[HN Gopher] Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th
        
       Author : lsdmtme
       Score  : 452 points
       Date   : 2026-04-12 05:45 UTC (17 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | Tarcroi wrote:
       | This coincides with Anthropic's peak-hour announcement (March
       | 26th). Could the throttling be partly a response to
       | infrastructure load that was itself inflated by the TTL
       | regression?
        
         | HauntingPin wrote:
         | It would be too fucking funny if this were the case. They're
         | vibe coding their infrastructure and they vibe coded their
         | response to the increased load.
        
           | KronisLV wrote:
           | You'd think they would have dashboards for all of this stuff,
           | to easily notice any change in metrics and be able to track
           | down which release was responsible for it.
        
             | HauntingPin wrote:
             | They probably do, then they pipe it into a bunch of Claude
             | subagents and then you get the current mess.
        
       | sscaryterry wrote:
       | Anthropic is leaving so much evidence around... proving damages
       | and a pattern is becoming trivial
        
       | cassianoleal wrote:
       | The title should be changed. It makes it look like they upped the
       | TTL from 1 h to 5 months.
       | 
       | The SI symbol for minutes is "min", not "M".
       | 
       | A compromise would be to use the OP notation "m".
        
         | PontifexMinimus wrote:
         | I agree. My first reaction was "what the fuck's an 'M'?"
        
           | isoprophlex wrote:
           | Five million. No matter the unit, just, 5.000.000
        
         | gib444 wrote:
         | I love the title change that totally hides the scale of the
         | issue. Good job poster/mods.
        
       | ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
       | If youre reading this claude, people are willing to pay extra if
       | you want to make more money, just please stop doing this
       | undermining, it devreases the trust of your platform to something
       | that cannot be relied on
        
         | andai wrote:
         | It _looks_ like selling reputation to save money.
         | 
         | But more likely they are constrained on GPUs and can't get them
         | fast enough.
         | 
         | (My guess having no understanding of how this industry actually
         | works.)
        
       | disillusioned wrote:
       | It's also routinely failing the car wash question across all
       | models now, which wasn't the case a month ago. :-/
       | 
       | Seeing some things about how the effort selector isn't working as
       | intended necessarily and the model is regressing in other ways:
       | over-emphasizing how "difficult" a problem is to solve and
       | choosing to avoid it because of the "time" it would take, but
       | quoted in human effort, or suggesting the "easier" path forward
       | even if it's a hack or kludge-filled solution.
        
         | _blk wrote:
         | Awesome, I didn't know about the car wash question.
         | 
         | Totally true, also tokens seem to burn through much faster.
         | More parallelism could explain some of it but where I could
         | work on 3-5 projects at once on the max plan a month ago, I
         | can't even get one to completion now on the same Opus model
         | before the 5h session locks me up..
        
         | andai wrote:
         | > over-emphasizing how "difficult" a problem is to solve and
         | choosing to avoid it because of the "time" it would take
         | 
         | I heard a while back Claude refused to attempt a task for days,
         | saying it would take weeks of work. Eventually the user
         | convinced it to try, and it one-shotted it in 30 seconds.
        
           | apetresc wrote:
           | For _days_? Someone spent _days_ trying to convince Claude to
           | do something?
        
             | layer8 wrote:
             | If you asked yesterday, and asked again today, then you
             | asked for days. OP might be trying to express that it
             | wasn't just a temporary fluke.
        
           | empath75 wrote:
           | I have noticed refusals as context windows grow.
        
         | colechristensen wrote:
         | >"idgaf about risk you coward, waste some time just do it and
         | stop bitching"
         | 
         | The above was a successful prompt to get Claude to stop whining
         | about effort, difficulty, and time.
         | 
         | Unfortunately abusive language well placed is an effective LLM
         | motivator.
        
         | tetraodonpuffer wrote:
         | it does feel something in the hidden system prompt makes it try
         | less hard, so many times in the past several weeks I have found
         | divergences with what was in plan and looking back at the jsonl
         | it's always some variant of "doing it this way would be too
         | complicated, let me take this hardcoded way out". If asked to
         | review the change, it will find it, and it will say also yeah I
         | agree prompt said not to do this, but I did anyways, not sure
         | why.
         | 
         | As others have said, anthropic is between a rock and a hard
         | place, you can't scale compute as quickly, and the influx of
         | new accounts has definitely made things tough for them: I think
         | all the "how is claude this session 1/2/3/4" questions that
         | keep coming up must be part of some a/b on just how far to
         | quantize / lower thinking while still maintaining user
         | satisfaction.
        
         | themafia wrote:
         | Step 1: Sell at a loss.
         | 
         | Step 2: Panic.
         | 
         | Step 3: Destroy product.
        
       | coffinbirth wrote:
       | Am I the only one who sees striking parallels between being a
       | Claude Code customer and Cuckoldry (as in biology)?
       | 
       | I mean, you are investing a lot (infrastructure and capital) into
       | something that is essentially not yours. You claim credit for the
       | _offspring_ (the solution) simply because it resides in your
       | workspace. You accept _foreign_ code to make your project appear
       | more successful and populated than you could manage alone. Your
       | over-reliance on a _surrogate_ for the heavy lifting leads to the
       | loss of your own _survival_ skills (coding and debugging). Last
       | but not least, you handle the grunt work of _territory defense_
       | (clients and environments) while the AI performs the actual act
       | of creation (Displaced Agency).
        
         | the_gipsy wrote:
         | What you're looking for is "vendor lock-in".
        
         | PunchyHamster wrote:
         | No, but it's very funny, I'm gonna call people that offshore
         | their thinking to LLM "AI cucks" now
        
       | davidkuennen wrote:
       | On slightly off topic note: Codex is absolutely fantastic right
       | now. I'm constantly in awe since switching from Claude a week
       | ago.
        
         | lifty wrote:
         | I made this switch months ago, ChatGPT 5.4 being a smarter
         | model, but I've had subjective feelings of degradation even on
         | 5.4 lately. There's a lot of growth in usage right now so not
         | sure what kind of optimizations their doing at both companies
        
           | CamperBob2 wrote:
           | Agreed. Watching the intermediate "Thinking about X ... Now
           | I'll do Y" text on GPT 5.4 lately has been like watching a
           | hypothetical smart drug wear off.
           | 
           | All of the major models have been getting worse lately, not
           | just Opus.
        
         | vidarh wrote:
         | Codex has been good quality wise, but I hit limits on the Codex
         | team subscription so quickly it's almost more hassle that it is
         | worth.
        
         | lores wrote:
         | I would switch to Codex, but Altman is such a naked sociopath
         | and OpenAI so devoid of ethical business practices that I can't
         | in good conscience. I'm not under any illusion that Anthropic
         | is ethical, but it is so far a step up from OpenAI.
        
           | nh2 wrote:
           | Cannot you use Codex (which is open source, unlike Claude
           | Code) with Claude, even via Amazon Bedrock?
        
             | embedding-shape wrote:
             | Codex with Anthrophic's models is not as good as using the
             | models with the harness it was trained in mine for. Same
             | goes vice-versa too.
        
           | bob1029 wrote:
           | I'm with you on the ethical part, but everything is a
           | spectrum. All the AI leadership are some shade of evil.
           | There's no way the product would be effective if they
           | weren't. I don't like that Sam Altman is a lunatic, but
           | frankly they all are. I also recognize that these are massive
           | companies filled with non shitty engineers who are actually
           | responsible for a lot of the magic. Conflating one charlatan
           | with the rest of it is a tragedy of nuance.
        
             | subscribed wrote:
             | Yeah, but there's distinct difference between "risks their
             | company because they refuse to help with killing little
             | kids" and "happily helping with genocide".
             | 
             | One of these is better.
        
           | groundzeros2015 wrote:
           | Enemy centered decision making
        
         | toenail wrote:
         | I have also switched from claude to codex a few weeks ago.
         | After deciding to let agents only do focused work I needed less
         | context, and the work was easier to review. Then I realized
         | codex can deliver the same quality, and it's paid through my
         | subscription instead of per token.
        
         | onion2k wrote:
         | I use Codex at home and Opus at work. They're both brilliant.
        
         | yukIttEft wrote:
         | I'm currently "working" on a toy 3d Vulkan Physx thingy. It has
         | a simple raycast vehicle and I'm trying to replace it with the
         | PhysX5 built in one (https://nvidia-
         | omniverse.github.io/PhysX/physx/5.6.1/docs/Ve...)
         | 
         | I point it to example snippets and webdocumentation but the
         | code it gens won't work at all, not even close
         | 
         | Opus4.6 is a tiny bit less wrong than Codex 5.4 xhigh, but
         | still pretty useless.
         | 
         | So, after reading all the success stories here and everywhere,
         | I'm wondering if I'm holding it wrong or if it just can't solve
         | everything yet.
        
           | lukan wrote:
           | " or if it just can't solve everything yet."
           | 
           | Obviously it cannot. But if you give the AI enough hints,
           | clear spec, clear documentation and remove all distracting
           | information, it can solve most problems.
        
             | shdh wrote:
             | Most simple problems with plenty of prior art, sure
        
           | seba_dos1 wrote:
           | It works somewhat well with trivial things. That's where most
           | of these success stories are coming from.
        
             | shdh wrote:
             | Exactly this, the SNR is polluted by this anecdata because
             | someone was able to implement a CRUD backend they couldn't
             | before
        
           | wg0 wrote:
           | Most of the folks are building CRUD apps with AI and that
           | works fine.
           | 
           | What you're doing is more specialized and these models are
           | useless there. It's not intelligence.
           | 
           | Another NFT/Crypto era is upon us so no you're not holding it
           | wrong.
        
             | MattRix wrote:
             | This is pretty wrong. Anyone who thinks this stuff is
             | similar to NFTs and crypto hasn't been paying attention.
        
               | 73738488484 wrote:
               | Indeed this time it's different
        
           | layer8 wrote:
           | My impression is that it always comes down to how well what
           | you're trying to do pattern-matches the training set.
        
             | embedding-shape wrote:
             | When it comes to agents like codex and CC it seems to come
             | down to how well you can describe what you want to do, and
             | how well you can steer it to create its own harness to
             | troubleshoot/design properly. Once you have that down, I
             | haven't found a lot of things you cannot do.
        
               | layer8 wrote:
               | Breaking down and describing things in sufficient detail
               | can be one way to ensure that the LLM can match it to its
               | implicit knowledge. It still depends on what you're
               | trying to do in how much detail you have to spell out
               | things to the LLM. It's almost a tautology that there's
               | always _some_ level of description that the LLM will be
               | able to take up.
        
               | embedding-shape wrote:
               | Well, not just breaking down the task at hand, but also
               | how you instruct it to do any work. Just saying "Do X"
               | will give you very different results from "Do X, ensure
               | Y, then verify with Z", regardless of what tasks you're
               | asking it to do.
               | 
               | That's also how you can get the LLM to do stuff outside
               | of the training data in a reasonably good way, by not
               | just including the _what_ in the prompt, but also the
               | _how_.
        
           | neomantra wrote:
           | While I've had tremendous success with Golang projects and
           | Typescript Web Apps, when I tried to use Metal Mesh Shaders
           | in January, both Codex and Claude both had issues getting it
           | right.
           | 
           | That sort of GPU code has a lot of concepts and machinery,
           | it's not just a syntax to express, and everything has to be
           | just right or you will get a blank screen. I also use them
           | differently than most examples; I use it for data viz
           | (turning data into meshes) and most samples are about level
           | of detail. So a double whammy.
           | 
           | But once I pointed either LLM at my own previous work -- the
           | code from months of my prior personal exploration and battles
           | for understanding, then they both worked much better. Not
           | great, but we could make progress.
           | 
           | I also needed to make more mini-harnesses / scaffolds for it
           | to work through; in other words isolating its focus, kind of
           | like test-driven development.
        
           | nothinkjustai wrote:
           | Nah, it only lives up to the hype for crud apps and web ui.
           | As soon as you stop doing webshit it becomes way less useful.
           | 
           | (Don't get mad at me, I'm a webshit developer)
        
           | shdh wrote:
           | I've noticed the models still can't complete complex tasks
           | 
           | Such as:
           | 
           | Adding fine curl noise to a volumetric smoke shader
           | 
           | Fixing an issue with entity interpolation in an
           | entity/snapshot netcode
           | 
           | Find some rendering bugs related to lightmaps not loading in
           | particular cases, and it actually introduced this bug.
           | 
           | Just basic stuff.
        
             | computerex wrote:
             | They are definitely behind in 3D graphics from my
             | experience. But surprisingly decent at HPC/low level
             | programming. I think they are definitely training on ML
             | stuff to perhaps kick off recursive self improvement.
        
           | 59nadir wrote:
           | LLMs can really only mostly do trivial things still, they're
           | always going to do very bad work outside of what your average
           | web developer does day-to-day, and even those things aren't a
           | slam dunk in many cases.
        
             | skullone wrote:
             | I don't know about "only doing trivial things". I've built
             | a fully threaded webmail replacement for Gmail using imap,
             | indexes mail to postgres, local Django webapp renders
             | everything in a Gmail/Outlook style threaded view with
             | text/html bodies and attachments and a better local search
             | than gmail, and runs all locally. Started as a "could I?"
             | and ended up exceeding all my expectations
        
           | wahnfrieden wrote:
           | Instead of "pointing it" at docs, you need to paste the docs
           | into context. Otherwise it will skim small parts by
           | searching. Of course if you're using an obscure tool you need
           | to supply more context.
           | 
           | Xhigh can also perform worse than High - more frequent
           | compaction, and "overthinking".
        
         | glerk wrote:
         | Codex/GPT5.4 is just superior to Opus4.6 for coding. I swear it
         | costs me 1/2 of the tokens to achieve the same results and it
         | always follows through the plan to completion compared to Opus
         | that takes shortcuts and sweeps things under the rug until I
         | discover them through testing.
         | 
         | I'm not accusing anyone of foul play and I don't have financial
         | interests in either company, but it feels like "something"
         | within Code Claude/Anthropic models is optimizing to make you
         | spend more tokens instead of helping you complete the task.
        
       | sunaurus wrote:
       | Has anybody else noticed a pretty significant shift in sentiment
       | when discussing Claude/Codex with other engineers since even just
       | a few months ago? Specifically because of the secret/hidden
       | nature of these changes.
       | 
       | I keep getting the sense that people feel like they have no idea
       | if they are getting the product that they originally paid for, or
       | something much weaker, and this sentiment seems to be constantly
       | spreading. Like when I hear Anthropic mentioned in the past few
       | weeks, it's almost always in some negative context.
        
         | jakobnissen wrote:
         | Yeah I've seen this too. It's difficult for me to tell if the
         | complaints are due to a legitimate undisclosed nerf of Claude,
         | or whether it's just the initial awe of Opus 4.6 fading and
         | people increasingly noticing its mistakes.
        
           | kingkongjaffa wrote:
           | Just one more anecdote:
           | 
           | I'm on the enterprise team plan so a decent amount of usage.
           | 
           | In March I could use Opus all day and it was getting great
           | results.
           | 
           | Since the last week of March and into April, I've had
           | sessions where I maxed out session usage under 2 hours and it
           | got stuck in overthinking loops, multiple turns of realising
           | the same thing, dozens of paragraphs of "But wait, actually I
           | need to do x" with slight variations of the same realisation.
           | 
           | This is not the 'thinking effort' setting in claude code, I
           | noticed this happening across multiple sessions with the same
           | thinking effort settings, there was clearly some underlying
           | change that was not published that made the model get stuck
           | in thinking loops more for longer and more often without any
           | escape hatch to stop and prompt the user for additional
           | steering if it gets stuck.
        
             | UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
             | Whenever I see Opus say "but wait, ..."--which is all the
             | time--I get a little bit closer toward throwing my computer
             | out the window. Sometimes I just collapse the thinking
             | section, cross my fingers, and wait for the answer. It's
             | too frustrating watching the thinking process.
        
               | natpalmer1776 wrote:
               | I stop the thinking and manually correct with explicit
               | instructions or direction. I treat my agents like well
               | meaning ivy-league graduate interns. They lack the
               | experience to know what to do sometimes and need a
               | "common sense" direction every now and then.
        
               | oldmanhorton wrote:
               | Have you considered just... writing code? Like we used to
               | in the good old days? If the tool drives you to that
               | point of frustration, maybe it's time to give the tool a
               | break.
        
               | trollbridge wrote:
               | A lot of folks aren't "allowed" to write code anymore.
        
             | adahn wrote:
             | I've seen the point raised elsewhere that this could be the
             | double usage promo that was available from the 13th of
             | March to the 28th. ie. people getting used to the promo
             | then feeling impacted when it finished.
             | 
             | Although it seems that enterprise wasn't included, so maybe
             | not in your case.
             | 
             | https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14063676-claude-
             | march...
        
               | cyanydeez wrote:
               | its sounds like, tinfoil hat, they reduced the quant size
               | of their model and tried to mask the change with the
               | promo. your theory only addresses the spend not the
               | reduced realiability
        
             | derangedHorse wrote:
             | It's probably because you didn't specify "make no mistakes"
             | /s
             | 
             | In all seriousness though, I've observed the same thing
             | with my own usage.
        
             | gfody wrote:
             | this timing matches my experience, enterprise plan, but
             | using opus from vscode - finished a heavy refactor of a
             | large C# codebase mid march, tried to do basically the same
             | thing early april and couldn't
        
             | chrsw wrote:
             | I'm also an enterprise user and this has been my experience
             | exactly. Same asks, same code bases, same models, much
             | worse results. Everyone on my team is expressing the same
             | thing.
             | 
             | Not only that, but the lack of transparency about what's
             | happening, in clear and simple terms, directly from
             | Anthropic is concerning.
             | 
             | I've already told my org's higher ups that in the current
             | situation we're not close to getting our money's worth with
             | these models.
        
           | iLoveOncall wrote:
           | I think there's a much more nefarious reason that you're
           | missing.
           | 
           | It's pretty clear that OpenAI has consistently used bots on
           | social networks to peddle their products. This could just be
           | the next iteration, mass spreading lies about Anthropic to
           | get people to flock back to their own products.
           | 
           | That would explain why a lot of users in the comments of
           | those posts are claiming that they don't see any changes to
           | limits.
        
             | hirako2000 wrote:
             | Judging from the number of GitHub issues on Anthropic,
             | shamelessly being dismissed as "fixed", I doubt openai
             | needs the bots to tarnish that competitor.
        
             | javawizard wrote:
             | The trouble with that argument, though, is that it works
             | the other way as well: how do I, a random internet citizen,
             | know that you're not doing the same thing for Anthropic
             | with this comment?
             | 
             | (FWIW I have definitely noticed a cognitive decline with
             | Claude / Opus 4.6 over the past month and a half or so, and
             | unless I'm secretly working for them in my sleep, I'm
             | definitely not an Anthropic employee.)
        
               | iLoveOncall wrote:
               | Oh it's pretty clear to me that Anthropic employs the
               | same tactics and uses bots on socials to push its
               | products too. On Reddit a couple of months ago it was
               | simply unbearable with all the "Claude Opus is going to
               | take all the jobs".
               | 
               | You definitely shouldn't trust me, as we're way beyond
               | the point where you can trust ANYTHING on the internet
               | that has a timestamp later than 2021 or so (and even
               | then, of course people were already lying).
               | 
               | Personally I use Claude models through Bedrock because I
               | work for Amazon, and I haven't noticed any decline.
               | Instead it's always been pretty shit, and what people
               | describe now as the model getting lost of infinite loops
               | of talking to itself happened since the very start for
               | me.
        
               | felixgallo wrote:
               | https://isitnerfed.org/
               | 
               | in short, it looks like nothing has been nerfed, but
               | sentiment has definitely been negative. I suspect some of
               | the openclaw users have been taking out their
               | frustrations.
        
               | javawizard wrote:
               | That's fascinating.
               | 
               | Any idea what their test harness looks like? My
               | experience comes primarily from Claude Code; this makes
               | me wonder if recent CC updates could be more to blame
               | than Opus 4.6 itself.
        
           | PunchyHamster wrote:
           | Both can be a thing at same time
        
           | babaganoosh89 wrote:
           | It's not just you, there is a github issue for it:
           | https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796
        
         | pxtail wrote:
         | There's still plenty of "leave my fellow multbillion corp
         | alone" type ones,it means that corp can and should screw it's
         | loving customer base harder.
        
           | simianwords wrote:
           | The enshittification meme has been taken too seriously to the
           | point where it is shoehorned into every single place
           | possible.
           | 
           | It is not in the interests for Anthropic to screw its
           | customer base. Running a frontier lab comes with tradeoffs
           | between training, inference and other areas.
        
             | officialchicken wrote:
             | The investors are their customers - not the users of the
             | end-product.
        
               | simianwords wrote:
               | This shows a lack of understanding of how markets work.
               | Investors make money when the valuation of the company
               | increases. The valuation of the company is the best
               | prediction of future profit risk adjusted.
               | 
               | How would anthropic increase future profits without
               | satisfying customers?
        
               | bitwize wrote:
               | Have you seen the business models for these companies?
               | Literal underpants gnome memes. OpenAI's goes like this:
               | 
               | 1. Build AGI
               | 
               | 2. Use said AGI to tell us how to become profitable
               | 
               | 3. Profit!
               | 
               | Anthropic seems to be going all in on enterprise sales.
               | Which means they don't actually have to please customers,
               | or it's what ThePrimeagen humorously calls a "yacht
               | problem"--a problem that only needs a solution _after_
               | the IPO. For now all they have to do is convince
               | corporate leadership that this is the future of work and
               | sow enough FOMO to close those sales contracts and their
               | projected sales, and stock valuation, goes through the
               | roof.
               | 
               | Of course that value will collapse if they go without
               | delivering on their promises long enough. That's why they
               | call it a bubble. But by then, hopefully, Dario and the
               | early investors will be long gone and even richer than
               | they were to start. Their only competitor, OpenAI, is
               | confronted with the same issues: the scalability problems
               | won't go away, and addressing them doesn't drive stock
               | valuation the way promising high rollers that AGI and
               | total workforce automation are just around the corner
               | does.
        
               | cowboylowrez wrote:
               | Well sure, all market signals should be considered. As a
               | casual observer, my received signals have been indicating
               | that AI is getting sold at a loss to get market share,
               | and more recent signals have indicated that users are
               | really really sensitive to both costs and performance.
               | 
               | The weakest signal to me is investor money, because when
               | you think of it, investors are betting on a future that
               | may or may not be there. Heck even trends aren't
               | guaranteed, "past performance is no guarantee etc etc"
        
               | jeremyjh wrote:
               | Early investors make money when later investors buy them
               | out at inflated valuations.
        
             | georgemcbay wrote:
             | It doesn't matter if it is in Anthropic's interest to screw
             | its customer base, if their reported monthly revenue growth
             | is accurate then it makes perfect sense why Claude would be
             | getting dumber...
             | 
             | Demand is way up and compute supply is extremely limited
             | because data center buildouts can't keep up with demand.
             | 
             | In the face of rising demand and insufficient compute their
             | only practical options (other than refusing new business
             | until demand can be met) are signicantly raising the price
             | of tokens (and more tighly limiting subscription options)
             | or doing behind the scenes inference optimizations that are
             | likely to make the model dumber.
             | 
             | It is very easy to believe that they took the route of
             | inference optimizations that have reduced quality of the
             | service and that that is where the perceived
             | enshittification is coming from.
        
         | echelon wrote:
         | Anthropic isn't your friend.
         | 
         | Phase 1: $200/mo prosumer engineer tool
         | 
         | Phase 2: AI layoffs / "it's just AI washing"
         | 
         | Phase 3: $20,000/mo limited release model "too dangerous" to
         | use
         | 
         | Phase 4: Accelerated layoffs / two person teams. Rehiring of
         | certain personnel at lower costs.
         | 
         | Phase 5: "Our new model can decompile and rewrite any
         | commercial software. We just wrote a new kernel after looking
         | at Linux (bye, bye GPL!) We also decompiled the latest Zelda
         | game, ported the engine to Rust, and made a new game with it.
         | Source code has no value. Even compiled and obfuscated code is
         | a breeze to clone."
         | 
         | Phase 6: $100k/mo model that replicates entire engineering
         | teams, only large companies can afford it. Ordinary users can't
         | buy. More layoffs.
         | 
         | Phase N: People can't afford computing anymore. Everything is
         | thin clients and rented. It's become like the private railroad
         | industry. End of the PC era. Like kids growing up on
         | smartphones, there's nothing to tinker with anymore. And
         | certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-skilled
         | labor capital.
         | 
         | Anothropic used to be cool before they started gating access.
         | Limiting Claw/OpenCode was strike one. Mythos is strike two.
         | 
         | Y'all should have started hating on their ethics when they
         | started complaining about being distilled. For training they
         | conducted on materials they did not own.
         | 
         | We need open weights companies now more than ever. Too bad
         | China seems to be giving up on the idea.
         | 
         | "You wouldn't distill an Opus."
        
           | marcus_cemes wrote:
           | > We need open weights companies now more than ever.
           | 
           | If you're objective it to democratize AI, sure. But for those
           | fed up with it and the devastating effects it's having on
           | students, for example, can opt to actively avoid paying for
           | products with AI (I say this as someone who uses it every
           | day, guilty). At some point large companies will see that
           | they're bleeding money for something that most people don't
           | seem to want, and cancel those $100k/mo deals. I've already
           | experienced one AI-developer-turned company crash and burn.
           | 
           | Personally, I don't think this LLM-based AI generation will
           | have any significant positive impacts. Time, energy (CO2) and
           | money would have been _far_ better spent elsewhere.
        
             | Zetaphor wrote:
             | There's plenty of valuable use cases for being able to give
             | natural language instructions to a tool and have it act on
             | that input. I do however agree that the current hype and
             | valuations far exceed the real value being offered.
             | 
             | Like with the dot com bubble there will be a crash and then
             | whatever shakes out of that will be the companies and
             | products who invested in understanding the actual strengths
             | and weaknesses of the tech, instead of just trying to slap
             | an "AI" sticker on everything.
        
           | jhancock wrote:
           | What leads you to say China AI is giving up on open weights?
           | 
           | I've been using GLM for over 6 months and pretty happy.
        
             | PunchyHamster wrote:
             | Why would any company release open weights once the
             | investment money stops ?
             | 
             | Releasing open weights have been basically a PR move, the
             | moment those companies need to actually make money they
             | will cut it out as that reduces their client base.
             | 
             | They DO NOT want you to run AI. They want you to pay them
             | to do it
        
               | cyanydeez wrote:
               | open weights is a way to nerf your opponent and is
               | meaningless to your business if you need to retrain a
               | model because your trailing
               | 
               | So, it makes a lot of sense to get people a "demo" and
               | claim the paid product is better.
               | 
               | i think a lot of people have no idea how capable local
               | models are atm.
        
               | jeremyjh wrote:
               | Two years ago a lot of people thought GPT-4o was usable
               | for software development. I didn't really find that to be
               | the case in general but certainly it could do a lot of
               | useful things. And now Qwen3.5-8B is just as capable and
               | runs fine on an M2 MacBook Air.
        
               | cyanydeez wrote:
               | QWEN3.5 coder next runs to ~84k context before it poops
               | out on AMD395+ w/128GB. Most of what it's good at is
               | boilerplate find/replace/copy/paste; but being able to
               | scaffold things out and touch up 20-30% of the code is
               | pretty sweet.
        
               | jhancock wrote:
               | ok. maybe. I don't know. I'm asking how you know.
               | 
               | z.ai did go public on the HK exchange. They are under
               | pressures similar to other public companies.
               | 
               | I know that China models are increasingly being trained
               | and run using Huawei chips instead of Nvidia. I know
               | China has a surplus of electricity from renewables (wind,
               | solar, hydro).
        
               | Zetaphor wrote:
               | Minimax just released a new model yesterday. You're
               | conflating one company with a countries entire industry.
               | There's more than just Qwen coming out of China.
        
             | Zetaphor wrote:
             | People keep repeating this without any real thought behind
             | it because of the high profile resignations on the Qwen
             | team. Meanwhile the Minimax team just released a new open
             | weights version of their 229B model yesterday. So much for
             | that narrative.
             | 
             | The AI landscape in China is larger than just Qwen and
             | Alibaba.
        
               | dns_snek wrote:
               | Of course, but for how long? Do you think that companies
               | will keep giving away valuable assets for free forever,
               | or do you think that in the near future there's going to
               | be an open weights model that's so good that people keep
               | using it indefinitely instead of going back to frontier
               | model providers?
               | 
               | The first one is just incredibly naive, the second might
               | be true for some people, for some tasks, but it's not
               | going to capture the majority who're chasing the latest
               | and greatest to "keep up".
        
               | Throaway199999 wrote:
               | the asset's value is in being released, so yes
        
               | dns_snek wrote:
               | What does that mean?
        
               | Throaway199999 wrote:
               | Every time you release the models you even the playing
               | field out for the competition, which ruins a lot of the
               | advantage your bigger competitors had. It also lets
               | smaller players work on the latest tech and then you can
               | make deals with them.
        
               | bachmeier wrote:
               | > Do you think that companies will keep giving away
               | valuable assets for free forever
               | 
               | If China is forced to choose between giving the entire AI
               | market to the US or releasing free models, they'll be
               | releasing free models as long as it's necessary.
        
               | CamperBob2 wrote:
               | _do you think that in the near future there 's going to
               | be an open weights model that's so good that people keep
               | using it indefinitely instead of going back to frontier
               | model providers?_
               | 
               | We are almost at that point now, where the harnesses and
               | tools are more important drivers of functionality and
               | performance than the model weights themselves. We'll get
               | there.
        
               | andriy_koval wrote:
               | > Meanwhile the Minimax team just released a new open
               | weights version of their 229B model yesterday.
               | 
               | its under new license prohibiting any commercial use.
        
               | Zetaphor wrote:
               | The statement was that China was giving up on open
               | weights, they didn't say anything about licensing.
               | Licensing on these models has always been hit or miss
               | depending on which lab and which release.
        
               | andriy_koval wrote:
               | but context of the statement is discussion about corps do
               | grab and rent strategy. My understanding is that
               | referenced Chinese model can't be argument in this
               | context, and there is no recent 200B+ params Chinese
               | models with friendly license.
               | 
               | That license is more like business source license vs open
               | source license.
        
               | CamperBob2 wrote:
               | Who in the world would care about that, and why?
               | 
               | You know what else was under a license prohibiting
               | commercial use? The training data.
        
           | magic_hamster wrote:
           | > End of the PC era, there's nothing to tinker with anymore.
           | And certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-
           | skilled labor capital.
           | 
           | This one seems too far fetched. Training models is
           | widespread. There will always be open weight models in some
           | form, and if we assume there will be some advancements in
           | architecture, I bet you could also run them on much leaner
           | devices. Even today you can run models on Raspberry Pis. I
           | don't see a reason this will stop being a thing, there will
           | be plenty of ways to tinker.
           | 
           | However, keep in mind the masses don't care about tinkering
           | and never have. People want a ChatGPT experience, not a
           | pytorch experience. In essence this is true for all tech
           | products, not just AI.
        
           | PunchyHamster wrote:
           | Stop thinking billion dollar publicly traded companies are
           | "cool" just because they make widget you like.
           | 
           | You will be backstabbed
           | 
           | You will be squeezed for all they can.
           | 
           | And you will be betrayed.
           | 
           | > Phase N: People can't afford computing anymore. Everything
           | is thin clients and rented. It's become like the private
           | railroad industry. End of the PC era. Like kids growing up on
           | smartphones, there's nothing to tinker with anymore. And
           | certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-skilled
           | labor capital.
           | 
           | Thankfully none of them actually makes money and just runs on
           | investment so there is a good chance bubble will drop and the
           | price of PC equipment will... continue to rise as US gives up
           | Taiwan to China
        
             | dns_snek wrote:
             | > Stop thinking billion dollar publicly traded companies
             | are "cool" just because they make widget you like.
             | 
             | Anthropic is a private company but nevertheless, the
             | sentiment is accurate and applies to all kinds of
             | corporations.
        
               | PunchyHamster wrote:
               | They are already preparing to go public.
               | 
               | But I wrote public because it is at least possible for
               | privately held company to not do all evil (see Steam, tho
               | in case of Steam it is more "do your thing and look as
               | competitors are shooting themselves in foot"...)
        
           | hirako2000 wrote:
           | Good read on the situation.
           | 
           | It all boils down to a brilliant but extremely expensive
           | technology. Both to build and to run.
           | 
           | We've been sold a product with heavy subsidy. The idea (from
           | Sam) scale out and see what happens.
           | 
           | Those who care to read between the lines can see what's
           | happening. A perfect storm of demand that attract VCs who
           | can't understand they are the real customers. Once they
           | understand that it will be too late.
           | 
           | Regarding open weight models: eventually we will, as
           | humanity, benefit from the astronomical capital poured into
           | developing a technology ahead of its time. In a few years
           | this and even more will run on edge.
           | 
           | Written by open source developers, likely former openai and
           | anthropic employees who got so much cash in the bank they
           | don't need to worry about renting their knowledge.
        
           | andai wrote:
           | What I want to know is how did they make the only LLM that
           | doesn't sound cringe?
           | 
           | I think it has something to do with mode collapse (although
           | Claude certainly has its own "tells"), but I'm not sure.
           | 
           | It sounds trivial but even for Agentic, I found the writing
           | style to be really important. When you give Claude a persona,
           | it sounds like the thing. When you give GPT a persona, it
           | sounds like GPT half-assedly pretending to be the thing.
           | 
           | ---
           | 
           | Some other interesting points about Anthropic's models. I
           | don't know if any of these relate to my LLM style question,
           | but seems worth mentioning:
           | 
           | Claude models also use way less tokens for the same task (on
           | ArtificialAnalysis, they are a clear outlier on this metric).
           | 
           | And there's a much stronger common sense, subjectively. (Not
           | sure if we have a good way to actually measure that, though.)
           | It takes context and common sense into account, to a much
           | greater degree.
           | 
           | (Which ties in with their constitution. Understanding why
           | things are wrong at a deeper level, rather than just surface
           | level pattern matching.)
           | 
           | Opus is great but it should be bigger. You notice the
           | difference between Sonnet and Opus, but with heavy use you
           | notice Opus's limitations, too.
        
           | slashdave wrote:
           | When did Hacker News become a fountain of dystopian science
           | fiction?
        
             | Throaway199999 wrote:
             | from its inception lol
        
         | matheusmoreira wrote:
         | I certainly noticed a significant drop in reasoning power at
         | some point after I subscribed to Claude. Since then I've
         | applied all sorts of fixes that range from disabling adaptive
         | thinking to maxing out thinking tokens to patching system
         | prompts with an ad-hoc shell script from a gist. Even after all
         | this, Opus will still sometimes go round and round in illogical
         | circles, self-correcting constantly with the telltale "no wait"
         | and undoing everything until it ends up right where it started
         | with nothing to show for it after 100k tokens spent.
         | 
         | Whether it's due to bugs or actual malice, it's not a good
         | look. I genuinely can't tell if it's buggy, if it's been
         | intentionally degraded, if it's placebo or if it's all just an
         | elaborate OpenAI psyop.
        
           | babaganoosh89 wrote:
           | There's a github issue for this:
           | https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796
        
             | matheusmoreira wrote:
             | Yes, I commented on it and applied all remedies suggested.
             | 
             | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664442
             | 
             | Configuration and environment variables seem to have
             | improved things somewhat but it still seems to be hit or
             | miss.
        
             | watt wrote:
             | That issue now is closed, probably as "not planned".
        
           | beering wrote:
           | The real question I see nobody asking is how GPT-5.4 beats
           | Opus at a fraction of the price. I doubt it's only a question
           | of subsidization. My impression from the past is that GPT-5
           | was around a Sonnet-sized model, and 5-mini was Haiku-sized.
           | At least on my codebase anyways, Codex one-shots tricky
           | things that Opus needs several tries to fully get right.
        
             | matheusmoreira wrote:
             | I wanted to choose Anthropic because they were apparently
             | more ethical compared to OpenAI, but... Yeah.
             | 
             | Right now the only blocker for me is the lack of Linux
             | support.
        
               | trollbridge wrote:
               | Cursor?
        
         | andai wrote:
         | Well, off the top of my head:
         | 
         | - Banning OpenClaw users (within their rights, of course, but
         | bad optics)
         | 
         | - Banning 3rd party harnesses in general (ditto)
         | 
         | (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if
         | I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be
         | great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my
         | Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?)
         | 
         | - Lowering reasoning effort (and then showing up here saying
         | "we'll try to make sure the most valuable customers get the
         | non-gimped experience" (paraphrasing slightly xD))
         | 
         | - Massively reduced usage (apparently a bug?) The other day I
         | got _21x_ more usage spend on the same task for Claude vs
         | Codex.
         | 
         | - Noticed a very sharp drop in response length in the Claude
         | app. Asked Claude about it and it mentioned several things in
         | the system prompt related to reduced reasoning effort, keeping
         | responses as brief as possible, etc.
         | 
         | It's all circumstantial but everything points towards
         | "desperately trying to cut costs".
         | 
         | I love Claude and I won't be switching any time soon (though
         | with the usage limits I'm increasingly using Codex for coding),
         | but it's getting hard to recommend it to friends lately. I told
         | a friend "it _was_ the best option, until about two weeks
         | ago... " Now it's up in the air.
        
           | risyachka wrote:
           | >> apparently a bug?
           | 
           | it's a bug only if they get a harsh public response,
           | otherwise it becomes a feature
        
             | OtomotO wrote:
             | A bug for one side can be a feature for another
        
           | esperent wrote:
           | > claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like
           | if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked
           | 
           | I've used it with a sub _a lot_. Concurrency of 40 writing
           | descriptions of thousands of images, running for hours on
           | sonnet.
           | 
           | I have a lot of complaints. I've cancelled my $200
           | subscription and when it runs out in a few days I'll have to
           | find something else.
           | 
           | But claude -p is fine.
           | 
           | ... Or it was 2 week ago. Who knows if they've silently
           | throttled it by now?
        
             | andai wrote:
             | The other day I read that letting another agent invoke
             | claude -p was considered a violation (i.e. letting OpenClaw
             | delegate to Claude Code).
             | 
             | Not sure how that's enforced though. I was in OpenClaw
             | discord a while ago and enforcement seemed a bit random.
             | 
             | I'll try to find the source, I might have gotten the
             | details mixed up.
        
               | jeremyjh wrote:
               | It's not a "violation" but they said it would be charged
               | as extra usage.
        
               | zackify wrote:
               | This is a funny cat and mouse game. They offer a built in
               | loop command.
               | 
               | Just tmux and use that.
               | 
               | Soon if they drop -p people will just vibe code in 5
               | minutes a way to type inside it remotely similar to their
               | own built in remote access tool. Seems like a losing game
               | from anthropics side
        
           | joshstrange wrote:
           | > (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling
           | like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked.
           | Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it
           | from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party
           | harness?)
           | 
           | 100% this, I've posted the same sentiment here on HN. I hate
           | the chilling effect of the bans and the lack of clarity on
           | what is and is not allowed.
        
             | stingraycharles wrote:
             | In this case, they handled things pretty well. You can
             | still use openclaw etc with your regular Anthropic
             | subscription, it will just count towards your extra credits
             | / usage which you can buy for a 30% discount compared to
             | API pricing. And they gave everyone one month's value in
             | credits.
             | 
             | I don't think they could have done that much better I'd
             | say.
        
               | cedws wrote:
               | That does not address joshstrange's concerns.
               | 
               | There is very poor clarity about what is and isn't
               | allowed with the Claude SDK/claude -p. Are we allowed to
               | use it to automate stuff? What kind of tasks is it
               | permitted to be used for? What if you call your script
               | 'OrangeClaw' and release that on GitHub? What if your
               | script gets super popular, does it suddenly become
               | against TOS?
        
               | joshstrange wrote:
               | This is exactly my point. At what point does it become a
               | ToS violation? Right now it's a huge grey area and the
               | idea of getting my account banned because I crossed an
               | invisible line with zero recourse other than to switch
               | providers is... frustrating.
        
               | deaux wrote:
               | It's pretty easy to read between the lines tbh. Personal,
               | non-automated use is fine. Using it as a means to
               | automate depleting your 5-hour limit 24/7 ("leftover
               | usage") is not fine. They don't want to put in in the ToS
               | because it's almost impossible because writing what I
               | just said will still have people going "well what's
               | automated, where's the exact line!" when it's all pretty
               | clear what the intended use case here is. The Anthropic
               | peeps have said about as much.
               | 
               | I get that the traditional dev is allergic to the concept
               | of reading between the lines and demands everything to be
               | spelled out explicitly, but maybe you should just see it
               | as something to learn because it's an incredibly useful
               | life skill.
        
               | cedws wrote:
               | Ok, let's say I'm not using it to deplete leftover usage,
               | the task just happens to run down the 5 hour window
               | usage.
               | 
               | Are you willing to bet your account over whether you've
               | read between the lines correctly? Anthropic aren't going
               | to listen to appeals.
        
               | deaux wrote:
               | > the task just happens to run down the 5 hour window
               | usage.
               | 
               | In a single prompt? From zero usage? That doesn't "just
               | happen".
        
               | cedws wrote:
               | When you're using the SDK, yes it can. Example: I used
               | the Python SDK to translate a bunch of source code
               | recently. I spawned a subagent for each module that
               | needed translating and left it to run for a few hours
               | with a parallelism limit of 5. It blasted through the 5
               | hour usage and dug into extra usage credits.
               | 
               | I have zero assurances that the above can't result in a
               | ban. The usage pattern is not distinct from OpenClaw.
        
               | deaux wrote:
               | As I said, it doesn't just happen, you explicitly had to
               | set it up so it could happen.
        
               | kuboble wrote:
               | I'm confused about this comment.
               | 
               | The GP has described a task which feels like a task very
               | well within intended usage of CC, but can easily eat up
               | the usage limit.
               | 
               | What should we read between the lines about this
               | scenario?
               | 
               | Is it a bannable offense?
        
               | joshstrange wrote:
               | That "non-automated" part is where I feel like there is a
               | lack of clarity. They even have some stuff in to allow
               | for scheduling in Claude Code. Seems similar to a cron
               | but "non-automated" would rule out using a cron (right?).
               | I'd love to feel comfortable setting up daily/hourly
               | tasks for Claude Code but that feels iffy. Like I said, I
               | don't think the line is clear.
        
               | deaux wrote:
               | The lack of clarity doesn't matter because they obviously
               | can't tell if _you_ ran a claude -p a few times today
               | with usual prompts or whether your cron job did. It 's
               | impossible for them to reliably tell.
               | 
               | It _can_ tell if your cron is running them every 10
               | minutes 24 /7, because basic biology rules out you doing
               | that for more than a day or so.
        
               | andai wrote:
               | Wait, this is news to me. I thought 3rd party use of the
               | sub was unequivocally prohibited?
               | 
               | If I'm understanding you correctly: they changed that
               | policy, you can now use 3rd party software unofficially
               | with the undocumented Claude Code endpoint, and their
               | servers auto-detect this and charge you extra for it?
               | 
               | EDIT: Yeah, something like that?
               | 
               | > Starting April 4 at 12pm PT / 8pm BST, you'll no longer
               | be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-
               | party harnesses including OpenClaw. Instead, they'll
               | require extra usage.
               | 
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633568
               | 
               | This seems to mean that unauthorized usage of the sub
               | endpoint is tolerated now (and billed as though it were
               | the regular API). And possibly affects claude -p, though
               | I don't know yet.
        
               | sunnybeetroot wrote:
               | One month's value in credits does not equal the value of
               | one month's subscription. They could have done better.
        
           | politelemon wrote:
           | Why were third party harnesses banned? Surely they'd want
           | sticking power over the ecosystem.
        
             | cedws wrote:
             | There's the argument that Anthropic has built Claude Code
             | to use the models efficiently, which the subscription
             | pricing is based on.
             | 
             | Maybe there's some truth to that, but then why haven't
             | OpenAI made the same move? I believe the main reason is
             | platform control. Anthropic can't survive as a pipeline for
             | tokens, they need to build and control a platform, which
             | means aggressively locking out everybody else building a
             | platform.
        
               | Zetaphor wrote:
               | Alternatively products like openclaw have an outsized
               | impact on Anthropic's infrastructure for essentially no
               | benefit to them. Especially when you're taking advantage
               | of the $200 plan.
               | 
               | OpenAI has never shyed away from burning mountains of
               | cash to try and capture a little more market share. They
               | paid a billion dollars for a vibe coded mess just for the
               | opportunity to associate themselves with the hype.
        
               | plusplusungood wrote:
               | > Taking advantage of the $200 plan.
               | 
               | No, I'm paying $200 a month for a premium product that I
               | expect premium service for. It's the single most
               | expensive IT expense I have. Taking advantage my foot.
        
               | charcircuit wrote:
               | It's not a premium product. It's just expensive.
        
               | infecto wrote:
               | You are simply a bit too entitled. It's not a premium
               | product and honestly not that expensive in my opinion
               | either (though that is going to depend on your location).
               | 
               | You are more than able to pay for API rates.
        
               | siva7 wrote:
               | You may want to learn the difference between someone
               | being able to pay API rates and someone willing to pay
               | API rates. I'm sure many people on HN are able to pay API
               | rates and almost all of them aren't willing to pay API
               | rates. The providers know this hence why subscriptions
               | exist. API is almost solely used by companies as almost
               | no private person would be willing to pay that.
        
               | infecto wrote:
               | "You may want to learn" such choice way to introduce your
               | position which is really not much of one.
               | 
               | If you are going to come and complain about a $200
               | subscription that gives you $400 worth of API tokens
               | there is only so much room to complain. Only so many
               | lemons can be squeezed. Hope that was a helpful for you.
        
               | 59nadir wrote:
               | Can you imagine paying the actual cost of it, or a
               | subscription cost that at least ballpark matched it? I
               | don't think I have a single friend or acquaintance who
               | realistically would.
        
               | qeternity wrote:
               | > They paid a billion dollars for a vibe coded mess just
               | for the opportunity to associate themselves with the
               | hype.
               | 
               | Lol no they didn't. It wasn't even an acquihire. They
               | just hired Peter.
               | 
               | Maybe they are paying him incredibly well, but not a
               | billion dollars well.
        
               | snovv_crash wrote:
               | I think it's a training data thing. They can only gather
               | valid training data from real human interactions, so they
               | don't want to subsidize tokens for purely automated
               | interactions.
        
             | sshine wrote:
             | One thing is lack of control of token efficiency on what's
             | already a subsidised product.
             | 
             | Another thing is branding: Their CLI might be the best
             | right now, but tech debt says it won't continue to be for
             | very long.
             | 
             | By enforcing the CLI you enforce the brand value -- you're
             | not just buying the engine.
        
               | olejorgenb wrote:
               | Maybe they should fix bugs like this then
               | https://github.com/anthropics/claude-
               | code/issues/17979#issue... ...
        
               | thepasch wrote:
               | Claude Code was the best harness from roughly around
               | release to January this year. Ever since then, it's
               | become more and more bloated with more and more stuff and
               | seemingly no coherent plan or vision to it all other than
               | "let's see what else that sounds cool we can cram in
               | there."
        
               | justin_dash wrote:
               | What's taken over since then? Codex or something else?
        
               | derwiki wrote:
               | Pi.dev
        
             | brookst wrote:
             | To be clear they weren't banned from Claude usage, they
             | were required to use the API and API rates rather than
             | Claude Max tokens.
             | 
             | Claude code uses a bunch if best practices to maximize
             | cache hit rate. Third party harnesses are hit or miss, so
             | often use a lot more tokens for the same task.
        
               | lacunary wrote:
               | but claude -p is still Claude Code
        
               | danmaz74 wrote:
               | Was something using that been banned?
        
               | SyneRyder wrote:
               | Yep, that's the reason for the new Extra Credit feature
               | in Claude Code. Some people were wiring up "Claude -p"
               | with OpenClaw, so now Anthropic detects if the system
               | prompt contains the phrase OpenClaw, and bills from Extra
               | Credit if that happens:
               | 
               | https://x.com/steipete/status/2040811558427648357
               | 
               |  _" Anthropic now blocks first-party harness use too
               | 
               | claude -p --append-system-prompt 'A personal assistant
               | running inside OpenClaw.' 'is clawd here?'
               | 
               | - 400 Third-party apps now draw from your extra usage,
               | not your plan limits.
               | 
               | So yeah: bring your own coin "_
        
               | Wowfunhappy wrote:
               | https://xcancel.com/bcherny/status/2041035127430754686#m
               | 
               | > This is not intentional, likely an overactive abuse
               | classifier. Looking, and working on clarifying the policy
               | going forward.
        
               | ledauphin wrote:
               | nah this doesn't explain it.
               | 
               | most of the users of those third party harnesses care
               | just as much about hitting cache and getting more usage.
        
               | SyneRyder wrote:
               | I'm watching a conference talk right now from 2 weeks
               | ago: "I Hated Every Coding Agent So I Built My Own -
               | Mario Zechner (Pi)", and in the middle he directly
               | references this.
               | 
               | He demonstrates in the code that OpenCode aggressively
               | trims context, by compacting on _every_ turn, and pruning
               | all tool calls from the context that occurred more than
               | 40,000 tokens ago. Seems like it could be a good strategy
               | to squeeze more out of the context window - but by
               | editing the oldest context, it breaks the prompt cache
               | for the entire conversation. There is effectively no
               | caching happening at all.
               | 
               | https://youtu.be/Dli5slNaJu0
        
               | brookst wrote:
               | Sure. The question is whether they have the same level of
               | expertise and prioritization that Anthropic does.
        
             | klempner wrote:
             | Note that the thing that's banned is using third party
             | harnesses with their subscription based pricing.
             | 
             | If you're paying normal API prices they'll happily let you
             | use whatever harness you want.
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | I want to differentiate 2 kinds of harnesses
             | 
             | 1. openclaw like - using the LLM endpoint on subscription
             | billing, different prompts than claude code
             | 
             | 2. using claude cli with -p, in headless mode
             | 
             | The second runs through their code and prompts, just calls
             | claude in non-interactive mode for subtasks. I feel
             | especially put off by restricting the second kind. I need
             | it to run judge agents to review plans and code.
        
             | lelanthran wrote:
             | > Why were third party harnesses banned? Surely they'd want
             | sticking power over the ecosystem.
             | 
             | Third-party harnesses are the exact opposite of stickiness!
             | 
             | Ditching Claude Code for a third party harness while using
             | the Claude Code subscription means it's trivial to switch
             | to a different model when you {run out of credits | find a
             | cheaper token provider | find a better model}.
        
           | rlpb wrote:
           | > It's all circumstantial but everything points towards
           | "desperately trying to cut costs".
           | 
           | I have been wondering if it's more geared at reducing
           | resource usage, given that at the moment there's a known
           | constraint on AI datacenter expansion capability. Perhaps
           | they are struggling to meet demand?
        
             | sshine wrote:
             | > _Perhaps Anthropic is struggling to meet demand?_
             | 
             | Yes, definitely, they're gracefully failing to meet demand.
             | They could also deny new customers, but it would probably
             | be bad for business.
        
               | leesalminen wrote:
               | I once decided to deny new customers in order to be able
               | to service current demand at the quality we wanted. It
               | backfired and made people want our product even more. Our
               | phones were blowing up. That approach can have unintended
               | consequences!
        
               | sunnybeetroot wrote:
               | You unintentionally used a common sales tactic; by
               | decreasing supply you increase demand.
        
               | ayewo wrote:
               | Another knob you could have turned is: raise prices. Did
               | you try this?
        
               | 59nadir wrote:
               | Bad for business and probably unwise for the type of
               | product people will pop their head in to check on, then
               | stop paying and return much later to see whether it's
               | still not much more than a parlor trick for them.
        
             | stingraycharles wrote:
             | It's more that Anthropic knows that the models themselves
             | are non-sticky, and the real moat is in the ecosystem
             | around it.
             | 
             | It only makes sense for them to get users to use their
             | ecosystem, rather than other tools.
        
               | oorza wrote:
               | See: Claude Cowork trying to establish an entire new
               | group of people in their ecosystem.
        
             | MuffinFlavored wrote:
             | I wish they would just rip the bandaid to stop everybody's
             | entitled whining.
             | 
             | "We're sorry, what we were able to give you for $100/mo
             | before now needs to be $200/mo (or more). We
             | miscalculated/we were too generous/gave too much away for
             | too little. It's a new technology, we are seeing a ton of
             | demand, we are trying to run a business, hope you
             | understand. If you don't want it, don't pay for it."
        
               | schmookeeg wrote:
               | This is my take too, although I'm not prepared for a
               | max400 reality to replace the max200, but... I hate all
               | of the whingeing. Piggies at the buffet line seem to be
               | the loudest on this subject.
        
               | 73738488484 wrote:
               | It is one thing to pay 100 a month to make calendar apps
               | for your linkedin and birds on bicycles to get invited to
               | talks, paying 200 HOWEVER
        
               | sunnybeetroot wrote:
               | If we didn't have the birds on bicycles, how would we
               | know the models are getting better?
        
               | oorza wrote:
               | Are we at the point where there are external constraints
               | that cash can't solve?
        
               | jazzyjackson wrote:
               | can't tell if you're being facetious but yes, there's not
               | enough cash in the world to double energy/silicon fab
               | capacity in a year. Infrastructure takes time, hardware
               | is hard, and you have to be willing to bet that the
               | demand will be there 5 years from now to make an
               | investment today.
        
               | killingtime74 wrote:
               | Until one has the entire supply of world GPU production,
               | cash can solve it by out bidding others
        
               | raw_anon_1111 wrote:
               | Just put everyone on pay per use with the API and rip the
               | band aid off.
        
               | coldtea wrote:
               | Even the pay per use is heavily VC subsidied at current
               | prices.
        
               | djeastm wrote:
               | I would understand the move, but boy would it play right
               | into the "AI is only here to make the rich even richer"
               | feeling wouldn't it?
        
           | fluidcruft wrote:
           | claude -p not working would be instant unsubscribe downgrade
           | from Max to Pro and further drive my use of codex. I use both
           | but overall have noticed I reach for Claude less than codex
           | lately because claude keeps getting slower and slower (I have
           | not noticed a drop off in quality, but I use it less and less
           | so maybe I'm not in a good position to notice).
           | 
           | Generally I find codex and claude make a good team. I'm not a
           | heavy user, but I am currently Claude Max 5x and ChatGPT
           | Plus. Now that OpenAI has a $100 offering and I am finding
           | myself using Claude less, I am considering switching to
           | Claude Pro and ChatGPT Pro x5. The work hours restriction on
           | Claude Max x5 really pisses me off.
           | 
           | I am not a heavy user. Historically I only break over 50%
           | weekly one week a month and average about 30-40% of Max x5
           | over the entire month. I went Max because of the weekly
           | limits and to access the better models and because I felt I
           | was getting value. I need an occasional burst of usage, not
           | 24/7 slow compute. But even for pay-as-you-go burst usage
           | Anthropic's API prices are insane vs Max.
           | 
           | I have yet to ever hit a limit on codex so it's not on my
           | mind. And lately it seems like Claude is likely to be having
           | a service interruption anyway. A big part of subscribing to
           | Claude Max was to get away from how the usage limits on Pro
           | were causing me to architect my life around 5hr windows. And
           | now Anthropic has brought that all back with this don't use
           | it before 2pm bullshit. I want things ready to go when the
           | muses strike. I'm honestly questioning whether Anthropic
           | wants anyone who isn't employed as a software engineer to use
           | their kit.
           | 
           | Anyway for the last month or so codex "just works" and Claude
           | has been an invitation for annoyances. There was a time when
           | codex was quite a bit behind claude-code. They have been
           | roughly equal (different strength and weaknesses) since at
           | least February (for me).
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | I might consider switching to codex from claude pro 20x but
             | I need the post tool use, pre file write and post user
             | message hooks. Waiting on codex to deliver.
             | 
             | - pre file write -> block editing code files without a task
             | and plan of work
             | 
             | - post tool use -> show next open checkbox in the task to
             | the agent, like an instruction pointer
             | 
             | - post user message -> log all user messages for periodic
             | review of intent alignment
             | 
             | These 3 hooks + plain md files make my claude harness.
        
               | glasner wrote:
               | I am cooking up an abstraction that enables these hooks
               | on codex. Would love to have you kick the tires.
        
               | sunnybeetroot wrote:
               | Why couldn't you use Claude code harness with codex? The
               | requests can be proxied to OpenAI.
        
               | tinodb wrote:
               | I use codex through the pi agent. It's wonderful and easy
               | to create whatever extension or hook you want!
               | 
               | I'd use it with Claude too if they hadn't banned it...
        
           | deaux wrote:
           | > (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling
           | like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked.
           | Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it
           | from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party
           | harness?)
           | 
           | How often? Realistically, if you invoke it occasionally, for
           | what's clearly an amount that's "reasonable personal use",
           | then no you don't get nuked.
        
             | ls612 wrote:
             | It's the same problem people have with Google. If they ban
             | you for some AI hallucinated reason you have no recourse
             | other than going viral on Hacker News.
        
               | deaux wrote:
               | I haven't seen a single case of that happening with
               | Anthropic yet. Every time someone has gotten banned it's
               | because they either used third party harnesses which went
               | to great lengths to impersonate claude code (obvious
               | evasion), or because they set things up so it maxxed out
               | their usage 24/7.
               | 
               | I'll change my mind when I see otherwise.
               | 
               | And this isn't being positive about Anthropic support or
               | their treatment of users, as I too have seen lots of
               | people here getting billed by them for stuff they never
               | paid for, blatant fraud. That's even worse than Google.
               | I'm only talking about getting banned for usage.
        
               | oooyay wrote:
               | I plugged this question into Claude and told it to limit
               | me to 10:
               | 
               | 1. _Cancer patient banned mid-payment_ --
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46675740
               | 
               | 2. _Hobbyist coder, VPN trigger, forms into void for 10+
               | months_ -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286867
               | 
               | 3. _" Reinstated" but still locked out -- two systems out
               | of sync_ -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46007408
               | 
               | 4. _Banned for testing vision API_ --
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39988137
               | 
               | 5. _Banned on first ever prompt ( "What do you know about
               | Hacker News?")_ --
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39698788
               | 
               | 6. _Mass banning wave, some banned before first use_ --
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39672765
               | 
               | 7. _Entire company banned without warning, thousands of
               | users stranded_ --
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42210199
               | 
               | 8. _Forced new account (no email change support) -
               | immediately banned_ --
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339741
               | 
               | 9. _Banned for scaffolding a Claude.md file, support
               | email never arrives_ --
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46723384
               | 
               | 10. _$81 billing overcharge, human promised, month of
               | silence_ -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47693679
        
           | rendaw wrote:
           | They also screwed up the API token detection and also blocked
           | a bunch of 1st party tool users for ~24h.
           | 
           | Support consisted of AI bots saying you did something stupid,
           | you did something wrong, you were abusing the system,
           | followed by (only when I asked for it explicitly) claiming to
           | file a ticket with a human who will contact you later (and it
           | either didn't happen or their ticket system is /dev/null).
           | 
           | (By the way this is the 2nd time I've been "please hold"
           | gaslit by support LLMs this exact same way, the other being
           | with Square)
        
           | Bolwin wrote:
           | Claude -p is allowed. They're not going to give you a feature
           | then ban you for using it.
           | 
           | What they changed is that it now uses extra usage, which is
           | charged at api rates
        
             | wild_egg wrote:
             | It only switches to charging API rates if some part of your
             | prompt triggers their magic string detector. Lot of
             | examples of that floating around where swapping "is" for
             | "are" or whatever will magically allow the request against
             | your subscription plan again.
        
           | infecto wrote:
           | Most of those are issues are coming from a very small
           | minority. A lot of times its good for businesses to focus on
           | the customers that are driving them the highest margin, most
           | likely not users like yourself.
           | 
           | 1) Nobody should expect to use OpenClaw without API usage.
           | 
           | 2) We have known for a long time that the plans are
           | subsidized. It was not as big of a deal but now that demand
           | has continued to explode at a multiple and tools like
           | OpenClaw were creating a lot of usage from a small minority
           | of customers, prices change.
           | 
           | Everything for me points more towards, we have made a service
           | people really want to use and we are trying to balance a
           | supply shortage (compute) with pricing. Nothing is stopping
           | folks like yourself from simply paying the API rates. It is
           | the simple no hassle way to get around any issue you are
           | having, pay the API cost and you will have no limitations!
        
           | stefan_ wrote:
           | I think we are about a month away from a class action
           | lawsuit, at their revenue they are a juicy target. And god
           | knows they got the entirely self inflicted unholy combination
           | going on, marketing & sales that borders on fraud (X times
           | the usage of plan Y which has Z times of free tier which has
           | unknowable "magic tokens") and then of course the actual
           | fraud, reducing usage in fifteen different non obvious non
           | public ways.
        
           | timtimmy wrote:
           | Perhaps Anthropic should put a freeze on new signups until
           | they can increase capacity. This is the best kind of problem
           | for a business, I'm cheering for them.
        
             | greenavocado wrote:
             | If there is one thing that is crystal clear, its that LLM
             | providers will always take your money, no matter how bad
             | the service is.
        
             | sscaryterry wrote:
             | This requires ethics.
        
           | retinaros wrote:
           | i dont know why ppl are surprised. you just need to see what
           | they say on china, open source and fake safety blogs to
           | understand they re not a company that devs should give their
           | code for free to
        
           | aftbit wrote:
           | Huh I've noticed that! Opus hallucinates answers and provides
           | contradictory reasoning to me much more regularly during the
           | past couple of weeks than it did in February.
           | 
           | For example, after a question about a script that used
           | taskset and CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES to handle NUMA domains on a
           | parallel GLUE evaluation run:
           | 
           | >Round 2 tasks reuse GPU slots that Round 1 may still be
           | occupying. Cola, SST-2, and QQP are small datasets and will
           | likely finish before MNLI, but QNLI is sizable. If QNLI (GPU
           | 3, slot 3) is still running when Round 2 launches, that's
           | fine -- they're on different slots. But more importantly,
           | Round 2 uses slots 5/6/7 (GPUs 7/0/1), while Round 1 uses
           | slots 0/1/2/3/4 (GPUs 4/5/2/3/6). So there's no GPU collision
           | -- you're good here actually. Disregard, this is clean.
        
           | siva7 wrote:
           | Anthropic has become shady as hell in less than a few weeks.
           | The DoD Story and the overall popularity among developers got
           | them a huge leap over OAI but i certainly won't renew my
           | subscription with them. The Claude SDK feels like a constant
           | fight against its own limitations compared to Codex and other
           | Harnesses.
        
           | smrtinsert wrote:
           | I will say I have noticed none of these things in my
           | enterprise account. Is this is a known targeting of non-
           | enterprise clients only?
        
         | zazibar wrote:
         | A month ago the company I work at with over 400 engineers
         | decided to cancel all IDE subscriptions (Visual Studio,
         | JetBrains, Windsurf, etc.) and move everyone over to Claude
         | Code as a "cost-saving measure" (along with firing a bunch of
         | test engineers). There was no migration plan - the EVP of
         | Technology just gave a demo showing 2 greenfield projects he'd
         | built with Claude Opus over a weekend and told everyone to copy
         | how he worked. A week later the EVP had to send out an email
         | telling people to stop using Opus because they were burning
         | through too many tokens.
         | 
         | Claude seems to be getting nerfed every week since we've
         | switched. I wonder how our EVP is feeling now.
        
           | dickersnoodle wrote:
           | Hopefully that EVP feels embarrassed that a big bet was made
           | that not only didn't pay off but left the company in a worse
           | position. Some schadenfreude may be all you can expect, since
           | this is an executive.
        
           | derangedHorse wrote:
           | Pretty bad decision on his part. I've been telling other
           | engineers within my company who felt threatened by AI that
           | this would happen. That prices would rise and the marginal
           | cost for changes to big codebases would start to exceed the
           | cost of an engineer's salary. API credits are expensive,
           | especially for huge contexts, and sometimes the model will
           | use $200 in credits trying to solve a problem that could be
           | fixed in an hour by a good engineer with enough context.
           | 
           | It kind of reminds me of the joke where a plumber charges
           | $500 for a 5 minute visit. When the client complains the
           | plumber says it's $50 for labor and $450 for knowing how to
           | fix the problem.
        
             | christoph wrote:
             | A good lesson for all - I always really liked the Picasso
             | version:
             | 
             | In a bustling restaurant, an excited patron recognized the
             | famous artist Picasso dining alone. Seizing the moment, the
             | patron approached Picasso with a simple request. With a
             | plain napkin and a big smile, he asked the artist for a
             | drawing. He promised payment for his troubles. Picasso,
             | ever the creator, didn't hesitate. From his pocket, he
             | produced a charcoal pencil and he brought to life a
             | stunning sketch of a goat on the napkin--a clear mark of
             | his unique style. Proudly, he presented it to the patron.
             | 
             | The artwork mesmerized the patron, who reached out to take
             | it, only to be stopped by Picasso's firm hand. "That will
             | be $100,000," Picasso declared.
             | 
             | Astonished, the patron balked at the sum. "But it took you
             | just a few seconds to draw this!"
             | 
             | With a calm demeanor, Picasso took back the napkin,
             | crumpled it, and tucked it away into his pocket, replying,
             | "No, it has taken me a lifetime."
        
               | airstrike wrote:
               | Good story but not applicable at all
        
             | breton wrote:
             | > the model will use $200 in credits trying to solve a
             | problem that could be fixed in an hour by a good engineer
             | with enough context
             | 
             | So the price for fixing the problem is equal. Sounds like a
             | great argument for AI.
        
               | OlivOnTech wrote:
               | Most good engineers are way cheaper than that. The world
               | is bigger than the united states.
        
               | malinens wrote:
               | 99% of software developers earn less than 200 USD a hour
        
               | d1sxeyes wrote:
               | That "with enough context" is doing a lot of work here.
               | If you take a great engineer, drop them in front of an
               | unfamiliar codebase, it'll take them more than an hour to
               | do most non-trivial tasks.
        
               | collingreen wrote:
               | Equal sounds like a terrible argument given all the other
               | problems with replacing engineering thought with ai. I
               | don't know where the line is but I expect it's far beyond
               | equal AND there needs to be a level of "this can debug
               | effectively in production" before that makes any sense
               | for a real business case.
        
             | charcircuit wrote:
             | >That prices would rise
             | 
             | Competition will prevent that from happening. When anyone
             | can host open models and there is giant demand for LLMs
             | companies can not easily raise token prices without sending
             | a lot of traffic to their competitors.
        
             | jrpear wrote:
             | Even if you take it as true that prices have risen
             | recently, and may continue to rise as the VC subsidies dry
             | up, they _will_ fall again long-term. Inference will get
             | more power efficient with model-on-chip solutions like
             | Taalas and God willing we will get cheaper and cheaper
             | renewable energy.
             | 
             | Despite this I don't think engineers should feel
             | threatened. As long as there is a need for a human in the
             | loop, as today, there will still be engineering jobs. And
             | if demand for engineering effort is elastic enough, there
             | could easily be even more jobs tomorrow.
             | 
             | Rather than threatened, I think engineers should feel
             | _exposed_. To danger, yes, but opportunity as well.
        
               | travoc wrote:
               | Increased demand will not drive down energy costs.
        
               | lobf wrote:
               | Why not?
        
           | sgt wrote:
           | But cancelling IDE subscriptions? You need a proper IDE to
           | along side AI augmented development unless you want to simply
           | be along for the ride.
        
             | derwiki wrote:
             | Free VS Code is probably fine
        
               | sgt wrote:
               | I'm using the JetBrains IDE's and it's definitely worth
               | paying for, even in the age of AI.
        
             | slashdave wrote:
             | Well, you can resubscribe in an afternoon. The fired
             | workers? No real recovery from that.
        
           | groundzeros2015 wrote:
           | I can't believe how many small to mid size companies are
           | being destroyed by bad decisions like this.
           | 
           | A friend's company fired all EMs and have engineers reporting
           | to product managers. They aren't allowed to do refactors
           | because the CTO believes the AI doesn't need organized code.
        
             | aerhardt wrote:
             | How do people like that ascend to CTO?
        
               | pbowyer wrote:
               | The Peter Principle:
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
        
               | philpem wrote:
               | Or more cynically they reach their level of competence,
               | go one level further and stay there to keep them from
               | ruining the productivity of the people doing the work...
        
               | 59nadir wrote:
               | CTO is in many cases a rank more than a role, and given
               | out accordingly. You should never take someone seriously
               | based on their rank alone, much less a CTO.
        
           | kubb wrote:
           | He must be feeling pretty good, after all he still believes
           | that it was the right call, and he definitely won't be
           | admitting a mistake.
           | 
           | There's 0 chance of him facing the consequences for it
           | either.
        
           | jimmydoe wrote:
           | lol. dude is so incompetent. changing tool for cost cutting
           | is so stupid, we all know real cost cutting is firing people.
           | if he is really good at he's doing, just fire 10% people and
           | replace them with his Claude. If that didn't get backfired in
           | 3 months, he will be CT0.
        
           | thefourthchime wrote:
           | Wow, that sounds like you have a astoundingly terrible EVP.
        
           | giancarlostoro wrote:
           | Should have started slowly instead of being so aggressive
           | with it.
        
         | oezi wrote:
         | On OpenRouter token consumption is up 5x since November 2025.
         | If this is indicative of the industries growth then I can't
         | fathom how we will not hit resource constraints.
        
         | faangguyindia wrote:
         | This is actually great feature, you can do bait and switch with
         | AI.
        
         | estimator7292 wrote:
         | I can't believe how quickly they went from riding high on anti-
         | OpenAI sentiment post-DOD fiasco, to shooting themselves and
         | all their users new and old in the foot.
         | 
         | The ideal time to make your product worse is probably not at
         | the same point that all of your competitor's customers are
         | looking. Anthropic really, really fucked up here.
         | 
         | And beyond that, there's a ton of people who are just regular
         | 9-5 Claude CLI users with an enterprise subscription who are
         | getting punished with a worse model at the same price just as
         | if we were Claw users. This kind of thing does not make one
         | feel warm and fuzzy. I feel like I just got a boot to the
         | teeth.
        
           | jeremyjh wrote:
           | The hypothesis that makes the most sense is not that they are
           | idiots, but that they have no choice. They cannot meet the
           | new demand. So they've quantized the model.
        
         | stavros wrote:
         | It feels like I'm getting less and less for my money every day.
         | A few weeks ago I was programming all week and never getting
         | close to the limit, yesterday half my weekly limit went away in
         | a day. Changing the limits mid-subscription is just theft.
        
         | nojs wrote:
         | My working theory is that all models are approximately the
         | same, and the variance in quality mostly depends on how long
         | they think for.
         | 
         | So the trick is to always set to max, and then begin every task
         | with "this is an extremely complex task, do not complete it
         | without extensive deep thinking and research" or whatever.
         | 
         | You're basically fighting a battle to make the model think
         | more, against the defaults getting more and more nerfed to save
         | costs.
        
           | beering wrote:
           | My experience has been that this isn't generally true, mainly
           | because worse models pursue red herrings or get confused and
           | stuck. a better model will get to the correct solution in
           | fewer tokens, and my surface-level understanding of how RL
           | works supports this.
        
         | felixgallo wrote:
         | https://isitnerfed.org/
        
         | drzaiusx11 wrote:
         | At some point these AI companies need to pay the piper as it
         | were and actually provide a return for their investors. Expect
         | cost cutting attempts to continue unless backlash is great
         | enough to pose an existential threat to these companies.
        
         | AznHisoka wrote:
         | Its not just engineers, and its not just about the 3rd
         | party/rate limiting stuff. I feel like the reasoning
         | capabilities have deteriorated too for non-coding tasks.
        
         | ruler88 wrote:
         | Anthropic seems to be playing the giant-tech-rent-capture game
         | that all of the old guards have done for the past few years. We
         | thought that the new age of AI might bring some fresh air into
         | the mix, but I guess that optimism quickly faded.
        
         | swasheck wrote:
         | it has been my go-to provider for things but i noticed
         | extraordinarily high usage rate last month on a little side
         | project i started so that i could learn about things that are
         | interesting to me while helping my day to day responsibilities
         | (creating an iceberg data lake from my existing parquet files).
         | i used my month's worth of corporate subscription allocated
         | tokens in 3 days. never seen that before so now i'm a lot more
         | apprehensive about getting into the weeds with claude but i'm
         | also so much less impressed with the other available models for
         | work in this domain.
        
         | wouldbecouldbe wrote:
         | Developers are a tough crowd, stubborn, know it alls.
        
         | pstuart wrote:
         | The past two weeks I've had code that was delivered and
         | declared as done (it did pass tests) but failed in a review by
         | Codex. This has looped to a painful extent. The code in
         | question deals with concurrency issues so there's an
         | acknowledgement that its tricker, but still, I expect more from
         | Claude.
        
         | jitl wrote:
         | I saw a big hit to Claude's intelligence w/ the 1M context
         | window model and the change to adaptive reasoning (github issue
         | linked elsewhere in this thread).
         | 
         | I'm pretty much using 90% Codex now, although since Claude is
         | consistently faster at answering quick questions, I still keep
         | it open for that and for code-reviewing codex/human work before
         | commit.
        
         | alpha_squared wrote:
         | I'm pretty sure this is an attempt by both companies to shape a
         | reasonable finance story for their eventual IPO. They need to
         | make this look a lot better than a pump and dump (raising on
         | wild valuations then offloading onto public investors).
        
         | motbus3 wrote:
         | I think so, but more than that, the performance of those tools
         | seems to be terribly degrading when they keep saying they have
         | created some crap like AGI which we know is a lie.
         | 
         | And to me, this lie is mostly a fight to see who bites the
         | biggest chunk of the war death machine.
        
         | trashface wrote:
         | The $20 a month plan still seems like a pretty good deal for me
         | (intermittent coding and not doing it for income).
        
         | taf2 wrote:
         | I switched off claude when they nerfed opus 4.5 in August 2025,
         | since then codex has clearly produced better code with fewer
         | bugs. Opus 4.6 was more a temporary de-nerf of 4.5 but did not
         | materially improve. codex has now a proven track record of
         | producing stable results while introducing far fewer bugs.
        
         | OtomotO wrote:
         | I measured it for my specific usecases and have cancelled my
         | Anthropic subscription (the Max x20 Plan)
        
         | sneak wrote:
         | They broke my openclaw last week; I switched to "extra usage"
         | and prepaid a grand for same.
         | 
         | A few days later it simply stopped working again, API
         | authentication error. What must I do to have working, paid,
         | premium service?
         | 
         | Screwing around with it today, it works 5x slower and times out
         | all of the time. I'm paying more and getting waaaaay less. Why
         | can't companies just raise prices like normal?
        
         | jclardy wrote:
         | Just anecdotal, but I was using Claude Code for everything a
         | few months ago, and it seemed great. Now, it is making a ton of
         | mistakes, doing the wrong thing, misunderstanding context, and
         | just generally being unusable.
         | 
         | I now have been using Codex and everything has been great (I
         | still swap back and forth but generally to check things out.)
         | 
         | My theory is just that the models are great after release to
         | get people switching, then they cut them back in capabilities
         | slowly over time until the next major release to increase the
         | hype cycle.
        
           | MattDamonSpace wrote:
           | Part hypecycle, part desperate attempts to rein in usage
        
           | oorza wrote:
           | Is it the models themselves or the tools around them? There's
           | that patch[1] that floats around for Claude Code that's
           | supposed to solve a lot of these problems by adjusting its
           | tool-level prompts. Also, if it were the models themselves,
           | wouldn't Cursor users have the same complaints (do they? I
           | haven't heard anything but the only Cursor users I talk to
           | are coworkers)?
           | 
           | I think it's more likely they're trying to optimize the
           | Claude Code prompts to reduce load on their system and have
           | overcorrected at the cost of quality.
           | 
           | 1: https://gist.github.com/roman01la/483d1db15043018096ac3bab
           | f5...
        
         | throwpoaster wrote:
         | Generally, across AI providers, I have come to interpret sudden
         | degradation in existing capabilities as a signal that a new,
         | more expensive, product tier is about to launch.
        
         | Papazsazsa wrote:
         | Yes. Anthropic is burning much of the goodwill they built up in
         | contrast to OAI, and I personally am taking it as a sign to
         | limit dependencies. Luckily for me I am not at all dependent on
         | frontier models, and it's increasingly apparent that nobody
         | else is too.
         | 
         | It looks like the spreadsheet-touchers over at Anthropic won
         | out over the brand leaders, which is too bad as good will can
         | be a trench if you don't abuse your customers.
        
           | beering wrote:
           | I think on HN we always underestimate how much momentum
           | matters. Anthropic has so much clout and mindshare that even
           | if they continue burning goodwill and everyone on HN ditches
           | Claude Code and stops recommending it, they will still be
           | revenue leader for years to come. Those enterprise contracts
           | aren't month-to-month.
        
         | raincole wrote:
         | That's a seasonal phenomenon. You can save this comment and
         | look back three to six months later. By the time people will be
         | like "is it just me or ChatGPT has been so bad lately?"
         | 
         | If you don't believe me you can search HN posts about
         | Codex/Claude six months ago.
        
         | LunaSea wrote:
         | > people feel like they have no idea if they are getting the
         | product that they originally paid for
         | 
         | They do indeed get the product they originally paid for.
         | 
         | It's simply that they were suckers and didn't read the "fine"
         | print of the product they bought.
         | 
         | The label says "more tokens than the lower tier".
        
         | indigodaddy wrote:
         | Is it perhaps not a model problem but a Claude Code harness
         | problem?
         | 
         | For instance on exe.dev VMs with Shelley agent/harness and Opus
         | 4.5/4.6, I haven't noticed any deterioration.
         | 
         | Any similar feedback perhaps from Opencode / GH Copilot
         | subscription-provided Opus models?
        
         | jrockway wrote:
         | I have read the HN articles and seen the grumbling from
         | coworkers, but I haven't felt it myself. I am not really a one-
         | shotter, though. I kind of think about how I would refactor /
         | write something myself and walk Claude through that, and
         | nitpick it at each step... and the recent changes haven't
         | really bothered me there. Likely due to being new at it.
         | 
         | Sometimes Claude can be a little weird. I was asking it about
         | some settings in Grafana. It gave me an answer that didn't
         | work. I told it that. "Yeah, I didn't really check, I just
         | guessed." Then I said, "please check" and it said "you should
         | read the discussion forums and issue tracker". I said "YOU
         | should read the discussion forms and issue tracker". It
         | consumed 35k tokens and then told me the thing I wanted was a
         | checkbox. It was! I am not sure this saved me time, Claude. I
         | am not experienced enough to say that this is a deal breaker.
         | While this is burned into my mind as an amusing anecdote, it
         | doesn't ruin the service for me.
         | 
         | My coworkers have noticed a degradation and feel vindicated by
         | some of the posts here that I link. A lot of them are using
         | Cursor more now. I have not tried it yet because I kind of like
         | the Claude flow and /effort max + "are you sure?" yield good
         | results. For now. I'm always happy to switch if something is
         | clearly better.
        
           | giancarlostoro wrote:
           | How exactly do you use Claude Code, in the browser? Claude
           | Code? The Desktop App (which has a "Code" tab) or some other
           | way? I feel like people who have issues with Claude /
           | Anthropic are not conveying where they are struggling. I see
           | people say they tried "Claude" and didn't like it, but the
           | secret sauce is Claude Code. Claude Code is what most people
           | enjoy using, even if we all wish they would open up the
           | harness, because there's so many more improvements that could
           | go into it.
        
             | jrockway wrote:
             | Yeah, sorry. Claude Code in my case.
             | 
             | I do use the browser version on occasion. I have no strong
             | feelings one way or the other there. I like it better than
             | Google search in many cases, but probably just search more
             | often.
        
         | blueboo wrote:
         | Wait till Codex doubles prices/halves quotas on May 31
        
       | simianwords wrote:
       | There's a case for intelligent caching: coarse grained 1h and
       | 5min type TTls are not optimal.
        
         | PunchyHamster wrote:
         | Caching LLM is not like caching normal content; the longer it
         | is the more beneficial it is and it only stops being worth when
         | user stops current session.
         | 
         | So you'd need some adaptive algorithm to decide when to keep
         | caching and when to purge it whole, possibly on client side,
         | but if you give _client_ the control, people will make it use
         | most cache possible just to chase diminishing returns. So fine
         | grained control here isn 't all that easy; other possible
         | option is just to have cache size per account and then
         | intelligently purge it instead of relying just on TTL
        
           | cyanydeez wrote:
           | keep in mind, efficient KV caching needs to be next to the
           | GPU, so you sls need you HA to keep routing the user to the
           | same hardware.
           | 
           | the hardware VM model is almost identical. Each session can
           | go anywhere to start but a live session cant just be routed
           | anywhere without penalty.
        
       | the_mitsuhiko wrote:
       | Since I (until Anthropic decided to remove access for subs) used
       | Anthropic models extensively with pi I explored the two caching
       | options and the much higher cost of 1h caches is almost never a
       | good tradeoff.
       | 
       | Since the caching really primarily is something they can be
       | judged at scale from across many users I can only assume that
       | Anthropic looked at their infra load and impact and made a very
       | intentional change.
        
       | ares623 wrote:
       | AGI finding bugs again. Actual Guys/Gals Instead.
        
       | perks_12 wrote:
       | Just give us the option to get the quality back, Anthropic. I get
       | that even a $200 subscription is not possible eventually, but
       | give us the option to sub the $1000 tier or tell us to use the
       | API tier, but give us some consistency.
        
         | jwr wrote:
         | This. I get much more value than 90EUR from my Claude Code
         | subscription. I am willing to pay more for consistency and not
         | having to watch my back all the time, because I might get
         | screwed over.
        
       | throwaway2027 wrote:
       | I also noticed this, just resuming something eats up your entire
       | session. The past two weeks also felt like a substantial
       | downgrade and made me regret renewing my subscription, it sucks
       | because I wish I kept my Codex subscription instead and renewed
       | that.
        
         | beering wrote:
         | Are you locked into your current subscription?
        
       | PunchyHamster wrote:
       | Well, how entirely expected. The money man comes to collect and
       | they are squeezing for money
        
       | throwaway2027 wrote:
       | It's absolutely ridiculous how stupid Claude is now. I sometimes
       | notice it and last year too but it feels like it's just last year
       | before December model.
        
         | config_yml wrote:
         | Feels similar to Claude last August/September. Knowing Claude
         | some Agent probably reverted the fix from back then ^^
         | 
         | https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-...
        
       | taffydavid wrote:
       | This is the same shit openAI used to do last year, quietly
       | downgrading their offerings while hyping the next big thing. I
       | thought Anthropic were different but it seems they're playing the
       | exact same long con with Mythos.
       | 
       | They can't really revolutionize AI again so they make the product
       | worse and worse and then offer you a "better" one
        
       | WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
       | Changing "regression" to "Anthropic silently downgraded"
       | sensationalizes the story
       | 
       | Why the FUD?
       | 
       | I notice some interesting public opinion weather change since
       | Anthropic passed OpenAI wrt revenue
        
         | subscribed wrote:
         | From the response in the linked issue:
         | 
         | >> Was there a change? Yes -- March 6, intentional, part of
         | ongoing cache optimization. You pinpointed the date correctly.
         | 
         | The entire issue lays out how and why it's a silent downgrade.
         | Also silent because it just happened, without announcing.
         | 
         | I don't understand how is this FUD?
        
       | poly2it wrote:
       | One of the largest AI companies on Earth cannot figure out an
       | algorithm for when not to drop caches in long-running sessions?
        
       | mrdw wrote:
       | I noticed another limitation: "An image in the conversation
       | exceeds the dimension limit for many-image requests (2000px).
       | Start a new session with fewer images."
       | 
       | So I can't continue my claude code session I started yesterday.
        
         | beering wrote:
         | makes sense, "a picture is worth a thousand tokens" as they
         | say. They probably lowered the limit due to capacity issues.
        
         | sunnybeetroot wrote:
         | Double tap ESC and revert the conversation.
        
       | eaf7e281 wrote:
       | I think they changed the quantification to save computer power
       | for their new model. This might be why the benchmark scores look
       | good, but the real world performance is much worse. I'm wondering
       | if they're testing the model internally and didn't find anything
       | wrong with the new parameter.
       | 
       | I canceled my subscription and switched to a codex, but it's not
       | as good. I'm tired of Anthropic changing things all the time. I
       | use Claude because it doesn't redirect you to a different model
       | like OpenAI does. But now it seems like both companies are doing
       | the same thing in different way.
        
         | throwaway2027 wrote:
         | Claude is worse, they don't tell you when your experience has
         | degraded and don't even let you use worse models if you run out
         | any.
        
           | eaf7e281 wrote:
           | i mean, openai does same, even worse, they change the model,
           | like gpt 5.4 to -mini
           | 
           | anthropic for now, at least just seems to change quantization
           | of the model
        
       | hirako2000 wrote:
       | There is a chef, he opens a restaurant. Delicious food.
       | 
       | It costs him more in ingredients alone than he charges. He even
       | offers some pseudo unlimited buffet, combo sets, and happy hours.
       | 
       | He announced a new restaurant, apparently it will be even better,
       | so good he's a bit worried. He makes sure to share his worries
       | while he picks a few select enterprise for business parties and
       | the likes.
       | 
       | In the meantime he cracks down on free buffet goers who happen to
       | eat too much, and downgrades all ingredients without notice to
       | finally hope to make a profit.
        
         | embedding-shape wrote:
         | Pretty much capitalism in a nut shell, yeah.
        
         | MattRix wrote:
         | This is close, but the real problem isn't that the food is
         | underpriced, it's that the supply of ingredients is severely
         | limited.
        
           | stri8ted wrote:
           | Those are the same thing
        
             | greycol wrote:
             | They are not if there aren't customers who are willing to
             | pay more. For instance imagine a widget that lasts 1 year
             | and is just under 1/2 the price of one that lasts 2 years.
             | There may be high demand because it's the more economical
             | option. If you raise the price so that it's 1/2 the price
             | of the 2 year widget then demand collapses without
             | effecting supply.
        
           | JackYoustra wrote:
           | Is this not the same thing?
        
       | albert_e wrote:
       | So a side effect of this is -- even at 1 hour caching -- ...
       | 
       | If you run out of session quota too quickly and need to wait more
       | than an hour to resume your work ... you are paying even more
       | penalty just to resume your work -- a penalty you wouldnt have
       | needed if session quota was not so restrictive in first place,
       | and which in turn causes you to burn through next session quota
       | even faster.
       | 
       | Seems like a vicious cycle that made the UX very poor. I remember
       | Claude Code with Pro became virtually unuseable in middle of
       | March with session quota expiring within first hour or less for
       | me -- which was wildly different experience from early March.
        
       | azuanrb wrote:
       | As a Pro user, even though these issues and bugs are "new," the
       | downgrade has been noticeable since January. I've unsubscribed
       | because the Pro plan is no longer usable for me.
       | 
       | It's only making the news now because it's affecting Max users as
       | well ($100/$200 plans). I understand the need for change, but
       | having zero communication about it is just wrong.
        
       | layer8 wrote:
       | From the recent-ish Dwarkesh podcast, Anthropic seems to be wary
       | about buying/building too much compute [0]. That probably means
       | that they have to attempt to minimize compute usage when there is
       | a surge in demand. Following the argument in the podcast,
       | throwing more money after them, as some in this thread are
       | suggesting, won't solve the issue, at least not in the short
       | term.
       | 
       | [0] https://www.dwarkesh.com/i/187852154/004620-if-agi-is-
       | immine...
        
         | shdh wrote:
         | Likely accurate
         | 
         | This tends to happen during pretraining phase of new models
         | 
         | Happened with 3.x too
        
       | bsaul wrote:
       | could it be that anthropic is experiencing a massive shortage of
       | compute capacity, and is desperately trying to find means to
       | overcome it ?
       | 
       | All the news i hear about this company for the past weeks made it
       | sound like they're really desperate.
        
       | foobar10000 wrote:
       | So, this especially bites if your validation step (let's say
       | integration tests) take 1hr plus. The harness is just waiting,
       | prefix caching should happily resume things with just a minor new
       | prefill chunk of output from the harness, and bam - completely
       | new prefill.
        
       | siscia wrote:
       | Lately I am finding myself doing more and more of what I called
       | "ambient coding" so that I am not directly using anymore all of
       | those coding harnesses.
       | 
       | https://redbeardlab.gitbook.io/acem/essays/ambient-developme...
       | 
       | I basically wrote a small GitHub app and I simply create a GitHub
       | issue, the bot read it, run an LLM loop and come up with a PR (or
       | a design)
       | 
       | Then I simply approve the pr (or the design)
       | 
       | I find it much calmer and much more productive
        
       | motbus3 wrote:
       | The TOS basically states you need to deal with whatever they
       | want.
       | 
       | Meanwhile their 'best' competitor just announced they want to
       | provide unreliable mass destruction guidance tools but they don't
       | wanna feel said.
       | 
       | Honestly speaking, we are wrong whenever we do business with this
       | sort of people
        
         | bigyabai wrote:
         | > The TOS basically states you need to deal with whatever they
         | want.
         | 
         | FWIW that's what most TOSes say for the majority of online
         | services. Some even include arbitration clauses to prevent
         | civil suits and class-action cases.
        
       | benced wrote:
       | Anthropic responded: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-
       | code/issues/46829#issue...
        
         | supermdguy wrote:
         | Bizarre reading the thread, it feels like their Claude
         | responding to the other posters' Claudes
        
           | phreack wrote:
           | That was my immediate impression too! It feels like it's all
           | AI maximalists who seem to have a need to filter their every
           | interaction through an LLM. And the result looks and reads
           | just like Moltbook.
        
         | dnw wrote:
         | Interesting that they actually acknowledge there was a change
         | on March 6th. Kudos to the prompt analysis work that uncovered
         | it!
        
         | TheTaytay wrote:
         | This should be the top comment. The OP misunderstands the
         | change and has their LLM write an expose. The company responds
         | with a well-reasoned explanation that it would actually cost
         | MORE money if there was a global 1h default for ALL prompts. It
         | gets downvoted and the pitchforks stay out because...I presume
         | the words like "cache read likelihood" sounds like made up
         | fluff to the audience, rather than an actual explanation?
        
           | glenngillen wrote:
           | Because it is made up fluff for this audience. There is a
           | wall of data and evidence + anecdotes from many people
           | pointing to the exact problem here and giving concrete
           | examples of how this absolutely does cost more.
           | 
           | And an admittedly uncharitable TLDR on the response is:
           | "yeah... but most users just ask one thing and barely use the
           | product so they never need the cache. Also trust me bro".
           | 
           | Which sure, fine. I'm willing to bet is technically true. I'd
           | also bet those users never previously came close to hitting
           | their session limits given their usage because their usage is
           | so low. But now people who were previously considered low to
           | moderate users are hitting limits within minutes.
           | 
           | They may as well have just said "we've looked at the data and
           | we're happy with this change because it's a performance
           | improvement for people we make the most margin on. Sucks to
           | be you".
        
       | lordmoma wrote:
       | Claude Code is not performing on par since September 2025, there
       | was already a huge backlash then, and many people just keep
       | cheering for CC every time it made some model upgrade or TUI
       | change, it just feels so unreal.
        
       | c16 wrote:
       | I've definitely noticed in evenings it stops trying as hard to
       | solve the issue and suggests I go find the answer. Never the case
       | in the morning.
        
       | taf2 wrote:
       | I don't understand who's still using anthropic? The model
       | produces more bugs and agrees to solutions that are clearly wrong
       | at a much higher rate then codex. Codex produces significantly
       | better code with fewer bugs and far less oversight. with /fast on
       | codex it's not even slower then claude and consider it implements
       | working code more reliably you have to use it less anyway. Beside
       | anthropic appears to be more focused on fear mongering and other
       | types of FUD and is a more closed solution I do not understand
       | why so many people still appear to care what anthropic does and
       | have not already moved on? </rant>
        
       | willworktill4pm wrote:
       | This Friday CC wrote wall off gibberish text for me. No reason,
       | happened twice with different gibberish text
       | 
       | https://ibb.co/4wcVQG5k
        
         | beering wrote:
         | maybe numerics issues after quantization? Looks like it really
         | went off the rails
        
       | hattimaTim wrote:
       | Classic scammer tactics: first, lure users in by promising a huge
       | deal, then scam the hell out of them.
        
       | pkaye wrote:
       | Actually I remember the change being reported in the Reddit
       | /r/claueai chat back around that time frame. I was concerned that
       | it would increase costs but nobody made a fuss so I presumed it
       | was not a big deal.
        
       | snowstormsun wrote:
       | Well, the 10x promised revenue increase must come from
       | somewhere...
        
       | zeckalpha wrote:
       | I find similar happening with Gemini Pro. Despite paying for Pro,
       | it regularly locks me out, without visibility into consumption.
       | Nothing on the plan comparison page indicates limits.
       | https://one.google.com/about/plans
       | 
       | Edit: I may have conflated these two threads.
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47739260
        
       | yobid20 wrote:
       | i thought it was always 5 minutes? ive been telling people 5
       | minutes for months so i dont think this is anything new?
        
       | foofloobar wrote:
       | Claude Code and the subscription are now less useful than a few
       | months ago. Claude Code and the service seem to pick up more and
       | more issues as time goes by: more bugs, fast quota drain, reduced
       | quota, poor model performance, cache invalidation problems, MCP
       | related bugs, potential model quantization and other problems.
       | 
       | Claude Code was able to implement something in one shot. It was
       | decent for a proof of concept initial implementation. It's barely
       | able to do work now with full specs and detailed plans.
       | 
       | ChatGPT is also being watered down.
       | 
       | It seems obvious that Anthropic and OpenAI aren't the solution to
       | any problem.
        
         | trollbridge wrote:
         | I caught up with a friend who said he's really happy with
         | Cursor (currently using the multi-model option where it
         | composes, and reserving use of Opus 4.6 for only when he
         | actually needs the extra power).
         | 
         | Quite interesting considering all the claims that Cursor was
         | dead a few months ago.
        
           | foofloobar wrote:
           | I wouldn't trust another company either. Some people have
           | reported some issues with Cursor. The solution is probably
           | not a cloud API with unknown quotas or pay as you go pricing.
        
         | ecocentrik wrote:
         | They are clearly straining under new demand and everyone is
         | being served highly quantized models without notice.
        
         | throw_m239339 wrote:
         | Every single one of these AI services are running at loss, they
         | are subsidized. Anybody who is surprised that these services
         | are going to get degraded and their cost go up substantially
         | learned nothing from the last 20 years of SAAS. It never gets
         | cheaper.
        
       | computerex wrote:
       | Good job anthropic. You had a clear lead with all devs singing
       | the praises of Opus. Way to lose all that by Enshittifying the
       | experience.
        
       | par wrote:
       | Claude code has gone down hill in a really bad way. It is often
       | far too quick to make significant changes, and requires much
       | higher level of hand-holding and explanation than I am used to.
       | r/claudecode on reddit shows a litany of complaints!
        
       | espeed wrote:
       | Does Anthropic's real time data ingestion effect its model
       | behavior globally? Could a file read by your agent effect the
       | behavior of mine?
        
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