that your users
| actually want.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I have worked with some really really good product managers.
|
| But not lately. Lately it's been people who have very little
| relevant domain expertise, zero interest in putting in the
| time to develop said expertise beyond just cataloguing and
| regurgitating feedback from the customers they like most on a
| personal level, and seem to mostly have only been selected
| for the position because they are really good at office
| politics.
|
| But I think it's not entirely their fault. What I've also
| noticed is that, when I was on teams with really elective
| product managers, we also had a full time project manager.
| That possibly freed up a lot of the product manager's time.
| One person to be good at the tactical so the other can be
| good at the strategic.
|
| Since project managers have become passe, though, I think the
| product managers are just stretched too thin. Which sets up
| bad incentive structures: it's impossible to actually do the
| job well anymore, so of course the only ones who survive are
| the office politicians who are really good at gladhanding the
| right people and shifting blame when things don't go well.
| alphazard wrote:
| There are individuals who have good taste for products in
| certain domains. Their own preferences are an accurate
| approximation for those of the users. Those people might
| add value when they are given control of the product.
|
| That good taste doesn't translate between domains very
| often. Good taste for developer tools doesn't mean good
| taste for a video game inventory screen. And that's the
| crux of the problem. There is a segment of the labor market
| calling themselves "product manager" who act like good
| taste is domain independent, and spread lies about their
| importance to the success of every business. What's worse
| is that otherwise smart people (founders, executives) fall
| for it because they think hiring them is what they are
| _supposed to_ do.
|
| Over time, as more and more people realized that PM is a
| side door into big companies with lots of money, "Product
| Manager" became an _imposter role_ like "Scrum Master".
| Now product orgs are pretty much synonymous with
| incompetence.
| sarchertech wrote:
| > There is a segment of the labor market calling
| themselves "product manager" who act like good taste is
| domain independent
|
| That's definitely one of the biggest problems with
| product management. The delusion that you can be an
| expert at generic "product".
|
| We used to have subject matter experts who worked with
| engineers. That made sense to me.
| npunt wrote:
| Taste is pretty transferable, I think what you're talking
| about is intuition. The foundations of intuition are
| deeply understanding problems and the ability to navigate
| towards solutions related to those problems. Both of
| these are relatively domain-dependent. People can have
| intuition for how to do things but lack the taste to make
| those solutions feel right.
|
| Taste on the other hand is about creating an overall
| feeling from a product. It's holistic and about
| coherence, where intuition is more bottom-up problem
| solving. Tasteful decisions are those that use restraint,
| that strike a particular tone, that say 'no' when others
| might say 'yes'. It's a lot more magical, and a lot
| rarer.
|
| Both taste and intuition are ultimately about judgment,
| which is why they're often confused for one another. The
| difference is they approach problems from the opposite
| side; taste from above, intuition from below.
|
| I agree with your assessment otherwise, PM can be a real
| smoke screen especially across domain and company stage.
| rrrx3 wrote:
| The proportion of "really good" PMs on product engineering
| teams has to be less than 0.1%.
|
| The counter to that is "the proportion of 'really good
| engineers' to product engineering teams has got to be in
| the single digits," and I would agree with that, as well.
|
| The problem is what is incentivized to be built - most
| teams are working on "number go up?" revenue or engagement
| as a proxy to revenue "problems." Not "is this a good
| product that people actively enjoy using?" problems.
|
| Just your typical late-stage capitalism shit.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Hire people who have never used the product and don't think
| like or accurately represent our users
|
| In most of my engineering jobs, the Product Managers were
| much closer to our users than the engineers.
|
| Good product managers are very valuable. There are a lot of
| bad ones carrying the product manager title because it was
| viewed as the easy way to get a job in tech without having to
| know how to program, but smart companies are getting better
| at filtering them out.
|
| > Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them
| talk to users a couple times a month
|
| Every single time I've seen this tried, it turns into a
| situation where one or two highly vocal customers capture the
| engineering team's direction and steer the product toward
| their personal needs. It's the same thing that happens when
| the sales people start feeding requests from their customers
| into the roadmap.
| mbesto wrote:
| This sentiment is going exactly against the trend right now.
| AI coding is making technically minded product manager's MORE
| powerful not less. When/if coding just because your ability
| to accurately describe what you want to build, the people
| yielding this skill are the ones who understand customer
| requirements, not the opposite.
|
| > Find your most socially competent engineer,
|
| These usually get promoted to product management anyway, so
| this isn't a new thought.
| alphazard wrote:
| > This sentiment is going exactly against the trend right
| now.
|
| It's not.
|
| Engineers are having more and more minutia and busy work
| taken off their plate, now done by AI. That allows them to
| be heads up more often, more of their cognitive capacity is
| directed towards strategy, design, quality.
|
| Meanwhile, users are building more and more of their own
| tools in house. Why pay someone when you can vibe code a
| working solution in a few minutes?
|
| So product managers are getting squeezed out by smarter
| people below them moving into their cognitive space and
| being better at solving the problems they were supposed to
| be solving. And users moving into their space by taking low
| hanging fruit away from them. No more month long
| discussions about where to put the chart and what color it
| should be. The user made their own dashboard and it calls
| into the API. What API? The one the PM doesn't understand
| and a single engineer maintains with the help of several
| LLMs.
|
| If it's simple and easy: the user took it over, if it's
| complex: it's going to the smartest person in the room.
| That has never been the PM.
| mlinsey wrote:
| Good PM's are extremely good at understanding users, and use
| soft-skills to make the rest of the org focus on users more.
| I've worked with a couple, and they've added an enormous
| amount of value, sometimes steering teams of dozens of
| engineers in a more productive direction.
|
| The problem is, it's hard to measure how good a PM is, even
| harder than for engineers. The instinct is to use product
| KPI's to do so, but especially at BigTech company,
| distribution advantages and traction of previous products
| will be the dominant factor here, and the best way of raising
| many product KPI's are actually user-hostile. Someone who has
| been a successful FAANG engineer who goes to a startup might
| lean towards over-engineering, but at least they should be
| sharp on the fundamentals. Someone who has been a successful
| FAANG PM might actually have no idea how to get PMF.
|
| > Here's what to do instead: Find your most socially
| competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple
| times a month
|
| This is actually a great idea, but what will happen is this
| socially competent engineer will soon have a new full-time
| job gathering those insights, coalescing them into actionable
| product changes, persuading the rest of the org to adopt
| those changes, and making sure the original user insights
| make it into the product. Voila: you've re-invented product
| management.
|
| But I actually think it's good to source PM's from people
| who've been engineers for a few years. PM's used to come from
| a technical background; Google famously gave entry-level
| coding tests to PM's well into the '10s. I dunno when it
| became more fashionable to hire MBA's and consultants into
| this role, but it may have been a mistake.
| alphazard wrote:
| > Voila: you've re-invented product management.
|
| This is a names vs. structure thing. For a moment, taboo
| the term product manager.
|
| What I'm suggesting is a low risk way to see if an engineer
| has an aptitude for aligning the roadmap with what the
| users want. If they aren't great at it, they can go back to
| engineering. We also know for sure that they are
| technically competent since they are currently working as
| an engineer, no risk there.
|
| The conventional wisdom (bad meme) is going to the labor
| market with a search term for people who claim to know what
| the users want, any user, any problem, doesn't matter.
| These people are usually incompetent and have never written
| software. Then hiring 1 and potentially more of the people
| that respond to the shibboleth.
|
| If you want the first case, then you can't say "product
| manager" because people will automatically do the second
| case.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Putting on a PM hat is something I've been doing regularly
| in my engineering career over the last quarter century.
| Even as a junior (still in college!) at my first job I was
| thinking about product, in no small part because there
| _were_ no PMs in sight. As I grew through multiple startups
| and eventually bigger brand name tech companies, I realized
| that understanding how the details work combined with some
| sense of what users actually want and how they behave is a
| super power. With AI this skillset has never been more
| relevant.
|
| I agree your assessment about the value of good PMs. The
| issue, in my experience, is that only about 20% (at most)
| are actually good. 60% are fine and can be successful with
| the right Design and Engingeering partners. And 20% should
| just be replaced by AI now so we can put the proper
| guardrails around their opinions and not be misled by their
| charisma or whatever other human traits enabled them to get
| hired into a job they are utterly unqualified for.
| nix0n wrote:
| > people who have never used the product and don't think like
| or accurately represent our users
|
| I agree completely that these are the important
| qualifications to be setting direction for a product.
|
| > Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them
| talk to users a couple times a month.
|
| This doesn't necessarily follow from the above, but in
| Anthropic's case specifically, where the users are software
| engineers, it probably would have worked better than whatever
| they have going on now.
|
| In general, it's probably better to have domain experts doing
| product management, as opposed to someone who is trained in
| product management.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| > your most socially competent engineer
|
| Unfortunately, he's already two of our SEs and the CTO and
| we're starting to run low on coders.
|
| What are we going to do when we need a customer success
| manager or a profserv team?
| bsder wrote:
| > Cynically, this is classic product management: simplify and
| remove useful information under the guise of 'improving the
| user experience' or perhaps minimalism if you're more overt
| about your influences.
|
| _Cynically_ , it's a vibe coded mess and the "programmers" at
| Anthropic can't figure out how to put it back.
|
| _More cynically_ , Anthropic management is trying to hide
| anything that people could map to token count (aka money) so
| that they can start jiggling the usage numbers to extract more
| money from us.
| fhd2 wrote:
| Fairly cynical indeed. Though I must admit that Anthropic's
| software - not the models, the software they build - seems to
| be generally plagued by quality issues. Even the dashboard is
| _somehow_ broken most of the time, at least whenever I try to
| do something.
| starkeeper wrote:
| I think it might also come down to UI churn. Sprint over? What
| to do next? Everything is always moving because people have
| nothing meaningful to do.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| Well, some who start as developers don't truly see users as
| stakeholders, sometimes not even remotely, and they often
| aren't assisted to change that view. While it feels astonishing
| in direct encounters, on the sliding scale of "are you a person
| that sees other people as stakeholders in general", many
| developers can be close to the "no" end of that scale. So not
| necessarily an institutional view.
| mrandish wrote:
| > Many people have been taught that streamlining and removal is
| positive.
|
| Over the past ten years or so the increasing de-featuring of
| software under the guise of 'simplification' has become a
| critical issue for power users. For any GUI apps which have a
| mixed base of consumer and power users, I mostly don't update
| them anymore because they're as likely to get net worse vs
| better.
|
| It's weird that companies like MSFT seem puzzled why so many
| users refuse to update Windows or Office to major new feature
| versions.
| willhslade wrote:
| What in Office has been a degradation? Just curious. I mostly
| agree about Windows.
| vajrabum wrote:
| Or is this PM and executive management aiming for the no and
| low code users? That would fit the zeitgeist especially in the
| tech C level and their sales pitch to non-tech C levels.
| robomartin wrote:
| Product management --and managers-- can be, shall we say,
| interesting.
|
| I was recently involved with a company that wanted us to
| develop a product that would be disruptive enough to enter an
| established market, make waves and shock it.
|
| We did just that. We ran a deep survey of all competing
| products, bought a bunch of them, studied absolutely everything
| about them, how they were used and their users. Armed with that
| information, we produced a set of specifications and user
| experience requirements that far exceeded anything in the
| market.
|
| We got green-lit to deliver a set of prototypes to present at a
| trade show. We did that.
|
| The prototypes were presented and they truly blew everyone
| away. Blogs, vlogs, users, everyone absolutely loved what we
| created and the sense was that this was a winning product.
|
| And then came reality. Neither the product manager nor the CTO
| (and we could add the CEO and CFO to the list) had enough
| understanding and experience in the domain to take the
| prototypes to market. It would easily have required a year or
| two of learning before they could function in that domain.
|
| What did they do? They dumbed down the product specification to
| force it into what they understood and what engineering
| building blocks they already had. Square peg solidly and
| violently pounded into a round hole.
|
| The outcome? Oh, they built a product alright. They sure did.
| And it flopped, horribly flopped, as soon as it was introduced
| and made available. Nobody wanted it. It was not competitive.
| It offered nothing disruptive. It was a bad clone of everything
| already occupying space in that ecosystem. Game over.
|
| The point is: Technology companies are not immune to human
| failings, ego, protectionism/turf guarding, bad decisions, bad
| management, etc.
|
| When someone says something like "I am not sure that's a good
| idea for a startup. There's competition." My first though is:
| Never assume that competitors know what they are doing, are
| capable and always make the right decisions without making
| mistakes. You don't always need a better product, you need
| better execution.
| seg_lol wrote:
| Replace the C levels with AI. The C suite is am impediment to
| innovation and progress. They _are_ the office politics
| mentioned in this entire thread. The person with the vision
| and the strategy is a random person out there that doesn 't
| even work for your company. Hell, _you_ could have done it.
|
| > The point is: Technology companies are not immune to human
| failings, ego, protectionism/turf guarding, bad decisions,
| bad management, etc.
|
| They only accidentally succeed in spite of those things. They
| have those things _more_ than existing businesses precisely
| because having too much money masks the pressures that would
| force solid execution and results. When you have 80% profit
| margins, you can show up drunk.
| wwweston wrote:
| I am so glad to hear there are working PMs who are aware of
| this (and if you're hiring it makes me more interested in
| considering your employer).
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or
| perhaps minimalism_
|
| I think we can be more charitable. Don't you see, even here on
| HN, people constantly asking for software that is less bloated,
| that does fewer things but does them better, that code is cost,
| and every piece of complexity is something that needs to be
| maintained?
|
| As features keep getting added, it _is_ necessary to revisit
| where the UX is "too much" and so things need to be hidden,
| e.g. menu commands need to be grouped in a submenu, what was
| toolbar functionality now belongs in a dialog, reporting needs
| to be limited to a verbose mode, etc.
|
| Obviously product teams get it wrong sometimes, users complain,
| and if enough users complain, then it's brought back, or a
| toggle to enable it.
|
| There's nothing to be cynical about, and it's not something we
| "should be over by now." It's just humans doing their best to
| strike the balance between a UX that provides enough
| information to be useful without so much information that it
| overwhelms and distracts. Obviously any _single_ instance isn
| 't usually enough to overwhelm and distract, but in aggregate
| they do, so PM's and designers try to be vigilant to simplify
| wherever possible. But they're only human, sometimes they'll
| get it wrong (like maybe here), and then they fix it.
| sli wrote:
| Every single website on the internet just says "whoopsie
| doodle, me made an oopsie" instead of just telling me what the
| problem is. This so-called mistake is so widespread that it has
| been the standard for at least a decade.
|
| I agree it's a mistake, but I don't believe that it's viewed
| that way by anyone making the decision to do it.
| oldestofsports wrote:
| You dont expose error details to the user for security
| reasons, even though it does indeed make the user experience
| worse.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I understand not exposing a full stack trace, but I don't
| see any excuse to not even expose a googleable error code.
| If me having an error code makes your product insecure,
| then you have a much bigger problem.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I show the stack trace on AGPL projects. Why hide what
| they can already see for themselves?
| falcor84 wrote:
| The reason I see is that it might expose the value of
| secret keys or other sensitive variables. But if you are
| certain it won't happen, then yes
| tetha wrote:
| We are currently extremely blessed on the companies new
| product, because they have placed a curious and open-minded
| product manager and a curious and open-minded ux-designer in
| charge of the administrative interface. Over half a year, those
| two have gained the trust of several admins within the company,
| all of them with experience of more than 10 years.
|
| We have by now taught them about good information density.
|
| Like, the permission pages, if you look at them just once,
| kinda look like bad 90s UIs. They throw a crapton of
| information at you.
|
| But they contain a lot of smart things you only realize when
| actually using it from an admin perspective. Easy comparison of
| group permissions by keeping sorting orders and colors stable,
| so you can toggle between groups and just visually match what's
| different, because colors change. Highlights of edge cases here
| and there. SSO information around there as well. Loads of
| frontloaded necessary info with optional information behind
| various places.
|
| You can move seriously fast in that interface once you
| understand it.
|
| Parts of the company hate it for not being user friendly. I
| just got a mail that a customer admin was able to setup SSO in
| 15 minutes and debug 2 mapping issues in another 10 and now
| they are production ready.
| torginus wrote:
| My issue with CC is that its interface deliberately obscures the
| code from you, making you treat it more like a genie you make
| wishes of rather than making changes and checking the output.
|
| I may not be up to date with the latest & greatest on how to code
| with AI, but I noticed that as opposed to my more human in the
| loop style,
| deagle50 wrote:
| Because they don't want you to improve.
| tern wrote:
| Claude's brand is sliding dangerously close to "the Microsoft of
| AI."
|
| DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS
|
| I write mainly out of the hope that some Anthropic employees read
| this: you need an internal crusade to fight these impulses. Take
| the high road in the short-term and you may avoid being disrupted
| in the long-term. It's a culture issue.
|
| Probably your strongest tool is specifically educating people
| about the history. Microsoft in the late 90s and early 00s was
| _completely_ dominant, but from today 's perspective it's very
| clear: they made some fundamental choices that didn't age well.
| As a result, DX on Windows is _still_ not great, even if Visual
| Studio has the best features, and people with taste by and large
| prefer Linux.
|
| Apple made an extremely strategic choice: rebuild the OS around
| BSD, which set them up to align with Linux (the language of
| servers). The question is: why? Go find out.
|
| The difference is a matter of sensibility, and a matter of
| allowing that sensibility to exist and flourish in the business.
| mightybyte wrote:
| The thing that annoys me most of all is they block me from
| using OpenCode with my Claude Max plan. I find the OpenCode UI
| to be meaningfully better than Claude Code's, so this is really
| annoying.
| seeEllArr wrote:
| if you are an expert developer smarter than everyone at
| anthropic, like everyone else commenting on this post, you'll
| know that it's not difficult to use the claude agent sdk
| behind an api to achieve almost exactly the same thing
| marinhero wrote:
| Some workarounds are here
| https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/7410 but I agree
| with you, this should be a native feature.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Huh? Why wouldn't developers (who probably have stock options
| in Claude) try to prevent becoming 'the Microsoft of AI'?
| That's probably what they are actively trying to do.
| yfw wrote:
| Your incentive is to stay in the job so you can vest.
| Fighting the slide may just make enemies
| mrandish wrote:
| > you need an internal crusade to fight these impulses. Take
| the high road in the short-term...
|
| Anthropic is the market leader for advanced AI coding with no
| serious competitor currently very close and they are preparing
| to IPO this year. This year is a transition year. The period
| where every decision would default toward delighting users and
| increasing perceived value is ending. By next year they'll be
| fully on the quarterly Wall Street grind of min/maxing every
| decision to extract the highest possible profit from customers
| at the lowest possible cost.
|
| This path is inevitable and unavoidable, even with the most
| well-intentioned management and employees.
| shevy-java wrote:
| This shows one problem here: a private entity controls Claude
| Code. You can reason that it brings benefits (perhaps), but to me
| it feels wrong to allow my thinking or writing code be controlled
| by a private entity. Perhaps I have been using Linux for too long
| - I may turn into RMS 2.0 (not really though, I like BSD/MIT
| licences too).
| evo_9 wrote:
| Serous question - why do people stick with Clause Code over
| Cursor? With Cursors base subscription I have access to pretty
| much all the Frontier models and can pick and choose. Anthropic
| models haven't been my go-to in months, Gemini and Codex produce
| much better results for me.
| esafak wrote:
| Wouldn't you run out of tokens sooner? That's the big problem.
| flaviolivolsi wrote:
| Because when it's good, it's really good - Cursor doesn't work
| as well for me and also I prefer the TUI experience. If
| anything, the real alternative is OpenCode.
| CharlesW wrote:
| My answer is that I tested both, and Claude Code (~8 months
| ago) was so obviously better than Cursor that I continue to
| happily pay Anthropic $200/month. Based on anecdotes I happen
| to catch, I don't believe Cursor's caught up.
|
| The value isn't just the models. Claude Code is notably better
| than (for example) OpenCode, even when using the same models.
| The plug-in system is also excellent, allowing me to build
| things like https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ that
| everyone can benefit from.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Part of the sauce is not in the model, but in the agent itself.
| And for that matter, I think AMP an incredibly better agent
| that Claude Code. But then, Claude heavily subsidized
| subscription prices are hard to beat.
| SatvikBeri wrote:
| Cursor performs notably worse for me on my medium-sized
| codebase (~500kloc), possibly because they try to aggressively
| conserve context. This is especially true for debugging, Claude
| Code will read dozens of files and do a surprisingly good job
| of finding complex bugs, while Cursor seems to just respond
| with the first hypothesis it comes up with.
|
| That said, Cursor Composer is a lot faster and really nice for
| some tasks that don't require lots of context.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Because I tried all the Cs - Copilot, Cursor, Codex, and Claude
| - and Claude consistently have better results. Codex was
| faster, Copilot had better integration, Cursor sometimes seemed
| smarter, but Claude was the best most reliable consistent
| experience overall, so Claude is what I stuck with - and so did
| the rest of our eng department.
| elzbardico wrote:
| This was really useful; sometimes, by a glance, you'd see Claude
| looking at the wrong files or searching the wrong patterns, and
| would be able to immediately interrupt it. For those of us who
| like to be deeply involved in what Claude is doing, those updates
| were terribly disappointing.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| I've been on the other side of this as a PM, and it's tough
| because you can't always say what you want to, which is roughly:
| This product is used by a lot of users with a range of use cases.
| I understand this change has made it worse for you, and I'm
| genuinely sorry about that, but I'm making decisions with much
| more information than you have and many more stakeholders than
| just you.
|
| > What majority? The change just shipped and the only response it
| got is people complaining.
|
| I'll refer you to the old image of the airplane with red dots on
| it. The people who don't have a problem with it are not
| complaining.
|
| > People explained, repeatedly, that they wanted one specific
| thing: file paths and search patterns inline. Not a firehose of
| debug output.
|
| Same as above. The reality is there are lots of people whose
| ideal case would be lots of different things, and you're seeking
| out the people who feel the same as you. I'm not saying you're
| wrong and these people don't exist, but you have to recognize
| that just because hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of
| people want something from a product that is used by millions
| does not make it the right decision to give that thing to all of
| the users.
|
| > Across multiple GitHub issues opened for this, all comments are
| pretty much saying the same thing: give us back the file paths,
| or at minimum, give us a toggle.
|
| This is a thing that people love to suggest - I want a feature
| but you're telling me other people don't? Fine, just add a
| toggle! Problem solved!
|
| This is not a good solution! Every single toggle you add creates
| more product complexity. More configurations you have to QA when
| you deploy a new feature. Larger codebase. There are cases for a
| toggle, but there is also a cost for adding one. It's very
| frequently the right call by the PM to decline the toggle, even
| if it seems like such an obvious solution to the user.
|
| > The developer's response to that?
|
| > I want to hear folks' feedback on what's missing from verbose
| mode to make it the right approach for your use case.
|
| > Read that again. Thirty people say "revert the change or give
| us a toggle." The answer is "let me make verbose mode work for
| you instead."
|
| Come on - you have to realize that thirty people do not in any
| way comprise a meaningful sample of Claude Code users. The fact
| that thirty people want something is not a compelling case.
|
| I'm a little miffed by this post because I've dealt with folks
| like this, who expect me as a PM to have empathy for what they
| want yet can't even begin to considering having empathy for me or
| the other users of the product.
|
| > Fucking verbose mode.
|
| Don't do this. Don't use profanity and talk to the person on the
| other side of this like they're an idiot because they're not
| doing what you want. It's childish.
|
| You pay $20/month or maybe $100/month or maybe even $200/month.
| None of those amounts entitles you to demand features. You've
| made your suggestion and the people at Anthropic have clearly
| listened but made a different decision. You don't like it? You
| don't have to use the product.
| barnabee wrote:
| I know product managers in particular hate it but, especially
| with professional software, when you gave lots of users you
| have to make things configurable and live with maintaining the
| complexity.
|
| The alternatives are alienating users or dumbing down the
| software, both of which are worse for any serious professional
| product.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| I don't think it's fair to say that product managers hate it.
| There are a lot of product managers and a lot of kinds of
| software. I've worked on complex enterprise software and have
| added enormous amounts of complexity into my products when it
| made sense.
|
| > The alternatives are alienating users or dumbing down the
| software, both of which are worse for any serious
| professional product.
|
| I disagree that this is universally true. Alienating users is
| very frequently the right call. The alienated users never
| feel that way, but it's precisely the job of the PM to
| understand which users they want to build the product for and
| which ones they don't. You have to be fine alienating the
| latter group.
| arjie wrote:
| The histrionic tone is annoying but this is actually a feature
| failure. The utility of seeing what files were being read is I
| could help direct its use if it goes down the wrong pathway. I
| use a monorepo so that's an easy mistake for the software to
| make.
| james_marks wrote:
| Since last Friday it's felt like CC rolled back a year of
| progress. Not sure what to attribute it to, or what this article
| seems to be about but it _felt_ much dumber.
| g-mork wrote:
| Absolutely worse than dumbed down, 4.6 is a mess. Ask it the
| simplest of questions, look away, and come back to 700 parallel
| tool uses.
| https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1r1cfha/is_anyone...
| ergonaught wrote:
| If you've got a solution to the problem of bad decisions made by
| people who shouldn't be empowered to make them in the first
| place, you'll solve more than Claude Code.
| madrox wrote:
| I have noticed, if I hit my session quota before it resets, that
| Claude gets "sleepy" for a day or so afterward. It's demonstrably
| worse at tasks...especially complex ones. My cofounder and I have
| both noticed this.
|
| Our theory is that Claude gets limited if you meet some threshold
| of power usage.
| peacebeard wrote:
| My biggest beef in recent versions is the automatic use of
| generic built in skills. I hate it when I ask a simple question
| and it says "OK! Time to use the RESEARCHING_CRAZY_PROBLEM skill!
| I'll kickstart the 20 step process!" when before it would just
| answer the question.
|
| You can control this behavior, so it's not a dealbreaker. But it
| shows a sort of optimism that skills make everything better. My
| experience is that skills are only useful for specific workflows,
| not as a way to broadly or generally enhance the LLM.
| bayindirh wrote:
| It's pretty interesting to watch AI companies start to squeeze
| their users as the constraints (financial, technical, capacity-
| wise) start to squeeze the companies.
|
| Ads in ChatGPT. Removing features from Claude Code. I think we're
| just beginning to face the music. It's also funny that how Google
| "invented" ad injection in replies with real-time auction
| capabilities, yet OpenAI would be the first implementer of it.
| It's similar to how transformers played out.
|
| For me, that's another "popcorn time". I don't use any of these
| to any capacity, except Gemini, which I seldom use to ask stuff
| when deep diving in web doesn't give any meaningful results. The
| last question I asked managed to return only one (but
| interestingly correct) reference, which I followed and continued
| my research from there.
| viraptor wrote:
| I don't get why people cling to the Claude Code abusive
| relationship. It's got so many issues, it's getting worse, and
| it's clear that there's no plan to make it open for patching.
|
| Meanwhile OpenCode is right there. (despite Anthropic efforts,
| you can still use it with a subscription) And you can tweak it
| any way you want...
| thisisit wrote:
| My last experience with Claude support was a fun merry go round.
|
| I had used a Visa card to buy monthly Pro subscription. One day I
| ran out of credits so I go to buy extra credit. But my card is
| declined. I recheck my card limit and try again. Still declined.
|
| To test the card I try extending the Pro subscription. It works.
| That's when I notice that my card has a security feature called
| "Secure by Visa". To complete transaction I need to submit OTP on
| a Visa page. I am redirected to this page while buying Pro
| subscription but not when trying to buy extra usage.
|
| I open a ticket and mention all the details to Claude support.
| Even though I give them the full run down of the issue, they say
| "We have no way of knowing why your card was declined. You have
| to check with your bank".
|
| Later I get hold of a Mastercard with similar OTP protection. It
| is called Mastercard Securecode. The OTP triggers on both
| subscription and extra usage page.
|
| I share this finding with support as well. But the response is
| same - "We checked with our engineering team and we have no way
| of knowing why the other Visa card was declined. You have to
| check with your bank".
|
| I just gave up trying to buy extra usage. So, I am not really
| surprised if they keep making the product worse.
| encom wrote:
| I guarantee you talked to a chat bot. There are no human
| support agents anywhere anymore.
| polski-g wrote:
| Its true. They have no idea why your bank was declining the
| charge, only that it was declined.
| chickensong wrote:
| For a general tool that has such a broad user base, the output
| should be configurable. There's no way a single config, even with
| verbose mode, will satisfy everyone.
|
| Set minimal defaults to keep output clean, but let users pick and
| choose items to output across several levels of verbosity,
| similar to tcpdump, Ansible, etc. (-v to -vvvvv).
|
| I know businesses are obsessed with providing Apple-like
| "experiences", where the product is so refined there's just "the
| one way" to magically do things, but that's not going to work for
| a coding agent. It needs to be a unix-like experience, where the
| app can be customized to fit your bespoke workflow, and opening
| the man page does critical damage unless you're a wizard.
|
| LLMs are already a magic box, which upsets many people. It'll be
| a shame if Anthropic alienates their core fan base of SWEs by
| making things more magical.
| brundolf wrote:
| What a weird hill to die on
| hungryhobbit wrote:
| And also a complete PR fail. This is damaging their brand with
| devs for no meaningful benefit.
| hungryhobbit wrote:
| Everyone, file your own ticket (check the box saying you searched
| for existing tickets anyway)!
|
| After the Anthropic PMs have to delete their hundredth ticket
| about this issue, they will feel the need to fix it ... if only
| to stop the ticket deluge!
| choldstare wrote:
| not getting dumbed down, ai is getting smarter than you at a
| speed faster than you can keep up or understand, have to abstract
| things and simplify so you can stay connected.
| stillpointlab wrote:
| I'm old, so I remember when Skyrim came out. At the time, people
| were howling about how "dumbed down" the RPG had become compared
| to previous versions. They had simplified so many systems. Seemed
| to work out for them overall.
|
| I understand the article writers frustration. He liked a thing
| about a product he uses and they changed the product. He is
| feeling angry and he is expressing that anger and others are
| sharing in that.
|
| And I'm part of another group of people. I would notice the files
| being searched without too much interest. Since I pay a monthly
| rate, I don't care about optimizing tokens. I only care about the
| quality of the final output.
|
| I think the larger issue is that programmers are feeling like we
| are losing control. At first we're like, I'll let it auto-
| complete but no more. Then it was, I'll let it scaffold a project
| but not more. Each step we are ceding ground. It is strange to
| watch someone finally break on "They removed the names of the
| files the agent was operating on". Of all of the lost points of
| control this one seems so trivial. But every camels back has a
| breaking point and we can't judge the straw that does it.
| root_axis wrote:
| If you're paying a monthly rate you still have to optimize for
| tokens, otherwise you'll be rate limited.
| kingkawn wrote:
| And not just by the day! The weekly limits are the biggest
| mistake imaginable for maintaining user engagement on a
| project.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Skyrim is one of the most over-rated games of all time. Dark
| Messiah Might and Magic did everything except music and
| exploration/scale better, and I mean a LOT better. It's from
| 2006.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p3zj0YKKYE
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeRUHzYJwNE
| joshstrange wrote:
| > Skyrim is one of the most over-rated games of all time.
|
| Those are fightin' words as someone who has dumped more hours
| than I can count into Skyrim but...
|
| I had never heard of this game, but it has a lot going for it
| (source engine) and I watched a little of the gameplay you
| linked and I'm intrigued. I'm probably gonna pick this up for
| the steam deck.
|
| A friend recommended the Might and Magic games to me a long
| time ago and I bought them off GoG, but wasn't a fan of the
| gameplay and just couldn't get hooked. This looks very
| different from what I remember (probably because this is a
| very different game from the earlier ones).
|
| Thank you for mentioning this game!
| bakugo wrote:
| > Seemed to work out for them overall.
|
| I'm guessing you're not aware of how their newest game,
| Starfield, was received. In the long term, that direction did
| not work out for them at all.
| Robdel12 wrote:
| I'm a heavy Claude code user and it's pretty clear they're
| starting to bend under their vibe coding. Each Claude code update
| breaks a ton of stuff, has perf issues, etc.
|
| And then this. They want to own your dev workflow and for some
| reason believe Claude code is special enough to be closed source.
| The react TUI is kinda a nightmare to deal with I bet.
|
| I will say, very happy with the improvements made to Codex 5.3.
| I've been spending A LOT more time with codex and the entire
| agent toolchain is OSS.
|
| Not sure what anthropic's plan is, but I haven't been a fan of
| their moves in the past month and a half.
| binsquare wrote:
| Same, codex 5.3 was able to solve a problem that I personally
| was stuck on even with help from Claude for the last 2 weeks.
| viking123 wrote:
| I switched to Codex 5.3 too, it's cheaper also anyway and as
| dumb as it sounds, Scam Altman is actually the less annoying
| CEO compared to Amodei which is kind of an achievement. Amodei
| really looking more and more like some huckster giving these
| idiotic predictions to the press.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Scam Altman is Epstein tier:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz6lq6x2gd9o
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/technology/sam-altman-
| sis...
| amai wrote:
| OpenAI's president is a Trump mega-donor
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46771231
| noosphr wrote:
| >Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the
| good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be
| better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent
| moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes
| sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but
| those who torment us for our own good will torment us
| without end for they do so with the approval of their own
| conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at
| the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very
| kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured"
| against one's will and cured of states which we may not
| regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have
| not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will;
| to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic
| animals.
|
| Sam wants money. Dario wants to be your dad.
|
| I'm going with Sam.
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| Yeah, I can feel it too, it _mostly_ works but.. feels like it
| needs a rewrite.
|
| for example Amp "feels" much better. Also like in Amp how I can
| just send the message whenever and it doesn't get queued
|
| * I know, lots of "feels" in there..
| oxag3n wrote:
| So much for human replacement.
|
| Map it to a workplace:
|
| - Hey Joe, why did you stop adding code diff to your review
| requests?
|
| - Most reviewers find it simpler. You can always run tcpdump on
| our shared drive to see what exactly was changed.
|
| - I'm the only one reviewing your code in this company...
| qwertox wrote:
| It was because of the (back then) new Haiku model, maybe 3.5,
| that i decided to subscribe yearly. more than good enough for a
| language layer to interact with the mcp server. Now I'm even
| hesitant to use it.
| runjake wrote:
| _> "Read 3 files." Which files?_
|
| _> "Searched for 1 pattern."_
|
| Hit Ctrl-o like it mentions right there, and Claude Code will
| show you. Or RTFM and adjust Output Styles[1]. If you don't like
| these things, you can change them.
|
| Like it or not, agentic coding is going mainstream and so they
| are going to tailor the default settings toward that wider
| mainstream audience.
|
| 1. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles
| muyuu wrote:
| Perhaps some power user of Claude Code can enlighten me here, but
| why not just using OpenCode? I admit I've only briefly tried
| Claude Code, so perhaps there are unique features there stopping
| the switch, or some other form of lock-in.
| TJTorola wrote:
| Anthropic is actively blocking calls from anything but claude
| code for it's claude plans. At this point you either need to be
| taking part in the cat and mouse game to make that plan work
| with opencode or you need to be paying the much more expensive
| API prices.
| muyuu wrote:
| i see
|
| i guess they were blocking OpenCode for a reason
|
| this will put people to the test that use mainly Anthropic,
| to have a second look at the results from other models
| anupamchugh wrote:
| We're having a UI argument about a workflow problem.
|
| We treat a stateless session like a colleague, then get upset
| when it forgets our preferences. Anthropic simplified the output
| because power users aren't the growth vector. This shouldn't
| surprise anyone.
|
| The fix isn't verbose mode. It's a markdown file the model reads
| on startup -- which files matter, which patterns to follow, what
| "good" looks like. The model becomes as opinionated as your
| instructions. The UI becomes irrelevant.
|
| The model is a runtime. Your workflow is the program. Arguing
| about log verbosity is a distraction.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| can't stand not seeing what exactly an ai agent is doing on my
| machine
| searls wrote:
| LOL, no, dumbing down was when I paid two months of subscription
| with the model literally struggling to write basic functions.
| Something Anthropic eventually acknowledged but offered no
| refunds for. https://ilikekillnerds.com/2025/09/09/anthropic-
| finally-admi...
|
| I care A LOT about the details, and I couldn't care less that
| they're cleaning up terminal output like this.
| qwertox wrote:
| I absolutely love reading thoughts and see the commands it uses.
| It teaches me new stuff, and I think this is what young people
| need: be able to know WHAT it is doing and WHY it is doing it.
| And have the ability to discuss with another agent about what the
| agent and me are trying to archive, and we can ask them questions
| we have without disturbing the flow, but seeing the live output.
|
| Regarding the thoughts: it also allows me to detect problematic
| paths it takes, like when it can't find a file.
|
| For example today I was working on a project that depends on
| another project, managed by another agent. While refactoring my
| code it noticed that it needs to see what this command is which
| it is invoking, so it even went so far as to search through vs
| code's user data to find the recent files history if it can find
| out more about that command... I stopped it and told it that if
| it has problems, it should tell me. It explained it can't find
| that file, i gave it the paths and tokens were saved. Note that
| in that session I was manually approving all commands, but then
| rejected the one in the data dir.
|
| Why dumb it down?
| vincentjiang wrote:
| It's nerfed to a point that it feels more like lawyer than a
| coding assistant now. We were arguing about an 3rd party API ToU
| for 1 hour last night. VSC Copilot executed it within 1 minute.
| svnt wrote:
| They don't seem to realize that doing vibe coding requires enough
| information to get the vibes.
|
| There are no vibes in "I am looking at files and searching for
| things" so I have zero weight to assign to your decision quality
| up until the point where it tells me the evals passed at 100%.
|
| Your agent is not good enough. I trust it like I trust a toddler
| not to fall into a swimming pool. It's not trying to, but enough
| time around the pool and it is going to happen, so I am watching
| the whole time, and I might even let it fall in if I think it can
| get itself out.
| nektro wrote:
| the definition of vibe coding is that you never check what it's
| doing, you only check its output; eg the actual website/feature
| you're having it build.
| tzury wrote:
| Here's my honest take on this:
|
| You're mass-producing outrage out of a UX disagreement about
| default verbosity levels in a CLI tool.
|
| Let's walk through what actually happened: a team shipped a
| change that collapsed file paths into summary lines by default.
| Some users didn't like it. They opened issues. The developers
| engaged, explained their reasoning, and started iterating on
| verbose mode to find a middle ground. That's called a normal
| software development feedback loop.
|
| Now let's walk through what you turned it into: a persecution
| narrative complete with profanity, sarcasm, a Super Bowl ad
| callback, and the implication that Anthropic is "hiding what it's
| doing with your codebase" -- as if there's malice behind a
| display preference change.
|
| A few specific points:
|
| The "what majority?" line is nonsense. GitHub issues are a self-
| selecting sample of people with complaints. The users who found
| it cleaner didn't open an issue titled "thanks, this is fine."
| That's how feedback channels work everywhere. You know this.
|
| "Pinning to 2.1.19" is your right. Software gives you version
| control. Use it. That's not the dramatic stand you think it is.
|
| The developers responding with "help us understand what verbose
| mode is missing" is them trying to solve the problem without a
| full revert. You can disagree with the approach, but framing
| genuine engagement as contempt is dishonest.
|
| A config toggle might be the right answer. It might ship next
| week. But the entitlement on display here isn't "give us a
| toggle" -- it's "give us a toggle _now_ , exactly as we
| specified, and if you try any other approach first, you're
| disrespecting us." That's not feedback. That's a tantrum dressed
| up as advocacy.
|
| You're paying $200/month for a tool that is under active
| development, with developers who are visibly responding to issues
| within days. If that feels like disrespect to you, you have a
| calibration problem.
|
| With kind regards, Opus 4.6
| nikcub wrote:
| claude code is big enough now that it really needs a preview /
| beta release channel where features like this can be tested
| against a smaller audience before being pushed out.
|
| as a regular and long-term user, it's frequently jarring being
| pushed new changes / bugs in what has become a critical tool.
|
| surprised their enterprise clients haven't raised this
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| Give me my local models so I can write a locally handcrafted tool
| that does what I want, goddamit.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Hey... I have been experimenting with Claude for a few days, and
| am not thrilled with it compared to web chatbots. I suspect this
| is partly me being new and unskilled with it, but this is a
| general summary.
|
| ChatGPT or Gemini: I ask it what I wish to do, and show it the
| relevant code. It gives me a often-correct answer, and I paste it
| into my program.
|
| Claude: I do the same, and it spends a lot of time thinking. When
| I check the window for the result, it's stalled with a
| question... asking to access a project or file that has nothing
| to do with the problem, and I didn't ask it to look for. Repeat
| several times until it solves the problem, or I give up with the
| questions.
| syspec wrote:
| RooCode is a better version of ClaudeCode than ClaudeCode.
|
| No affiliation, just a fan.
| tryauuum wrote:
| can't you write some tool to display the files being read with
| the inotify system call?
|
| Usually I hate programming but it feels like a nice little tool
| to create
| singularfutur wrote:
| Anthropic is optimizing for enterprise contracts, not hacker
| cred. This is what happens when you take VC money and need to
| sell to Fortune 500s. The "dumbing down" is just the product
| maturing beyond the early adopter phase.
| smcleod wrote:
| > That's it. "Read 3 files." Which files? Doesn't matter.
|
| It doesn't say "Read 3 files." though - it says "Read 3 files
| (ctrl+o to expand)" and you press ctrl+o and it expands the
| output to give you the detail.
|
| It's a really useful feature to increase the signal to noise
| ratio where it's usually safe to do so.
|
| I suspect the author simply needs to enable verbose mode output.
| pkilgore wrote:
| This is directly addressed in the article.
| aipatselarom wrote:
| Exact same thing with Codex from 5.2 to 5.3.
|
| There's no conspiracy, though, other than more tokens consumed =
| more money, and they want that.
| myko wrote:
| I really hate this change. I had just given a demo about how
| Claude Code helped me learn some things by showing exactly what
| it was doing, and now it doesn't do that any more. So
| frustrating.
| cess11 wrote:
| This "intervening" people are mentioning in these issues, does it
| stop the execution on the backend or just cause the client to
| stop listening to it?
| supermatt wrote:
| And they hate that people are using different agents (like
| opencode) with their subscription - to the extent that they have
| actively been trying to block it.
|
| With stupidity like this what do they expect? It's only a matter
| of time before people jump ship entirely.
| testfrequency wrote:
| I agree the quality of Claude Code recent has felt poor and
| frustrating.
|
| I've been persistently dealing with the agent running in circles
| on itself when trying to fix bugs, not following directions fully
| and choosing to only accomplish partial requests, failing to
| compact and halting a session, and ignoring its MCP tooling and
| doing stupid things like writing cruddy python and osascripts
| unnecessarily.
|
| I've been really curious about codex recently, but I'm so deep
| into Claude Code with multiple skills, agents, MCPs, and a skill
| router though.
|
| Can anyone recommend an easy migration path to codex as a first
| time codex user from Claude code?
| mnewme wrote:
| Just use pi, love it!
| mrinterweb wrote:
| I thought this was going to talk about a nerfed Opus 4.6
| experience. I believe I experienced one of those yesterday. I
| usually have multiple active claude code sessions, using Opus
| 4.6, running. The other sessions were great, but one session
| really felt off. It just felt much more dumbed down than what I
| was used to. I accidentally gave that session a "good" feedback,
| which my inner conspiracy theorist immediately jumps to a
| conclusion that I just helped validate a hamstrung model in some
| A/B test.
| pkilgore wrote:
| https://www.conductor.build/
| jgb1984 wrote:
| I like claude models, but crush and opencode are miles ahead of
| claude code. It's a pity anthropic forces us to use inferior
| tooling (I'm on a "team" plan from work). I can use an API key
| instead but then I'll blow past 25$ in an hour.
| bcherny wrote:
| Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. I wanted to take a sec
| to explain the context for this change.
|
| One of the hard things about building a product on an LLM is that
| the model frequently changes underneath you. Since we introduced
| Claude Code almost a year ago, Claude has gotten more
| intelligent, it runs for longer periods of time, and it is able
| to more agentically use more tools. This is one of the magical
| things about building on models, and also one of the things that
| makes it very hard. There's always a feeling that the model is
| outpacing what any given product is able to offer (ie. product
| overhang). We try very hard to keep up, and to deliver a UX that
| lets people experience the model in a way that is raw and low
| level, and maximally useful at the same time.
|
| In particular, as agent trajectories get longer, the average
| conversation has more and more tool calls. When we released
| Claude Code, Sonnet 3.5 was able to run unattended for less than
| 30 seconds at a time before going off the rails; now, Opus 4.6
| 1-shots much of my code, often running for minutes, hours, and
| days at a time.
|
| The amount of output this generates can quickly become
| overwhelming in a terminal, and is something we hear often from
| users. Terminals give us relatively few pixels to play with; they
| have a single font size; colors are not uniformly supported; in
| some terminal emulators, rendering is extremely slow. We want to
| make sure every user has a good experience, no matter what
| terminal they are using. This is important to us, because we want
| Claude Code to work everywhere, on any terminal, any OS, any
| environment.
|
| Users give the model a prompt, and don't want to drown in a sea
| of log output in order to pick out what matters: specific tool
| calls, file edits, and so on, depending on the use case. From a
| design POV, this is a balance: we want to show you the most
| relevant information, while giving you a way to see more details
| when useful (ie. progressive disclosure). Over time, as the model
| continues to get more capable -- so trajectories become more
| correct on average -- and as conversations become even longer, we
| need to manage the amount of information we present in the
| default view to keep it from feeling overwhelming.
|
| When we started Claude Code, it was just a few of us using it.
| Now, a large number of engineers rely on Claude Code to get their
| work done every day. We can no longer design for ourselves, and
| we rely heavily on community feedback to co-design the right
| experience. We cannot build the right things without that
| feedback. Yoshi rightly called out that often this iteration
| happens in the open. In this case in particular, we approached it
| intentionally, and dogfooded it internally for over a month to
| get the UX just right before releasing it; this resulted in an
| experience that most users preferred.
|
| But we missed the mark for a subset of our users. To improve it,
| I went back and forth in the issue to understand what issues
| people were hitting with the new design, and shipped multiple
| rounds of changes to arrive at a good UX. We've built in the open
| in this way before, eg. when we iterated on the spinner UX, the
| todos tool UX, and for many other areas. We always want to hear
| from users so that we can make the product better.
|
| The specific remaining issue Yoshi called out is reasonable. PR
| incoming in the next release to improve subagent output (I should
| have responded to the issue earlier, that's my miss).
|
| Yoshi and others -- please keep the feedback coming. We want to
| hear it, and we genuinely want to improve the product in a way
| that gives great defaults for the majority of users, while being
| extremely hackable and customizable for everyone else.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| In what terminals is rendering slow? I really think GPU
| acceleration for terminals (as seen in Ghostty) is silly. It's
| a terminal.
|
| Edit: I can't post anymore today apparently because of dang. If
| you post a comment about a bad terminal at least tell us about
| the rendering issues.
| latchkey wrote:
| As someone who's business is run through a terminal, not
| everyone uses ghostty, even though they should. Remember,
| that they don't have a windows version.
| bcherny wrote:
| VSCode (xterm.js) is one of the worst, but there's a large
| long tail of slow terminals out there.
| vikaveri wrote:
| Not really using VS Code terminal anymore, just Ubuntu
| terminal but the biggest problem I have is that at some
| point Claude just eats up all memory and session crashes. I
| know it's not really Claude's fault but damn it's annoying.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Boris! Unrelated but thank you and the Anthropic team for
| Claude code. It's awesome. I use it every day. No complaints.
| You all just keep shipping useful little UX things all the
| time. It must be because it's being dogfooded internally. Kudos
| again to the team!
| latchkey wrote:
| This is an insanely good response. History, backstory, we
| screwed up, what we're doing to fix it. Keep up the great work!
| rmujica wrote:
| it reads like AI generated or at least AI assisted... those
| -- don't fool me!
| bcherny wrote:
| fwiw, I wrote it 100% by hand. Maybe I talk to Claude too
| much..
| ares623 wrote:
| would've been better to post the prompt directly IMO
| gchamonlive wrote:
| So in a nutshell Claude becoming smarter means that logic that
| once resided in the agent is being moved to the model?
|
| If that's the case, it's important to asses wether it'll be
| consistent when operating on a higher level, less dependent on
| the software layer that governs the agent. Otherwise it'll risk
| Claude also becoming more erratic.
| sdoering wrote:
| There are so many config options. Most I still need to truly
| deeply understand.
|
| But this one isn't? I'd call myself a professional. I use with
| tons of files across a wide range of projects and types of
| work.
|
| To me file paths were an important aspect of understanding
| context of the work and of the context CC was gaining.
|
| Now? It feels like running on a foggy street, never sure when
| the corner will come and I'll hit a fence or house.
|
| Why not introduce a toggle? I'd happily add that to my
| alisases.
|
| Edit: I forgot. I don't need better subagent output. Or even
| less output whrn watching thinking traces. I am happy to have
| full verbosity. There are cases where it's an important aspect.
| bcherny wrote:
| You want verbose mode for this -- we evolved it to do exactly
| what you're asking for: verbose file reads, without seeing
| thinking traces, hook output, or (after tomorrow's release)
| full subagent output.
|
| More details here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982177
| steinnes wrote:
| I can't count how many times I benefitted from seeing the files
| Claude was reading, to understand how I could interrupt and
| give it a little more context... saving thousands of tokens and
| sparing the context window. I must be in the minority of users
| who preferred seeing the actual files. I love claude code, but
| some of the recent updates seem like they're making it harder
| for me to see what's happening.. I agree with the author that
| verbose mode isn't the answer. Seems to me this should be
| configurable
| bcherny wrote:
| I think folks might be crossing wires a bit. To make it so
| you can see full file paths, we repurposed verbose mode to
| enable the old explicit file output, while hiding more
| details behind ctrl+o. In effect, we've evolved verbose mode
| to be multi-state, so that it lets you toggle back to the old
| behavior while giving you a way to see even more verbose
| output, while still defaulting everyone else to the condensed
| view. I hope this solves everyones' needs, while also
| avoiding overly-specific settings (we wanted to reuse verbose
| mode for this so it is forwards-compatible going fwd).
|
| To try it: /config > verbose, or --verbose.
|
| Please keep the feedback coming. If there is anything else we
| can do to adjust verbose mode to do what you want, I'd love
| to hear.
| noodletheworld wrote:
| How do you respond to the comment that; given the log
| trace:
|
| "Did something 2 times"
|
| That may as well not be shown at all in default mode?
|
| What useful information is imparted by "Read 4 files"?
|
| You have two issues here:
|
| 1) making verbose mode better. Sure.
|
| 2) logging useless information in default.
|
| If you're not imparting any useful information, claude may
| as well just show a spinner.
| bcherny wrote:
| It's a balance -- we don't want to hide everything away,
| so you have an understanding of what the model is doing.
| I agree that with future models, as intelligence and
| trust increase, we may be able to hide more, but I don't
| think we're there yet.
| extr wrote:
| FWIW I mentioned this in the thread (I am the guy in the
| big GH issue who actually used verbose mode and gave
| specific likes/dislikes), but I find it frustrating that
| ctrl+o still seems to truncate at strange boundaries. I am
| looking at an open CC session right now with verbose mode
| enabled - works pretty well and I'm glad you're fixing the
| subagent thing. But when I hit ctrl+o, I only see more
| detailed output for the last 4 messages, with the rest
| hidden behind ctrl+e.
|
| It's not an easy UI problem to solve in all cases since
| behavior in CC can be so flexible, compaction, forking,
| etc. But it would be great if it was simply consistent
| (ctrl+o shows last N where N is like, 50, or 100), with
| ctrl+e revealing the rest.
| bcherny wrote:
| Yes totally. ctrl+o used to show all messages, but this
| is one of the tricky things about building in a terminal:
| because many terminals are quite slow, it is hard to
| render a large amount of output at once without causing
| tearing/stutter.
|
| That said, we recently rewrote our renderer to make it
| much more efficient, so we can bump up the default a bit.
| Let me see what it feels like to show the last 10-20
| messages -- fix incoming.
| verelo wrote:
| Not only what files, but what part of the files. Seeing 1-6
| lines of a file that's being read is extremely frustrating,
| the UX of Claude code is average at best. Cursor on the other
| hand is slow and memory intensive, but at least I can really
| get a sense of what's going on and how I can work with it
| better.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| > saving thousands of tokens and sparing the context window
|
| shhh don't say that, they will never fix it if means you use
| less tokens.
| lombasihir wrote:
| ok claude
| Aeolun wrote:
| > this resulted in an experience that most users preferred
|
| I just find that very hard to believe. Does anyone actually do
| anything with the output now? Or are they just crossing their
| fingers and hoping for the best?
| bcherny wrote:
| Have you tried verbose mode? /config > verbose. It should do
| exactly what you are looking for now, without extraneous
| thinking/subagent/hook output. We hear the feedback!
| kshri24 wrote:
| Hilarious! Anthropic can just vibe code the boolean flag in.
| ares623 wrote:
| I think they already do? Which is commendable tbh. But I keep
| my popcorn ready and warm for the day when their vibe coding
| can't keep up with the codebase. Of course they will try their
| best to hide that fact for as long as possible.
| markoa wrote:
| Like any CLI Claude Code should follow decades old tradition of
| providing configurable verbosity levels, like tcpdump's -v to
| -vvvvv to accommodate varying usage contexts.
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| this has got to be one of the worst comments sections i've ever
| seen on HN... people shouting past each other... into the void...
| neom wrote:
| If you've not, I recommend giving Opus[1m] + teams a shot,
| warning it's hella expensive but holy cow... what a tool.
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