47 ms·

Claude Code is being dumbed down?

1085 points by WXLCKNO 7mo ago

cess11 7mo ago
This "intervening" people are mentioning in these issues, does it stop the execution on the backend or just cause the client to stop listening to it?
theZilber 7mo ago
What happens when you press ctrl+o? You get verbose mode?
- koakuma-chan 7mo ago
  I just tested, it shows you which files it read, same as first example he gave "Where you used to see."
  - WXLCKNO 7mo ago
    Yeah just that it's not real time and you have to toggle to see it. It lags a bunch also in longer threads. Definitely a downgrade.
    - koakuma-chan 7mo ago
      I mean yes, they claim that it's "Claude Code Native" or something but it does feel laggy and takes multiple seconds to start. What do they even mean native, didn't they acquire Bun? It's not native. They need to rewrite it in Rust, I'm serious.
      - WXLCKNO 7mo ago
        Codex feels much faster. For a while after the rewrite (to rust also I think?) it was bad because you couldn't copy anything from the terminal but since then it's gotten much much better.
- pacoWebConsult 7mo ago
  You can only ctrl+o the most recent response, and its a lot worse than knowing the # of lines read or the pattern grepped, which are useful because it can tell you what the agent is thrashing on trying to find, or what context would be useful to give it upfront in the future.
- alsetmusic 7mo ago
  I believe it opens the file that was referenced. Apologies in advance if I got that wrong.
- stefan_ 7mo ago
  Honestly? Half the time the shitty vibe coded Claude CLI interface spergs out. Don't try to scroll too much
htx80nerd 7mo ago
another case of 'devs are out of touch with users basics needs and basic day-to-day usage of our app'
- closewith 7mo ago
  It's definitely a case of out-of-touch devs, but which cohort they are is still to be seen.
- AlotOfReading 7mo ago
  I think it's a case of wishful design. When they (or rather their own vibecoding tools) imagine how the tool is used, they aren't imagining that it's actually a human-machine interface, with the human actively engaged in the loop. Instead, the human is mostly expected to behave as a magical prompt oracle with a credit card and let the machine take care of the details.
- falloutx 7mo ago
  by devs you mean those two guys on twitter who brag about vibe coding with 100 agents running simultaneously. While Claude Code still can't display images. I wonder what they are doing with those 100 agents
noupdates 7mo ago
Quite frankly, most seasoned developers should be able to write their own Claude Code. You know your own algorithm for how you deal with lines of code, so it's just a matter of converting your own logic. Becoming dependent on Claude Code is a mistake (edit: I might be too heavy handed with this statement). If your coding agent isn't doing what you want, you need to be able to redesign it.
- nicetryguy 7mo ago
  It's not that simple. Claude Code allows you to use the Anthropic monthly subscription instead of API tokens, which for power users is massively less expensive.
  - tibbar 7mo ago
    this is the real reason why people are switching to claude code.
  - co_king_3 7mo ago
    Drug dealer business model. The first bag is free. Don't act surprised when you get addicted and they 10x the price.
- bradfa 7mo ago
  Yes and no. There are many not-trivial things you have to solve when using an LLM to help (or fully handle writing) code. For example, applying diffs to files. Since the LLM uses tokenization for all its text input/output, sometimes the diffs it'll create to modify a file aren't quite right as it may slightly mess up the text which is before/after the change and/or might introduce a slight typo in text which is being removed, which may or may not cleanly apply in the edit. There's a variety of ways to deal with this but most of the agentic coding tools have this mostly solved now (I guess you could just copy their implementation?). Also, sometimes the models will send you JSON or XML back from tool calls which isn't valid, so your tool will need to handle that. These fun implementation details don't happen that often in a coding session, but they happen often enough that you'd probably get driven mad trying to use a tool which didn't handle them seamlessly if you're doing real work.
co_king_3 7mo ago
Am I mistaken or is Claude Code essentially an opt-in rootkit?
- minimaxir 7mo ago
  Modern agenting coding software is scoped to only allow edits in the project folder, with some sandboxing more aggressively than others (Claude Code the most)
  - Der_Einzige 7mo ago
    Don't lie. The correct way to run it is with sudo su - then IS_SANDBOX=1 claude code --dangerously-skip-permissions This is the true AI pilled version.
- lukev 7mo ago
  And it's pretty easy to run in a stronger sandbox too. "docker sandbox run claude" in a recent version of docker is a super easy way to get started.
- chasd00 7mo ago
  only if you run it as root, run it as a user and it can't do any more damage than the user running it could. It can still certainly send any data the user has access to anywhere on the inet though, that's a big problem. idk if there's a way to lock down a user so that they can only open sockets to an IP on a whitelist.. maybe that could be an option to at least keep the data from going anywhere except to Anthropic (that's not anywhere close to perfect/correct either but it's something i guess).
alansaber 7mo ago
I don't feel as if any CLI editor has quite nailed UX yet
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
  If you are talking about agents I feel like opencode has gotten pretty good UI/UX If you are talking about a CLI editor, then micro has hit the nail on quality UX https://micro-editor.github.io/ https://micro-editor.github.io/
  - AnonyX387 7mo ago
    The UX where it completely breaks copy paste conventions on Linux? Other than that I agree it's gotten pretty good but this one thing drives me mad each time I use it.
    - Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
      I think that you can actually change the keybindings to follow the copy paste conventions that you want in micro But personally I really love these new copy paste conventions, its the ctrl q convention which troubled me in ghostty but what I did was "ctrl > " write quit enter https://github.com/micro-editor/micro/blob/master/runtime/help/keybindings.md https://github.com/micro-editor/micro/blob/master/runtime/he...
ramon156 7mo ago
All my information about this is being based on feels, because debugging isn't really feasible. Verbose mode is a mess, and there's no alternative. It still does what I need so I'm okay with it, but I'm also on the $20 plan so it's not that big of a worry for me. I did sense that the big wave of companies is hitting Anthropic's wallet. If you hadn't realized, a LOT of companies switched to Claude. No idea why, and this is coming from someone who loves Claude Code. Anyway, getting some transparency on this would be nice.
- co_king_3 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - cindyllm 7mo ago
    [dead]
  - palebluedot 7mo ago
    > FWIW I think LLMs are a dead end for software development, and that the people who think otherwise are exceptionally gullible. By this do you mean there isn't much more room for future improvement, or that you feel it is not useful in its current form for software development? I think the latter is hard position to defend, speaking as a user of it. I am definitely more productive with it now, although I'm not sure I enjoy software development as much anymore (but that is a different topic)
    - co_king_3 7mo ago
      > By this do you mean there isn't much more room for future improvement I don't expect that LLM technology will improve in a way that makes it significantly better . I think the training pool is poisoned, and I suspect that the large AI labs have been cooking the benchmark data for years to suspect that their models are improving more quickly than they are in reality. That being said, I'm sure some company will figure out new strategies for deploying LLMs that will cause a significant improvement. But I don't expect that improvements are going to come from increased training. > [Do] you feel it is not useful in its current form for software development? IME using LLMs for software development corrodes my intuitive understanding of an enterprise codebase. Since the advent of LLMs, I've been asked to review many sloppy 500+/1000+ line spam PRs written by arrogant Kool-Aid drinking coworkers. If someone is convinced that Claude Code is AGI, they won't hesitate to drop a slop bomb on you. Basically I feel that coding using LLMs degrades my understanding of what I'm working on and enables coworkers to dominate my day with spam code review requests.
ekropotin 7mo ago
Another instance of devs being out of touch is them wanting Claude Code to respect AGENT.md: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 What’s wrong with you, people? Are you stupid?
- JetSetIlly 7mo ago
  I've never used Claude or anything like it so this may be a dumb question: could you solve this problem by having a CLAUDE.md file that simply says to use AGENT.md if one is available. Can an AI agent not do that?
  - ekropotin 7mo ago
    Yes, the most common solution for this problem either creating a symbolic CLAUDE.md link pointing to AGENT.md (or visa versa) if OS supports it. Or, in CLAUDE.md have an instruction to follow AGENT.md - but this approach is quite unreliable. These are solutions to a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place. How else can one explain Anthropic’s reluctance to adhere to a widely adopted standard, if not as an attempt to build a walled garden around an otherwise great product?
  - deaux 7mo ago
    It's not a dumb question per se but it does fail to understand the issue. It's that there's 20 coding agents yet only 1 of them needs this solving. Imagine if all of them needed this. It's like IE6, or Lightning connectors. At least for that last one there's an argument that they performed better than USB-C. For the Anthropic people reading this - take note that both IE and Lightning are now dead and their competitors that followed the standards are thriving.
    - JetSetIlly 7mo ago
      I understand the issue is that Anthropic is not adhering to a standard. I was simply asking whether it's possible to solve the problem created by Anthropic in the way I was asking.
colechristensen 7mo ago
I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about! - Zapp I mean I get it I guess but I'm not nearly so passionate as anyone saying things about this
JohnMakin 7mo ago
I'm not sure this is a regression, at least how I use it - you can hit control + o to expand, and usually the commands it runs show the file path(s) it's using, and I'm really paranoid with it, and I didn't even notice this change.
- thousand_nights 7mo ago
  i've never had to use control + o before but with the latest changes, i give Opus a simple task that should take a few seconds and it's like "used 15k tokens" and "thinking" for three minutes with absolutely zero indication or visibility as to what it's actually doing and i have to ESC ESC it to stop and ask what the FUCK are you actually doing claude?
  - virtue3 7mo ago
    I think this change is really disingenuous. If they hide how the tool is accessing files (aka using tokens) and then charging us per token - how are we able to track loosely what our spend is? I’m all for simplification of the UX. But when it’s helping to hide the main spend it feels shitty.
  - misnome 7mo ago
    Yes, I’ve been evaluating since the start of the year and since 4.6 suddenly the most innocuous requests will sit there “thinking” for 5+ minutes and if I can get it to show me the thinking it’s just going round in circles. Or, it decided it needs to get API documentation out and spends tens of thousands of tokens fetching every file in a repo with separate tool use instead of reading the documentation. Profitable, if you are charging for token usage, I suspect. But I’m reaching the point where I can’t recommend claude to people who are interesting in skeptically trying it out, because of the default model.
    - JohnMakin 7mo ago
      I guess I engineered around this before 4.6 - I did notice a regression in it wanting to search deeper than I wanted and had specified, but just restricted it with tooling I wrote that would enforce what I wanted. In that respect, I feel comfortable running 4.6 with the guardrails I already have, but did notice some squirrelyness I didnt anticipate in my utility scripts. It is clever. its its best and worst feature.
koakuma-chan 7mo ago
> Read 3 fies (ctrl+o to expand) What if you hit ctrl+o?
- huydotnet 7mo ago
  exactly what i think when reading the top of the article, maybe the author turned off vebose mode
  - thunfischtoast 7mo ago
    The verbose mode is, well, verbose. They removed, without any need, info and hid it in a wall of text.
kissgyorgy 7mo ago
This is why I am a big fan of self-hosting, owning your data and using your own Agent. pi is a really good example. You can have your own tooling and can switch any SOTA model in a single interface. Very nice! https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi/ https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi/
- alexandriaeden 7mo ago
  This is exactly the right instinct. When you own the agent harness, you decide what's visible. I've been building my own tooling on top of Playwright for similar reasons — the feedback loop between 'what did the agent just do' and 'should I let it continue' is the core UX of any agent, not a detail to be abstracted away. Hiding it breaks the only trust mechanism the user has.
MicKillah 7mo ago
This comes up from time to time and although my experience is anecdotal, I see clear degradation of output when I run heavy loads (100s of batched/chunked requests, via an automated pipeline) and sometimes the difference in quality is absolutely laughable in how poor it is. This gets worse for me as I get closer to my (hourly, weekly) limits. I am Claude Max subscriber. There’s some shady stuff going on in the background, for sure, from my perspective and experience during my year or so of intense usage.
- afro88 7mo ago
  Man, you have to read the article, not just the headline
  - MicKillah 7mo ago
    That would definitely be helpful, but the headline hit a painful spot for me and I went in! You’re right tho! I was in my feelins. I still am. lol
wouldbecouldbe 7mo ago
Developers are just complainers.
ffritz 7mo ago
What if it’s used with a different harness, e.g. Opencode?
- minimaxir 7mo ago
  You infamously cannot use Claude Code with a different harness anymore (without shenanigans that will likely draw Anthropic's ire).
turnsout 7mo ago
As a heavy CC user, I appreciate a cleaner console output. If you really need to know which 3 files CC read, AI-assisted coding agents might not be for you.
- turnsout 7mo ago
  Downvoted, but fight me on this… It's important to see what it wrote, but what it read?
  - FergusArgyll 7mo ago
    If there's obviously important context in foo and I see that it didn't read foo then I know that means it's making assumptions which are wrong
artisin 7mo ago
Vibe-coders griping about Claude's vibe-coded CLI hits all the right vibes.
- WXLCKNO 7mo ago
  Jokes about vibe-coded CLI aside, I think that's the issue for me, the defaults are being tailored to vibe coders. (and the general weirdness of trying to fix it with verbose mode) I like that people who were afraid of CLIs perhaps are now warming up to them through tools like Claude Code but I don't think it means the interfaces should be simplified and dumbed down for them as the primary audience. Sure you can press CTRL+O, but that's not realtime and you have to toggle between that and your current real time activity. Plus it's often laggy as hell.
- Maxion 7mo ago
  Literally the opposite though, as being able to see what it reads allows you to tell it to ignore certain files when you see it read the wrong one, and adjust the claude.md file to ensure that it does not read incorrect files given a specific input. True vibe coders don't care about this.
- koverstreet 7mo ago
  Yeah, these all sound like complete non issues if you're actually... keeping your codebase clean and talking through design with Claude instead of just having it go wild. I'm using it for converting all of the userspace bcachefs code to Rust right now, and it's going incredibly smoothly. The trick is just to think of it like a junior engineer - a smart, fast junior engineer, but lacking in experience and big picture thinking. But if you were vibe coding and YOLOing before Claude, all those bad habits are catching up with you suuuuuuuuuuuper hard right now :)
- red_hare 7mo ago
  I hate to say it, but "vibe-coders" are just "coders" now. It's a huge shift, but we need to start thinking of AI-tools as developer tools, just like a formatter, linter, or IDE would be. The right move is diversity. Just like diversity of editors/IDEs. We need good open source claude code alternatives.
hirako2000 7mo ago
Sounds like the compacting issue. > Compacting fails when the thread is very large > We fixed it. > No you did not > Yes now it auto compacts all messages. > Ok but we don't want compaction when the thread isn't large, plus, it still fails when the compacted thread is too large > ...
- Joel_Mckay 7mo ago
  Let me fix that for you: > Compacting fails when the thread is very large Flips coin, it is Heads > We fixed it. > No you did not Flips coin, it is Tails > Yes now it auto compacts all messages. Flips coin, it is Heads > Ok but we don't want compaction when the thread isn't large, plus, it still fails when the compacted thread is too large Flips coin, it is Grapefruit > ... Congratulations on a vibe solution, if you are unhappy with the frequency of isomorphic plagiarism... the vendor still has your money and new data =3
eptcyka 7mo ago
Can we not like, just apply a patch? Or will anthropic be mad if I run their client with my own patch? Nix makes it easy to package up esotheric patches reliably and reproducibly, claude lowers the cost of creating such patches, the only roadblocks Inforesee are legal.
- tylergetsay 7mo ago
  Claude code is distributed as a minified JS bundle so you cant just easily patch in this functionality
  - eptcyka 7mo ago
    I’m told that this new LLM tech is great at deminimizing minified javascript, no?
- jy14898 7mo ago
  https://github.com/aleks-apostle/claude-code-patches/pull/9 https://github.com/aleks-apostle/claude-code-patches/pull/9 is what I found, not tested yet
lukev 7mo ago
If you're not vibecoding your own UX to render CC's output the way you like it, you're not living.
- co_king_3 7mo ago
  If you're not vibecoding your own UX to render CC's output the way you like it, you're getting replaced by AI.
  - scottyah 7mo ago
    If you're not replacing the replacers, you're the replaced.
    - tclancy 7mo ago
      This is why I joined The Watchmen.
ares623 7mo ago
"This is as bad as it's going to be" turning out to be wrong They could change course, obviously. But how does the saying go again -- it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a VC funded tech startup to not enshittify.
Retr0id 7mo ago
I also found this change annoying. Often a codebase ends up with non-authoritative references for things (e.g. docs out of sync with implementation, prototype vs "real" version), and the proper solution is to fix and/or document that divergence. But let's face it, that doesn't always happen. When the AI reads from the wrong source it only makes things worse, and when you can't see what it's reading it's harder to even notice that it's going off track.
jascha_eng 7mo ago
There are a lot of non developer claude code users these days. The hype about vibe coding lets everyone think they can now be an engineer. Problem is if anthropic caters to that crowd the devs that are using it to do somewhat serious engineering tasks and don't believe in the "run an army of parallel agents and pray" methodology are being alienated. Maybe Claude Code web or desktop could be targeted to these new vibe coders instead? These folks often don't know how simple bash commands work so the terminal is the wrong UX anyway. Bash as a tool is just very powerful for any agentic experience.
- MattGaiser 7mo ago
  Anecdotally, all the non-technical people I know are adapting fine to the console. You don’t need to know how bash commands work to use it as you are just approving commands, not writing them.
  - fcatalan 7mo ago
    Approving commands you don't understand doesn't seem ideal
    - operatingthetan 7mo ago
      People are handing over their entire system to openclaw, so that's about where we are.
      - system2 7mo ago
        Because we haven't heard about the disaster stories yet, give it some time and see how people will talk about it as if it were a virus.
- WXLCKNO 7mo ago
  Exactly how I feel. I'm happy that more people are using these tools and learning (hopefully) about engineering but it shouldn't degrade the core experience for let's say "more advanced" users who don't see themselves as Vibe coders and want precise control over what's happening.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
parhamn 7mo ago
We opensourced our claude code ui today: https://github.com/bearlyai/openade https://github.com/bearlyai/openade I wanted a terminal feel (dense/sharp) + being able to comment directly on plans and outputs. It's MIT, no cloud, all local, etc. It includes all the details for function runs and some other nice to haves, fully built on claude code. Particularly we found planning + commenting up front reduces a lot of slop. Opus 4.6 class models are really good at executing an existing plan down to a T. So quality becomes a function of how much you invest in the plan.
- ramoz 7mo ago
  Built similar focused specifically on planning annotations. https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator It integrates with the CLI through hooks. completely local.
  - parhamn 7mo ago
    That looks great! Planning phase is really key.
mnicky 7mo ago
At least now we also have a tracker: https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/ https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/
- WXLCKNO 7mo ago
  Saw this the other day and loved it. Especially seeing Opus 4.5 degrading prior to the 4.6 release (IIRC) and Codex staying very stable and even improving over time. But FYI the blog post is not about the actual model being dumbed down, but the command line interface.
dogleash 7mo ago
>Try using it for a few days. We've been using this internally at Anthropic for about a month now, and found that it took people a few days to mentally switch over to the new UI. Once they did, it "clicked" and they appreciated the reduced noise and focus on the tools that actually do need their attention. Ah, the old "you're holding it wrong."
- WXLCKNO 7mo ago
  Sorry I'm dumber than the average Anthropic employee, might just take me a few more days for it to "click" that I'm no longer seeing useful information and that this is good.
- layer8 7mo ago
  They’re dog-fooding it wrong. ;)
iamleppert 7mo ago
As soon as there is a viable alternative to Claude Code, I'm gone after this change. It appears minor on the surface but their response to all the comments tells you everything you need to know. They don't even want to concede at all, or at least give a flag to enable the old behavior, what was deployed and working for many users before. It's a signal that someone, somewhere at Anthropic is making decisions based on ego, not user feedback. The other fact pattern is their CLI is not open source, so we can't go in and change it ourselves. We shouldn't have to. They have also locked down OpenCode and while there are hacks available, I shouldn't have to resort to such cat and mouse games as someone who pays $200/month for a premium service. I'm aggressively exploring other options, and it's only a matter of if -- not when, one surfaces.
- WXLCKNO 7mo ago
  "It appears minor on the surface but their response to all the comments tells you everything you need to know." I mean I hope it's just a single developer being stubborn rather than guidance from management asking everyone to simplify Claude Code for maximum mass appeal. But I agree otherwise, it's telling.
- deagle50 7mo ago
  codex cli. I switched, no regrets. Also, $20 for top model vs being limited to sonnet.
  - stefan_ 7mo ago
    Plus (the $20 plan) is still stuck on 5.2 right now..
    - deagle50 7mo ago
      5.3 codex xhigh works for me
      - ReptileMan 7mo ago
        Honestly even medium is quite good.
nekusar 7mo ago
Well, they already fucked over the community with their "lol not really unlimited" rug-pull. For those of you who are still suckered in paying for it, why do you think the company would care how they abuse the existing users? You all took it the last time.
self_awareness 7mo ago
Add another LLM to extract paths from verbose mode...
jwr 7mo ago
I really dislike this trend that unfortunately has become, well, a trend. And has followers. Namely, let's simplify to "reduce noise" and "not overwhelm users", because "the majority of users don't need…". This is spreading like a plague: browser address bars are being trimmed down to nothing. Good luck figuring out which protocol you're using, or soon which website you are talking to. The TLS/SSL padlock is gone, so is the way to look into the site certificate (good luck doing that on recent Safari versions). Because users might be confused. Well the users are not as dumb as you condescendingly make them out to be. And if you really want to hide information, make it a config setting. Ask users if they want "dumbo mode" and see if they really do.
- titanomachy 7mo ago
  The TLS thing at least kind of makes sense. 99.9% of sites that the typical user visits will have a correctly configured and trusted certificate and communicate over TLS, so the browsers only show an indicator when that’s not the case. I think it’s a sensible evolution given how the internet has changed.
  - jwr 7mo ago
    Again with the "99.9%" argument. This is always the beginning of a path towards dumbing things down. "99% of users…, 99% of sites…, in 99% of cases…" — this is always how these things begin. Also, was the padlock really such a problem? Did it really have to be removed? If not, perhaps another easily accessible way to access this data could be invented. Like, I don't know, a menu item perhaps?
    - titanomachy 7mo ago
      In chrome on macOS, the information is still there. It’s right where it used to be, to the left of the url. But quickly glancing at safari on Mac and phone I wasn’t able to find the information at all, which, yeah, I disagree with that decision. Both browsers show “not secure” pretty prominently for non-TLS sites, and very loudly complain about sites with untrusted certificates, so the absence of either of those things signals a trusted cert, which is now the most common case by a very wide margin for me.
boutell 7mo ago
Strong meme game. I'm on an older release and now I'm reluctant to update. In my current release, the verbosity is just where I want it and control-o is there when I really need it.
SOLAR_FIELDS 7mo ago
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8477 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8477 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/15263 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/15263 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/9099 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/9099 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8371 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8371 It's very clear that Anthropic doesn't really want to expose the secret sauce to end users. I have to patch Claude every release to bring this functionality back.
- resiros 7mo ago
  Honestly, just use OpenCode. It works with Claude Code Max, and the TUI is 100x better. The only thing that sucks is Compaction.
  - kakugawa 7mo ago
    How much longer is Anthropic going to allow OpenCode to use Pro/Max subscriptions? Yes, it's technically possible, but it's against Anthropic's ToS. [1] 1: https://blog.devgenius.io/you-might-be-breaking-claudes-tos-without-knowing-it-228fcecc168c https://blog.devgenius.io/you-might-be-breaking-claudes-tos-...
    - exitb 7mo ago
      Consider switching to an OpenAI subscription, which allows OpenCode use.
      - Aeolun 7mo ago
        Yeah. OpenAI allows any client, and only one single fixed system prompt. All their control is on the backend, which is worse than Claude.
    - azinman2 7mo ago
      Doesn’t Claude code have an agents sdk that officially allows you to use the good parts?
lionkor 7mo ago
Meanwhile GPT-5.3-Codex which just released recently is a huge change and much better. It now displays intermediate thinking summaries instead of being silent.
- fooker 7mo ago
  My experience using it from cursor has been fairly disappointing
  - chairmanwow1 7mo ago
    Much better in the codex cli harness
    - fooker 7mo ago
      Interesting, I can give that a try at some point.
    - roflcopter69 7mo ago
      There's one really confusing thing in Codex CLI from my perspective. How do I make it run unsandboxed but still ask me for approvals? I'm fine with it running bare on my machine but I like to approve first before it runs commands. But I only see how I can configure to have both or none. What am I missing?
      - machiaweliczny 7mo ago
        --help explains this, -s for sandbox and -a for approvals
        roflcopter69 7mo ago
        Thanks! That helped. Really strange though, that the slash commands inside the CLI do not allow for such a detailed configuration. It allows for the sandbox and approvals options but there's only "default" and "just allow everything" while the CLI flags or the config.toml allows for more nuanced options.
juancn 7mo ago
Just stop using the damn thing if you don't like it.
ukuina 7mo ago
It's clear we're seeing the same code-vs-craft divergence play out as before, just at a different granularity. Codex/Claude would like you to ignore both the code AND the process of creating the code.
paseante 7mo ago
I have been using it extensively, and for me it's fine as it is. Also, the title is just false. How did this get into HN frontpage, that's a good question.
jtrn 7mo ago
I find it hard to care about claims of degradation of quality, since this has been a firehouse of claims that don't map onto anything real and is extremely subjective. I myself made the claim in error. I think this is just as ripe for psychological analysis as anything else.
- layer8 7mo ago
  You seem to be referring to something else than the topic the article is about.
- thunfischtoast 7mo ago
  Did you read the article? It's not about subjective claims, it's about a very real feature getting removed (file reads showing the filepath and numbers of lines read).
  - jtrn 7mo ago
    This is exactly what I am talking about. Let me try to explain. I am interested in the more abstract and general concept of: "People excessively feel that things are worse, even if they are not." And I see this A LOT in the AI/LLM area. For instance, the claim that Claude Code, on the UX/DX side, is dumbed down seems to me absolutely not a reasonable take. The "hiding" of the file name being read is no longer being shown neither supports that claim, AND has to be seen in the context of Claude Code as a whole. On the first point: Could one not make the argument that "not showing files read", is part of a more advanced abstraction layer, switching emphasis to something else in the UX experience? That could, by some, be seen as the overall package becoming more advanced and making choices as to what is presented for cognitive load. Secondly... it's not removed. It's just not default shown in non-verbose mode. As I understand it, you can just hit CTRL+O to see it again. Secondly, even if it was done ONLY to be less for "power user focus," and more for dumb people (got to love the humility in the developer world), it's blindly obvious that you can't just mention ONE change as proof that Claude Code is dumbed down. And to me, it just does not compute to say that Claude Code feels dumbed down over the last patches. The amount of more advanced features, like seeing background tasks, the "option" selection feature, lifecycle hooks, sub-agents, agent swarms, skills—all of these have been released in just the last few months. I have used Claude Code since the very beginning, and it is just insane to claim that it's getting dumber as a tool. And this is just in relationship to the actual functionality, UX, and DX, not the LLM quality. But people see "I now have to hit CTRL+O to see files being read = DUMBED DOWN ENSHITFICATION!!!" I don't get it. My point was simply... I'm much more interested in the psychological aspects driving everybody to predictably always claim that "things are getting worse," when it seems to not be the case. Be that in the exaggerated (but sometimes true) claims of model degradation, or as in this example of Claude Code getting dumbed down. What is driving this bias towards seeing and claiming things are getting worse, out of proportion to reality? Or even shorter: why are we obsessed with the narrative of decline?
heywoods 7mo ago
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/24537 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/24537 Seems like a dashboard mode toggle to run in a dedicated terminal would be a good candidate to move some of this complexity Anthropic seems to think “most” users can’t handle. When your product is increasing cognitive load the answer isn’t always to remove the complexity entirely. That decision in this case was clearly the wrong one.
locusofself 7mo ago
Working at Microsoft, I've just now hooked up to Claude Code (my department was not permitted to use it previously), through something called "Agent Maestro", a vscode extension which I guess pipes claude code API requets to our internally hosted Claude models, including Opus 4.6. I do wonder if there is going to be much of a difference between using Claude Code vs. Copilot CLI when using the same models.
- pletnes 7mo ago
  I honestly don’t think the models are as important as people tend to believe. More important is how the models are given tools - find, grep, git, test runners, …
  - Galanwe 7mo ago
    > I honestly don’t think the models are as important as people tend to believe. I tend to disagree. While I don't see meaningful _reasoning power_ between frontier models, I do see differences in the way they interact with my prompts. I use exclusively Anthropic models because my interactions with GPT are annoying: - Sonnet/Opus behave like a mix of a diligent intern, or a peer. It does the work, doesn't talk too much, gives answers, etc. - GPT is overly chatty, it borderline calls me "bro", tend to brush issues I raise "it should be good enough for general use", etc. - I find that GPT hardly ever steps back when diagnosing issues. It picks a possible cause, and enters a rabbit hole of increasingly hacky / spurious solutions. Opus/Sonnet is often to step back when the complexity increases too much, and dig an alternative. - I find Opus/Sonnet to be "lazy" recently. Instead of systematically doing an accurate search before answering, it tries to "guess", and I have to spot it and directly tell it to "search for the precise specification and do not guess". Often it would tell me "you should do this and that", and I have to tell it "no, you do it". I wonder if it was done to reduce the number of web searches or compute that it uses unless the user explicitly asks.
- nfg 7mo ago
  > I do wonder if there is going to be much of a difference between using Claude Code vs. Copilot CLI when using the same models. I’m also at MS, not (yet?) using Claude Code at work and pondering precisely the same question.
kittbuilds 7mo ago
[dead]
unltdpower 7mo ago
This is the end game I've been Casandra'ing since the beginning. You all are refining these models through their use, and the model owners will be the only ones with access to true models while you will be fed whatever degraded slop they give you. You all are helping concentrate even more power in these sociopaths.
vintagedave 7mo ago
> That’s it. “Read 3 files.” Which files? Doesn’t matter. “Searched for 1 pattern.” What pattern? Who cares. Product manager here. Cynically, this is classic product management: simplify and remove useful information under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism if you're more overt about your influences. It's something that as an industry we should be over by now. It requires deep understanding of customer usage in order not to make this mistake. It is _really easy_ to think you are making improvements by hiding information if you do not understand why that information is perceived as valuable. Many people have been taught that streamlining and removal is positive. It's even easier if you have non-expert users getting attention. All of us here at HN will have seen UIs where this has occurred.
- idopmstuff 7mo ago
  Also product manager here. Not at all cynically, this is classic product management - simplify by removing information that is useful to some users but not others. We shouldn't be over it by now. It's good to think carefully about how you're using space in your UI and what you're presenting to the user. You're saying it's bad because they removed useful information, but then why isn't Anthropic's suggestion of using verbose mode a good solution? Presumably the answer is because in addition to containing useful information, it also clutters the UI with a bunch of information the user doesn't want. Same thing's true here - there are people who want to see the level of detail that the author wants and others for whom it's not useful and just takes up space. > It requires deep understanding of customer usage in order not to make this mistake. It requires deep understanding of customer usage to know whether it's a mistake at all, though. Anthropic has a lot deeper understanding of the usage of Claude Code than you or I or the author. I can't say for sure that they're using that information well, but since you're a PM I have to imagine that there's been some time when you made a decision that some subset of users didn't like but was right for the product, because you had a better understanding of the full scope of usage by your entire userbase than they did. Why not at least entertain the idea that the same thing is true here?
  - lp0_on_fire 7mo ago
    > You're saying it's bad because they removed useful information, but then why isn't Anthropic's suggestion of using verbose mode a good solution? Because reading through hundreds of lines verbose output is not a solution to the problem of "I used to be able to see _at a glance_ what files were being touched and what search patterns were being used but now I can't".
torginus 7mo ago
My issue with CC is that its interface deliberately obscures the code from you, making you treat it more like a genie you make wishes of rather than making changes and checking the output. I may not be up to date with the latest & greatest on how to code with AI, but I noticed that as opposed to my more human in the loop style,
- deagle50 7mo ago
  Because they don't want you to improve.
tern 7mo ago
Claude's brand is sliding dangerously close to "the Microsoft of AI." DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS I write mainly out of the hope that some Anthropic employees read this: you need an internal crusade to fight these impulses. Take the high road in the short-term and you may avoid being disrupted in the long-term. It's a culture issue. Probably your strongest tool is specifically educating people about the history. Microsoft in the late 90s and early 00s was completely dominant, but from today's perspective it's very clear: they made some fundamental choices that didn't age well. As a result, DX on Windows is still not great, even if Visual Studio has the best features, and people with taste by and large prefer Linux. Apple made an extremely strategic choice: rebuild the OS around BSD, which set them up to align with Linux (the language of servers). The question is: why? Go find out. The difference is a matter of sensibility, and a matter of allowing that sensibility to exist and flourish in the business.
- mightybyte 7mo ago
  The thing that annoys me most of all is they block me from using OpenCode with my Claude Max plan. I find the OpenCode UI to be meaningfully better than Claude Code's, so this is really annoying.
  - seeEllArr 7mo ago
    if you are an expert developer smarter than everyone at anthropic, like everyone else commenting on this post, you'll know that it's not difficult to use the claude agent sdk behind an api to achieve almost exactly the same thing
  - marinhero 7mo ago
    Some workarounds are here https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/7410 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/7410 but I agree with you, this should be a native feature.
- NewsaHackO 7mo ago
  Huh? Why wouldn’t developers (who probably have stock options in Claude) try to prevent becoming 'the Microsoft of AI'? That's probably what they are actively trying to do.
shevy-java 7mo ago
This shows one problem here: a private entity controls Claude Code. You can reason that it brings benefits (perhaps), but to me it feels wrong to allow my thinking or writing code be controlled by a private entity. Perhaps I have been using Linux for too long - I may turn into RMS 2.0 (not really though, I like BSD/MIT licences too).
evo_9 7mo ago
Serous question - why do people stick with Clause Code over Cursor? With Cursors base subscription I have access to pretty much all the Frontier models and can pick and choose. Anthropic models haven’t been my go-to in months, Gemini and Codex produce much better results for me.
- esafak 7mo ago
  Wouldn't you run out of tokens sooner? That's the big problem.
- flaviolivolsi 7mo ago
  Because when it's good, it's really good - Cursor doesn't work as well for me and also I prefer the TUI experience. If anything, the real alternative is OpenCode.
- CharlesW 7mo ago
  My answer is that I tested both, and Claude Code (~8 months ago) was so obviously better than Cursor that I continue to happily pay Anthropic $200/month. Based on anecdotes I happen to catch, I don't believe Cursor's caught up. The value isn't just the models. Claude Code is notably better than (for example) OpenCode, even when using the same models. The plug-in system is also excellent, allowing me to build things like https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ that everyone can benefit from.
- elzbardico 7mo ago
  Part of the sauce is not in the model, but in the agent itself. And for that matter, I think AMP an incredibly better agent that Claude Code. But then, Claude heavily subsidized subscription prices are hard to beat.
- SatvikBeri 7mo ago
  Cursor performs notably worse for me on my medium-sized codebase (~500kloc), possibly because they try to aggressively conserve context. This is especially true for debugging, Claude Code will read dozens of files and do a surprisingly good job of finding complex bugs, while Cursor seems to just respond with the first hypothesis it comes up with. That said, Cursor Composer is a lot faster and really nice for some tasks that don't require lots of context.
elzbardico 7mo ago
This was really useful; sometimes, by a glance, you'd see Claude looking at the wrong files or searching the wrong patterns, and would be able to immediately interrupt it. For those of us who like to be deeply involved in what Claude is doing, those updates were terribly disappointing.
_user_account 7mo ago
[dead]
idopmstuff 7mo ago
I've been on the other side of this as a PM, and it's tough because you can't always say what you want to, which is roughly: This product is used by a lot of users with a range of use cases. I understand this change has made it worse for you, and I'm genuinely sorry about that, but I'm making decisions with much more information than you have and many more stakeholders than just you. > What majority? The change just shipped and the only response it got is people complaining. I'll refer you to the old image of the airplane with red dots on it. The people who don't have a problem with it are not complaining. > People explained, repeatedly, that they wanted one specific thing: file paths and search patterns inline. Not a firehose of debug output. Same as above. The reality is there are lots of people whose ideal case would be lots of different things, and you're seeking out the people who feel the same as you. I'm not saying you're wrong and these people don't exist, but you have to recognize that just because hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people want something from a product that is used by millions does not make it the right decision to give that thing to all of the users. > Across multiple GitHub issues opened for this, all comments are pretty much saying the same thing: give us back the file paths, or at minimum, give us a toggle. This is a thing that people love to suggest - I want a feature but you're telling me other people don't? Fine, just add a toggle! Problem solved! This is not a good solution! Every single toggle you add creates more product complexity. More configurations you have to QA when you deploy a new feature. Larger codebase. There are cases for a toggle, but there is also a cost for adding one. It's very frequently the right call by the PM to decline the toggle, even if it seems like such an obvious solution to the user. > The developer’s response to that? > I want to hear folks’ feedback on what’s missing from verbose mode to make it the right approach for your use case. > Read that again. Thirty people say “revert the change or give us a toggle.” The answer is “let me make verbose mode work for you instead.” Come on - you have to realize that thirty people do not in any way comprise a meaningful sample of Claude Code users. The fact that thirty people want something is not a compelling case. I'm a little miffed by this post because I've dealt with folks like this, who expect me as a PM to have empathy for what they want yet can't even begin to considering having empathy for me or the other users of the product. > Fucking verbose mode. Don't do this. Don't use profanity and talk to the person on the other side of this like they're an idiot because they're not doing what you want. It's childish. You pay $20/month or maybe $100/month or maybe even $200/month. None of those amounts entitles you to demand features. You've made your suggestion and the people at Anthropic have clearly listened but made a different decision. You don't like it? You don't have to use the product.
arjie 7mo ago
The histrionic tone is annoying but this is actually a feature failure. The utility of seeing what files were being read is I could help direct its use if it goes down the wrong pathway. I use a monorepo so that's an easy mistake for the software to make.
james_marks 7mo ago
Since last Friday it’s felt like CC rolled back a year of progress. Not sure what to attribute it to, or what this article seems to be about but it _felt_ much dumber.
g-mork 7mo ago
Absolutely worse than dumbed down, 4.6 is a mess. Ask it the simplest of questions, look away, and come back to 700 parallel tool uses. https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1r1cfha/is_anyone_else_burning_through_opus_46_limits_10x/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1r1cfha/is_anyone...
ergonaught 7mo ago
If you've got a solution to the problem of bad decisions made by people who shouldn't be empowered to make them in the first place, you'll solve more than Claude Code.
madrox 7mo ago
I have noticed, if I hit my session quota before it resets, that Claude gets "sleepy" for a day or so afterward. It's demonstrably worse at tasks...especially complex ones. My cofounder and I have both noticed this. Our theory is that Claude gets limited if you meet some threshold of power usage.
peacebeard 7mo ago
My biggest beef in recent versions is the automatic use of generic built in skills. I hate it when I ask a simple question and it says "OK! Time to use the RESEARCHING_CRAZY_PROBLEM skill! I'll kickstart the 20 step process!" when before it would just answer the question. You can control this behavior, so it's not a dealbreaker. But it shows a sort of optimism that skills make everything better. My experience is that skills are only useful for specific workflows, not as a way to broadly or generally enhance the LLM.
bayindirh 7mo ago
It's pretty interesting to watch AI companies start to squeeze their users as the constraints (financial, technical, capacity-wise) start to squeeze the companies. Ads in ChatGPT. Removing features from Claude Code. I think we're just beginning to face the music. It's also funny that how Google "invented" ad injection in replies with real-time auction capabilities, yet OpenAI would be the first implementer of it. It's similar to how transformers played out. For me, that's another "popcorn time". I don't use any of these to any capacity, except Gemini, which I seldom use to ask stuff when deep diving in web doesn't give any meaningful results. The last question I asked managed to return only one (but interestingly correct) reference, which I followed and continued my research from there.
viraptor 7mo ago
I don't get why people cling to the Claude Code abusive relationship. It's got so many issues, it's getting worse, and it's clear that there's no plan to make it open for patching. Meanwhile OpenCode is right there. (despite Anthropic efforts, you can still use it with a subscription) And you can tweak it any way you want...
thisisit 7mo ago
My last experience with Claude support was a fun merry go round. I had used a Visa card to buy monthly Pro subscription. One day I ran out of credits so I go to buy extra credit. But my card is declined. I recheck my card limit and try again. Still declined. To test the card I try extending the Pro subscription. It works. That's when I notice that my card has a security feature called "Secure by Visa". To complete transaction I need to submit OTP on a Visa page. I am redirected to this page while buying Pro subscription but not when trying to buy extra usage. I open a ticket and mention all the details to Claude support. Even though I give them the full run down of the issue, they say "We have no way of knowing why your card was declined. You have to check with your bank". Later I get hold of a Mastercard with similar OTP protection. It is called Mastercard Securecode. The OTP triggers on both subscription and extra usage page. I share this finding with support as well. But the response is same - "We checked with our engineering team and we have no way of knowing why the other Visa card was declined. You have to check with your bank". I just gave up trying to buy extra usage. So, I am not really surprised if they keep making the product worse.
- encom 7mo ago
  I guarantee you talked to a chat bot. There are no human support agents anywhere anymore.
  - thisisit 7mo ago
    I did talk to human support after going through multiple rounds of "check with your bank" with the chatbot. The response was slow, taking over 24hrs between each response.
- polski-g 7mo ago
  Its true. They have no idea why your bank was declining the charge, only that it was declined.
chickensong 7mo ago
For a general tool that has such a broad user base, the output should be configurable. There's no way a single config, even with verbose mode, will satisfy everyone. Set minimal defaults to keep output clean, but let users pick and choose items to output across several levels of verbosity, similar to tcpdump, Ansible, etc. (-v to -vvvvv). I know businesses are obsessed with providing Apple-like "experiences", where the product is so refined there's just "the one way" to magically do things, but that's not going to work for a coding agent. It needs to be a unix-like experience, where the app can be customized to fit your bespoke workflow, and opening the man page does critical damage unless you're a wizard. LLMs are already a magic box, which upsets many people. It'll be a shame if Anthropic alienates their core fan base of SWEs by making things more magical.
brundolf 7mo ago
What a weird hill to die on
- hungryhobbit 7mo ago
  And also a complete PR fail. This is damaging their brand with devs for no meaningful benefit.
  - brundolf 7mo ago
    I didn't even see it was a brand blog. Sheesh
hungryhobbit 7mo ago
Everyone, file your own ticket (check the box saying you searched for existing tickets anyway)! After the Anthropic PMs have to delete their hundredth ticket about this issue, they will feel the need to fix it ... if only to stop the ticket deluge!
choldstare 7mo ago
not getting dumbed down, ai is getting smarter than you at a speed faster than you can keep up or understand, have to abstract things and simplify so you can stay connected.
stillpointlab 7mo ago
I'm old, so I remember when Skyrim came out. At the time, people were howling about how "dumbed down" the RPG had become compared to previous versions. They had simplified so many systems. Seemed to work out for them overall. I understand the article writers frustration. He liked a thing about a product he uses and they changed the product. He is feeling angry and he is expressing that anger and others are sharing in that. And I'm part of another group of people. I would notice the files being searched without too much interest. Since I pay a monthly rate, I don't care about optimizing tokens. I only care about the quality of the final output. I think the larger issue is that programmers are feeling like we are losing control. At first we're like, I'll let it auto-complete but no more. Then it was, I'll let it scaffold a project but not more. Each step we are ceding ground. It is strange to watch someone finally break on "They removed the names of the files the agent was operating on". Of all of the lost points of control this one seems so trivial. But every camels back has a breaking point and we can't judge the straw that does it.
- root_axis 7mo ago
  If you're paying a monthly rate you still have to optimize for tokens, otherwise you'll be rate limited.
  - kingkawn 7mo ago
    And not just by the day! The weekly limits are the biggest mistake imaginable for maintaining user engagement on a project.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- Der_Einzige 7mo ago
  Skyrim is one of the most over-rated games of all time. Dark Messiah Might and Magic did everything except music and exploration/scale better, and I mean a LOT better. It's from 2006. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p3zj0YKKYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p3zj0YKKYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeRUHzYJwNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeRUHzYJwNE
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
Robdel12 7mo ago
I’m a heavy Claude code user and it’s pretty clear they’re starting to bend under their vibe coding. Each Claude code update breaks a ton of stuff, has perf issues, etc. And then this. They want to own your dev workflow and for some reason believe Claude code is special enough to be closed source. The react TUI is kinda a nightmare to deal with I bet. I will say, very happy with the improvements made to Codex 5.3. I’ve been spending A LOT more time with codex and the entire agent toolchain is OSS. Not sure what anthropic’s plan is, but I haven’t been a fan of their moves in the past month and a half.
- binsquare 7mo ago
  Same, codex 5.3 was able to solve a problem that I personally was stuck on even with help from Claude for the last 2 weeks.
- viking123 7mo ago
  I switched to Codex 5.3 too, it's cheaper also anyway and as dumb as it sounds, Scam Altman is actually the less annoying CEO compared to Amodei which is kind of an achievement. Amodei really looking more and more like some huckster giving these idiotic predictions to the press.
  - Der_Einzige 7mo ago
    Scam Altman is Epstein tier: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz6lq6x2gd9o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz6lq6x2gd9o https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/technology/sam-altman-sister-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/technology/sam-altman-sis...
    - OrangeMusic 7mo ago
      So he's been accused of various crimes and has not been not found guilty? Not like Epstein at all then.
  - amai 7mo ago
    OpenAI’s president is a Trump mega-donor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46771231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46771231
oxag3n 7mo ago
So much for human replacement. Map it to a workplace: - Hey Joe, why did you stop adding code diff to your review requests? - Most reviewers find it simpler. You can always run tcpdump on our shared drive to see what exactly was changed. - I'm the only one reviewing your code in this company...
qwertox 7mo ago
It was because of the (back then) new Haiku model, maybe 3.5, that i decided to subscribe yearly. more than good enough for a language layer to interact with the mcp server. Now I'm even hesitant to use it.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
runjake 7mo ago
> “Read 3 files.” Which files? > “Searched for 1 pattern.” Hit Ctrl-o like it mentions right there, and Claude Code will show you. Or RTFM and adjust Output Styles[1]. If you don't like these things, you can change them. Like it or not, agentic coding is going mainstream and so they are going to tailor the default settings toward that wider mainstream audience. 1. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles
muyuu 7mo ago
Perhaps some power user of Claude Code can enlighten me here, but why not just using OpenCode? I admit I've only briefly tried Claude Code, so perhaps there are unique features there stopping the switch, or some other form of lock-in.
- TJTorola 7mo ago
  Anthropic is actively blocking calls from anything but claude code for it's claude plans. At this point you either need to be taking part in the cat and mouse game to make that plan work with opencode or you need to be paying the much more expensive API prices.
  - muyuu 7mo ago
    i see i guess they were blocking OpenCode for a reason this will put people to the test that use mainly Anthropic, to have a second look at the results from other models
anupamchugh 7mo ago
[flagged]
greenie_beans 7mo ago
can't stand not seeing what exactly an ai agent is doing on my machine
searls 7mo ago
LOL, no, dumbing down was when I paid two months of subscription with the model literally struggling to write basic functions. Something Anthropic eventually acknowledged but offered no refunds for. https://ilikekillnerds.com/2025/09/09/anthropic-finally-admits-claude-quality-degradation/ https://ilikekillnerds.com/2025/09/09/anthropic-finally-admi... I care A LOT about the details, and I couldn't care less that they're cleaning up terminal output like this.
qwertox 7mo ago
I absolutely love reading thoughts and see the commands it uses. It teaches me new stuff, and I think this is what young people need: be able to know WHAT it is doing and WHY it is doing it. And have the ability to discuss with another agent about what the agent and me are trying to archive, and we can ask them questions we have without disturbing the flow, but seeing the live output. Regarding the thoughts: it also allows me to detect problematic paths it takes, like when it can't find a file. For example today I was working on a project that depends on another project, managed by another agent. While refactoring my code it noticed that it needs to see what this command is which it is invoking, so it even went so far as to search through vs code's user data to find the recent files history if it can find out more about that command... I stopped it and told it that if it has problems, it should tell me. It explained it can't find that file, i gave it the paths and tokens were saved. Note that in that session I was manually approving all commands, but then rejected the one in the data dir. Why dumb it down?
- ayewo 7mo ago
  > While refactoring my code it noticed that it needs to see what this command is which it is invoking, so it even went so far as to search through vs code's user data to find the recent files history if it can find out more about that command... I stopped it and told it that if it has problems, it should tell me. TIL that there's an especially apt xkcd comic for this scenario: "Zealous Autoconfig" https://xkcd.com/416/ https://xkcd.com/416/
486sx33 7mo ago
[dead]
vincentjiang 7mo ago
It's nerfed to a point that it feels more like lawyer than a coding assistant now. We were arguing about an 3rd party API ToU for 1 hour last night. VSC Copilot executed it within 1 minute.
svnt 7mo ago
They don’t seem to realize that doing vibe coding requires enough information to get the vibes. There are no vibes in “I am looking at files and searching for things” so I have zero weight to assign to your decision quality up until the point where it tells me the evals passed at 100%. Your agent is not good enough. I trust it like I trust a toddler not to fall into a swimming pool. It’s not trying to, but enough time around the pool and it is going to happen, so I am watching the whole time, and I might even let it fall in if I think it can get itself out.
- nektro 7mo ago
  the definition of vibe coding is that you never check what it's doing, you only check its output; eg the actual website/feature you're having it build.
  - svnt 7mo ago
    I could accept that definition, but really that seems less like vibe coding and more like just not coding. Vibe coding for me is more like: yeah this doesn’t look insane and you got the interface from the right git repo. Like I wouldn’t put my name on it at work and defend it in a code review but I also didn’t just push the button and hope.
tzury 7mo ago
Here's my honest take on this: You're mass-producing outrage out of a UX disagreement about default verbosity levels in a CLI tool. Let's walk through what actually happened: a team shipped a change that collapsed file paths into summary lines by default. Some users didn't like it. They opened issues. The developers engaged, explained their reasoning, and started iterating on verbose mode to find a middle ground. That's called a normal software development feedback loop. Now let's walk through what you turned it into: a persecution narrative complete with profanity, sarcasm, a Super Bowl ad callback, and the implication that Anthropic is "hiding what it's doing with your codebase" — as if there's malice behind a display preference change. A few specific points: The "what majority?" line is nonsense. GitHub issues are a self-selecting sample of people with complaints. The users who found it cleaner didn't open an issue titled "thanks, this is fine." That's how feedback channels work everywhere. You know this. "Pinning to 2.1.19" is your right. Software gives you version control. Use it. That's not the dramatic stand you think it is. The developers responding with "help us understand what verbose mode is missing" is them trying to solve the problem without a full revert. You can disagree with the approach, but framing genuine engagement as contempt is dishonest. A config toggle might be the right answer. It might ship next week. But the entitlement on display here isn't "give us a toggle" — it's "give us a toggle now, exactly as we specified, and if you try any other approach first, you're disrespecting us." That's not feedback. That's a tantrum dressed up as advocacy. You're paying $200/month for a tool that is under active development, with developers who are visibly responding to issues within days. If that feels like disrespect to you, you have a calibration problem. With kind regards, Opus 4.6
nikcub 7mo ago
claude code is big enough now that it really needs a preview / beta release channel where features like this can be tested against a smaller audience before being pushed out. as a regular and long-term user, it's frequently jarring being pushed new changes / bugs in what has become a critical tool. surprised their enterprise clients haven't raised this
dev_l1x_be 7mo ago
Give me my local models so I can write a locally handcrafted tool that does what I want, goddamit.
the__alchemist 7mo ago
Hey... I have been experimenting with Claude for a few days, and am not thrilled with it compared to web chatbots. I suspect this is partly me being new and unskilled with it, but this is a general summary. ChatGPT or Gemini: I ask it what I wish to do, and show it the relevant code. It gives me a often-correct answer, and I paste it into my program. Claude: I do the same, and it spends a lot of time thinking. When I check the window for the result, it's stalled with a question... asking to access a project or file that has nothing to do with the problem, and I didn't ask it to look for. Repeat several times until it solves the problem, or I give up with the questions.
syspec 7mo ago
RooCode is a better version of ClaudeCode than ClaudeCode. No affiliation, just a fan.
tryauuum 7mo ago
can't you write some tool to display the files being read with the inotify system call? Usually I hate programming but it feels like a nice little tool to create
singularfutur 7mo ago
Anthropic is optimizing for enterprise contracts, not hacker cred. This is what happens when you take VC money and need to sell to Fortune 500s. The "dumbing down" is just the product maturing beyond the early adopter phase.
smcleod 7mo ago
> That’s it. “Read 3 files.” Which files? Doesn’t matter. It doesn't say "Read 3 files." though - it says "Read 3 files (ctrl+o to expand)" and you press ctrl+o and it expands the output to give you the detail. It's a really useful feature to increase the signal to noise ratio where it's usually safe to do so. I suspect the author simply needs to enable verbose mode output.
- pkilgore 7mo ago
  This is directly addressed in the article.
aipatselarom 7mo ago
Exact same thing with Codex from 5.2 to 5.3. There's no conspiracy, though, other than more tokens consumed = more money, and they want that.
myko 7mo ago
I really hate this change. I had just given a demo about how Claude Code helped me learn some things by showing exactly what it was doing, and now it doesn't do that any more. So frustrating.
supermatt 7mo ago
And they hate that people are using different agents (like opencode) with their subscription - to the extent that they have actively been trying to block it. With stupidity like this what do they expect? It’s only a matter of time before people jump ship entirely.
testfrequency 7mo ago
I agree the quality of Claude Code recent has felt poor and frustrating. I’ve been persistently dealing with the agent running in circles on itself when trying to fix bugs, not following directions fully and choosing to only accomplish partial requests, failing to compact and halting a session, and ignoring its MCP tooling and doing stupid things like writing cruddy python and osascripts unnecessarily. I’ve been really curious about codex recently, but I’m so deep into Claude Code with multiple skills, agents, MCPs, and a skill router though. Can anyone recommend an easy migration path to codex as a first time codex user from Claude code?
mnewme 7mo ago
Just use pi, love it!
mrinterweb 7mo ago
I thought this was going to talk about a nerfed Opus 4.6 experience. I believe I experienced one of those yesterday. I usually have multiple active claude code sessions, using Opus 4.6, running. The other sessions were great, but one session really felt off. It just felt much more dumbed down than what I was used to. I accidentally gave that session a "good" feedback, which my inner conspiracy theorist immediately jumps to a conclusion that I just helped validate a hamstrung model in some A/B test.
pkilgore 7mo ago
https://www.conductor.build/ https://www.conductor.build/
jgb1984 7mo ago
I like claude models, but crush and opencode are miles ahead of claude code. It's a pity anthropic forces us to use inferior tooling (I'm on a "team" plan from work). I can use an API key instead but then I'll blow past 25$ in an hour.
bcherny 7mo ago
Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. I wanted to take a sec to explain the context for this change. One of the hard things about building a product on an LLM is that the model frequently changes underneath you. Since we introduced Claude Code almost a year ago, Claude has gotten more intelligent, it runs for longer periods of time, and it is able to more agentically use more tools. This is one of the magical things about building on models, and also one of the things that makes it very hard. There's always a feeling that the model is outpacing what any given product is able to offer (ie. product overhang). We try very hard to keep up, and to deliver a UX that lets people experience the model in a way that is raw and low level, and maximally useful at the same time. In particular, as agent trajectories get longer, the average conversation has more and more tool calls. When we released Claude Code, Sonnet 3.5 was able to run unattended for less than 30 seconds at a time before going off the rails; now, Opus 4.6 1-shots much of my code, often running for minutes, hours, and days at a time. The amount of output this generates can quickly become overwhelming in a terminal, and is something we hear often from users. Terminals give us relatively few pixels to play with; they have a single font size; colors are not uniformly supported; in some terminal emulators, rendering is extremely slow. We want to make sure every user has a good experience, no matter what terminal they are using. This is important to us, because we want Claude Code to work everywhere, on any terminal, any OS, any environment. Users give the model a prompt, and don't want to drown in a sea of log output in order to pick out what matters: specific tool calls, file edits, and so on, depending on the use case. From a design POV, this is a balance: we want to show you the most relevant information, while giving you a way to see more details when useful (ie. progressive disclosure). Over time, as the model continues to get more capable -- so trajectories become more correct on average -- and as conversations become even longer, we need to manage the amount of information we present in the default view to keep it from feeling overwhelming. When we started Claude Code, it was just a few of us using it. Now, a large number of engineers rely on Claude Code to get their work done every day. We can no longer design for ourselves, and we rely heavily on community feedback to co-design the right experience. We cannot build the right things without that feedback. Yoshi rightly called out that often this iteration happens in the open. In this case in particular, we approached it intentionally, and dogfooded it internally for over a month to get the UX just right before releasing it; this resulted in an experience that most users preferred. But we missed the mark for a subset of our users. To improve it, I went back and forth in the issue to understand what issues people were hitting with the new design, and shipped multiple rounds of changes to arrive at a good UX. We've built in the open in this way before, eg. when we iterated on the spinner UX, the todos tool UX, and for many other areas. We always want to hear from users so that we can make the product better. The specific remaining issue Yoshi called out is reasonable. PR incoming in the next release to improve subagent output (I should have responded to the issue earlier, that's my miss). Yoshi and others -- please keep the feedback coming. We want to hear it, and we genuinely want to improve the product in a way that gives great defaults for the majority of users, while being extremely hackable and customizable for everyone else.
kshri24 7mo ago
Hilarious! Anthropic can just vibe code the boolean flag in.
- ares623 7mo ago
  I think they already do? Which is commendable tbh. But I keep my popcorn ready and warm for the day when their vibe coding can't keep up with the codebase. Of course they will try their best to hide that fact for as long as possible.
markoa 7mo ago
Like any CLI Claude Code should follow decades old tradition of providing configurable verbosity levels, like tcpdump's -v to -vvvvv to accommodate varying usage contexts.
keeganpoppen 7mo ago
this has got to be one of the worst comments sections i've ever seen on HN... people shouting past each other... into the void...
- ares623 7mo ago
  WHAT??
neom 7mo ago
If you've not, I recommend giving Opus[1m] + teams a shot, warning it's hella expensive but holy cow... what a tool.
slantaclaus 7mo ago
$200 a month? I buy compute credits as needed and have used maybe $300 in a year
Johnny_Bonk 7mo ago
I unfortunately have unsubbed from my 200 plan after having it for months, It really really seems to me that you never 100% feel like you're getting 4.6 and the same was happening with 4.5, some sessions it truly felt like haiku was being used despite the default setting and high thinking.
purplecats 7mo ago
shrinkflation
go_photon_go 7mo ago
Gemini CLI shows all the file paths.
go_photon_go 7mo ago
Gemini CLI shows the file paths
tehjoker 7mo ago
It's kind of annoying to see headlines complaining about some consumer facing UI that sound like a fundamental change in the model.
kittbuilds 7mo ago
[dead]
perrygeo 7mo ago
I must use AI differently than y'all. Do we not use plan mode? There is almost no value in watching the stream of intermediate tokens. There's no need to micromanage the agent's steps. Just monitor the artifact and insist the LLM summarizes findings in plain English. If it can't explain the proposed change coherently, it can't code it coherently either. `git restore .` I find it much more effective to throw away bad sessions, try a new prompt than to massage the existing context swamp.
ndespres 7mo ago
It makes sense that any product written after the advent of these AI code generators, including the AI code generators themselves, will get worse as it starts to eat itself.
bandrami 7mo ago
No, it's a psychological effect. Claude Code pushes the reward center in your brain, and that reward center gets tired after a while.
causal 7mo ago
Could write a similar post about their cloud UI. Feel like you have so little control over the thing. I think Cursor has an uphill battle by having to go through the API, but they certainly do a better job of making conversations and context more transparent and manageable.
dacapoday 7mo ago
Goodbye Claude Code. Welcome Pi.
BuleBule 7mo ago
I've been using Claude Code heavily for the past few weeks on a production project. Opus 4.6 is noticeably more capable than what I was using before, longer autonomous runs, better contextual awareness across files, fewer hallucinated edits. The UX changes I'm less sure about. The progressive disclosure thing makes sense in theory but sometimes I want to see exactly what it's doing without clicking through. The terminal is where I work, don't hide things from me. Boris's response here is the right move though. Acknowledging the miss and committing to a fix in the next release is how you build trust with a dev audience.
bennydog224 7mo ago
It feels like CC got nerfed after the 4.6 drop.
leejongyon 7mo ago
Many people are complaining, and that is indeed a meaningful step toward improvement. However, I just want to say 'Thank you' here.
toliveistobuild 7mo ago
This isn't just a UI preference issue, it's the observability problem that every agentic system hits eventually. When you're building agents that interact with real environments (browsers, codebases, APIs), the single hardest thing to get right isn't the model's reasoning. It's giving the operator enough visibility into what the agent is actually doing without drowning them in noise. There's a narrow band between "Read 3 files" (useless) and a full thinking trace dump (unusable), and finding it requires treating observability as a first-class design problem, not a verbosity slider. The frustrating part is that Anthropic clearly understands this in other contexts. Their own research on agent safety talks extensively about the need for human oversight of autonomous actions. But the moment it's their own product, the instinct is to simplify away the exact information that makes oversight possible. The people pinning to 2.1.19 aren't being difficult. They're telling you that when an agent touches my codebase, I need to know which files it read and what it searched for — not because I want to micromanage, but because that's literally the minimum viable audit trail. Take that away and you're asking users to trust a black box that edits production code.
- tefkah 7mo ago
  this isn't just an empty comment -- it's the same llm slop infesting every part of your existence.
ashwinr2002 7mo ago
This is a horrible change! I agree with everything in the article
kittbuilds 7mo ago
[dead]
userbinator 7mo ago
AI so intelligent, it enshittifies itself and your codebase for you.
consciousTed 7mo ago
I liked the way it was. Its a companion developer not an autonomous one. Let it speak developer to me or give it a know. Run from naive to hacker
jongjong 7mo ago
The dumbing down of LLMs seems to be working in my favor so far as my platform provides guardrails for LLMs by abstracting away complexity. They could potentially dumb it down further, but if they did that, it would hurt other use cases and competitors much more.
Lockal 7mo ago
One good solution should be mentioned here - run Claude under strace/ltrace/LD_PRELOAD/etc. The fact that LLM miss to read files is crucial for solving tasks. It does not matter that LLM later say "Yeah, I've fully read the specification and here is your code" if you check the log and it says: "Reading SPEC.md lines 1-400" <end_of_read>. Overall, the complete log of interaction with the system should always be available, otherwise it is effectively a malware. That's not an exaggeration: consider that at any point of time any side part can spit out a prompt injection. Consider the use case: previously in xz-utils it was needed to sabotage the landlock kernel level sandbox, AND to exist in the memory of sshd, AND to be able to hijacking the RSA_public_decrypt. Now the only thing is needed - printf.
singularfutur 7mo ago
Claude got smarter so we see less. Same playbook every SaaS uses when power users become edge cases. File paths aren't noise. They're the only thing stopping your LLM from hallucinating your codebase into garbage.
PostOnce 7mo ago
You open your toolbox to get your pliers, but due to nanite software updates, your pliers are now a chisel. We carefully considered this change and feel it brings the most value to our users, and we hope you'll love chisel as much as we do. One day, you guys are gonna learn not to tie your livelihoods to the whim of a corporation, but today isn't that day.
jillesvangurp 7mo ago
The meta issue here with AI companies is that they while they excel at producing LLMs, they don't have any inherent advantages when eating their own dog food and it shows in the quality and UX of their products. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have been maintaining a high pace of releasing often poorly thought through new products and experimenting with features. A lot of their product releases show all the hallmarks of vibe coding: randomly breaking features, poor QA and testing on releases, etc. OpenAI seems to have the upper hand in UX currently. Their products feel a bit more polished and they've clearly tried to up their game. Taking over Jony Ive's company a few months ago is a clear signal that they want to do better. The Codex AI desktop app was a clear step up from their web app and cli. I've been using both before that was released. Both companies are spread very thin trying to do both end user and developer oriented products and features while keeping existing paying users happy as well. Both companies also have had a string of rushed product releases that kind of fizzled out: OpenAI's Atlas, which was a response to Anthropic's Comet. Neither of which seem to be very popular at this point. Several false starts with apps (OpenAI), Claude Cowork, etc. There are a lot of half formed product ideas there that than don't get the attention they deserve. And it's not like MS, Google, and Apple are any better. If anything they are more hesitant and out of their depth here. They are all dancing around the hard issues here which are UX and security/trust models. Also, while coders get a lot of toys, nailing agentic tools for business users is proving to be a lot harder. Blanket access to everything via an agentic browser is not a viable solution. I can agentically code a structured document via latex or markdown. But the same tools are relatively useless in spreadsheets, presentations, and documents. And while you can do a lot of potentially interesting things if you surrender your inbox, the security failure modes around that remain a show stopping obstacle for wide adoption. There's a lot of stage fright, hesitation, and immature product management in this sector. There's a bit of gold rush in terms of rapid experimentation. But as the stakes get higher, a lot of these companies are increasingly lacking the freedom to move as fast as needed. Fear of liability issues is preventing them to do a lot. Which is why most progress is concentrated around developer tools.
zeptonix 7mo ago
Yeah just adding to this -- being able to see the files being operated on is absolutely essential for figuring out if you need to ^C it and try again or if you need to let it keep going.
bluesnowmonkey 7mo ago
Along the same lines: I want the context window percentage visible at all times, not just when it drops below 10%. By that point it's too late to do anything useful. I can't even get it to finish up and dump its state to a file before the window is full. If I could see the percentage the whole time, I could pace my work and wrap things up cleanly instead of slamming into the wall.
tom_m 7mo ago
Yes. Because there's not enough compute. Most providers do this.
samspot 7mo ago
Posting like this is an anti-pattern. "Everyone wants what I want, and if you don't build it my way you are stupid." Props to teams that can find some value in feedback like this, but I think I would have stopped reading. If you have really valuable feedback for a product the last thing you want to do is deliver it wrapped in ignorance and entitlement.
MantraHQ 7mo ago
[dead]

1085 points by WXLCKNO 7mo ago

This "intervening" people are mentioning in these issues, does it stop the execution on the backend or just cause the client to stop listening to it?

theZilber 7mo ago

What happens when you press ctrl+o? You get verbose mode?

koakuma-chan 7mo ago
I just tested, it shows you which files it read, same as first example he gave "Where you used to see."
- WXLCKNO 7mo ago
  Yeah just that it's not real time and you have to toggle to see it. It lags a bunch also in longer threads. Definitely a downgrade.
  - koakuma-chan 7mo ago
    I mean yes, they claim that it's "Claude Code Native" or something but it does feel laggy and takes multiple seconds to start. What do they even mean native, didn't they acquire Bun? It's not native. They need to rewrite it in Rust, I'm serious.
    - WXLCKNO 7mo ago
      Codex feels much faster. For a while after the rewrite (to rust also I think?) it was bad because you couldn't copy anything from the terminal but since then it's gotten much much better.
pacoWebConsult 7mo ago
You can only ctrl+o the most recent response, and its a lot worse than knowing the # of lines read or the pattern grepped, which are useful because it can tell you what the agent is thrashing on trying to find, or what context would be useful to give it upfront in the future.
alsetmusic 7mo ago
I believe it opens the file that was referenced. Apologies in advance if I got that wrong.
stefan_ 7mo ago
Honestly? Half the time the shitty vibe coded Claude CLI interface spergs out. Don't try to scroll too much

htx80nerd 7mo ago

another case of 'devs are out of touch with users basics needs and basic day-to-day usage of our app'

closewith 7mo ago
It's definitely a case of out-of-touch devs, but which cohort they are is still to be seen.
AlotOfReading 7mo ago
I think it's a case of wishful design. When they (or rather their own vibecoding tools) imagine how the tool is used, they aren't imagining that it's actually a human-machine interface, with the human actively engaged in the loop. Instead, the human is mostly expected to behave as a magical prompt oracle with a credit card and let the machine take care of the details.
falloutx 7mo ago
by devs you mean those two guys on twitter who brag about vibe coding with 100 agents running simultaneously. While Claude Code still can't display images. I wonder what they are doing with those 100 agents

noupdates 7mo ago

Quite frankly, most seasoned developers should be able to write their own Claude Code. You know your own algorithm for how you deal with lines of code, so it's just a matter of converting your own logic. Becoming dependent on Claude Code is a mistake (edit: I might be too heavy handed with this statement). If your coding agent isn't doing what you want, you need to be able to redesign it.

nicetryguy 7mo ago
It's not that simple. Claude Code allows you to use the Anthropic monthly subscription instead of API tokens, which for power users is massively less expensive.
- tibbar 7mo ago
  this is the real reason why people are switching to claude code.
- co_king_3 7mo ago
  Drug dealer business model. The first bag is free. Don't act surprised when you get addicted and they 10x the price.
bradfa 7mo ago
Yes and no. There are many not-trivial things you have to solve when using an LLM to help (or fully handle writing) code. For example, applying diffs to files. Since the LLM uses tokenization for all its text input/output, sometimes the diffs it'll create to modify a file aren't quite right as it may slightly mess up the text which is before/after the change and/or might introduce a slight typo in text which is being removed, which may or may not cleanly apply in the edit. There's a variety of ways to deal with this but most of the agentic coding tools have this mostly solved now (I guess you could just copy their implementation?). Also, sometimes the models will send you JSON or XML back from tool calls which isn't valid, so your tool will need to handle that. These fun implementation details don't happen that often in a coding session, but they happen often enough that you'd probably get driven mad trying to use a tool which didn't handle them seamlessly if you're doing real work.

co_king_3 7mo ago

Am I mistaken or is Claude Code essentially an opt-in rootkit?

minimaxir 7mo ago
Modern agenting coding software is scoped to only allow edits in the project folder, with some sandboxing more aggressively than others (Claude Code the most)
- Der_Einzige 7mo ago
  Don't lie. The correct way to run it is with sudo su - then IS_SANDBOX=1 claude code --dangerously-skip-permissions This is the true AI pilled version.
lukev 7mo ago
And it's pretty easy to run in a stronger sandbox too. "docker sandbox run claude" in a recent version of docker is a super easy way to get started.
chasd00 7mo ago
only if you run it as root, run it as a user and it can't do any more damage than the user running it could. It can still certainly send any data the user has access to anywhere on the inet though, that's a big problem. idk if there's a way to lock down a user so that they can only open sockets to an IP on a whitelist.. maybe that could be an option to at least keep the data from going anywhere except to Anthropic (that's not anywhere close to perfect/correct either but it's something i guess).

alansaber 7mo ago

I don't feel as if any CLI editor has quite nailed UX yet

Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
If you are talking about agents I feel like opencode has gotten pretty good UI/UX If you are talking about a CLI editor, then micro has hit the nail on quality UX https://micro-editor.github.io/ https://micro-editor.github.io/
- AnonyX387 7mo ago
  The UX where it completely breaks copy paste conventions on Linux? Other than that I agree it's gotten pretty good but this one thing drives me mad each time I use it.
  - Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
    I think that you can actually change the keybindings to follow the copy paste conventions that you want in micro But personally I really love these new copy paste conventions, its the ctrl q convention which troubled me in ghostty but what I did was "ctrl > " write quit enter https://github.com/micro-editor/micro/blob/master/runtime/help/keybindings.md https://github.com/micro-editor/micro/blob/master/runtime/he...

ramon156 7mo ago

All my information about this is being based on feels, because debugging isn't really feasible. Verbose mode is a mess, and there's no alternative. It still does what I need so I'm okay with it, but I'm also on the $20 plan so it's not that big of a worry for me. I did sense that the big wave of companies is hitting Anthropic's wallet. If you hadn't realized, a LOT of companies switched to Claude. No idea why, and this is coming from someone who loves Claude Code. Anyway, getting some transparency on this would be nice.

co_king_3 7mo ago
[flagged]
- cindyllm 7mo ago
  [dead]
- palebluedot 7mo ago
  > FWIW I think LLMs are a dead end for software development, and that the people who think otherwise are exceptionally gullible. By this do you mean there isn't much more room for future improvement, or that you feel it is not useful in its current form for software development? I think the latter is hard position to defend, speaking as a user of it. I am definitely more productive with it now, although I'm not sure I enjoy software development as much anymore (but that is a different topic)
  - co_king_3 7mo ago
    > By this do you mean there isn't much more room for future improvement I don't expect that LLM technology will improve in a way that makes it significantly better . I think the training pool is poisoned, and I suspect that the large AI labs have been cooking the benchmark data for years to suspect that their models are improving more quickly than they are in reality. That being said, I'm sure some company will figure out new strategies for deploying LLMs that will cause a significant improvement. But I don't expect that improvements are going to come from increased training. > [Do] you feel it is not useful in its current form for software development? IME using LLMs for software development corrodes my intuitive understanding of an enterprise codebase. Since the advent of LLMs, I've been asked to review many sloppy 500+/1000+ line spam PRs written by arrogant Kool-Aid drinking coworkers. If someone is convinced that Claude Code is AGI, they won't hesitate to drop a slop bomb on you. Basically I feel that coding using LLMs degrades my understanding of what I'm working on and enables coworkers to dominate my day with spam code review requests.

ekropotin 7mo ago

Another instance of devs being out of touch is them wanting Claude Code to respect AGENT.md: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 What’s wrong with you, people? Are you stupid?

JetSetIlly 7mo ago
I've never used Claude or anything like it so this may be a dumb question: could you solve this problem by having a CLAUDE.md file that simply says to use AGENT.md if one is available. Can an AI agent not do that?
- ekropotin 7mo ago
  Yes, the most common solution for this problem either creating a symbolic CLAUDE.md link pointing to AGENT.md (or visa versa) if OS supports it. Or, in CLAUDE.md have an instruction to follow AGENT.md - but this approach is quite unreliable. These are solutions to a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place. How else can one explain Anthropic’s reluctance to adhere to a widely adopted standard, if not as an attempt to build a walled garden around an otherwise great product?
- deaux 7mo ago
  It's not a dumb question per se but it does fail to understand the issue. It's that there's 20 coding agents yet only 1 of them needs this solving. Imagine if all of them needed this. It's like IE6, or Lightning connectors. At least for that last one there's an argument that they performed better than USB-C. For the Anthropic people reading this - take note that both IE and Lightning are now dead and their competitors that followed the standards are thriving.
  - JetSetIlly 7mo ago
    I understand the issue is that Anthropic is not adhering to a standard. I was simply asking whether it's possible to solve the problem created by Anthropic in the way I was asking.

colechristensen 7mo ago

I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about! - Zapp I mean I get it I guess but I'm not nearly so passionate as anyone saying things about this

JohnMakin 7mo ago

I'm not sure this is a regression, at least how I use it - you can hit control + o to expand, and usually the commands it runs show the file path(s) it's using, and I'm really paranoid with it, and I didn't even notice this change.

thousand_nights 7mo ago
i've never had to use control + o before but with the latest changes, i give Opus a simple task that should take a few seconds and it's like "used 15k tokens" and "thinking" for three minutes with absolutely zero indication or visibility as to what it's actually doing and i have to ESC ESC it to stop and ask what the FUCK are you actually doing claude?
- virtue3 7mo ago
  I think this change is really disingenuous. If they hide how the tool is accessing files (aka using tokens) and then charging us per token - how are we able to track loosely what our spend is? I’m all for simplification of the UX. But when it’s helping to hide the main spend it feels shitty.
- misnome 7mo ago
  Yes, I’ve been evaluating since the start of the year and since 4.6 suddenly the most innocuous requests will sit there “thinking” for 5+ minutes and if I can get it to show me the thinking it’s just going round in circles. Or, it decided it needs to get API documentation out and spends tens of thousands of tokens fetching every file in a repo with separate tool use instead of reading the documentation. Profitable, if you are charging for token usage, I suspect. But I’m reaching the point where I can’t recommend claude to people who are interesting in skeptically trying it out, because of the default model.
  - JohnMakin 7mo ago
    I guess I engineered around this before 4.6 - I did notice a regression in it wanting to search deeper than I wanted and had specified, but just restricted it with tooling I wrote that would enforce what I wanted. In that respect, I feel comfortable running 4.6 with the guardrails I already have, but did notice some squirrelyness I didnt anticipate in my utility scripts. It is clever. its its best and worst feature.

koakuma-chan 7mo ago

> Read 3 fies (ctrl+o to expand) What if you hit ctrl+o?

huydotnet 7mo ago
exactly what i think when reading the top of the article, maybe the author turned off vebose mode
- thunfischtoast 7mo ago
  The verbose mode is, well, verbose. They removed, without any need, info and hid it in a wall of text.

kissgyorgy 7mo ago

This is why I am a big fan of self-hosting, owning your data and using your own Agent. pi is a really good example. You can have your own tooling and can switch any SOTA model in a single interface. Very nice! https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi/ https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi/

alexandriaeden 7mo ago
This is exactly the right instinct. When you own the agent harness, you decide what's visible. I've been building my own tooling on top of Playwright for similar reasons — the feedback loop between 'what did the agent just do' and 'should I let it continue' is the core UX of any agent, not a detail to be abstracted away. Hiding it breaks the only trust mechanism the user has.

MicKillah 7mo ago

This comes up from time to time and although my experience is anecdotal, I see clear degradation of output when I run heavy loads (100s of batched/chunked requests, via an automated pipeline) and sometimes the difference in quality is absolutely laughable in how poor it is. This gets worse for me as I get closer to my (hourly, weekly) limits. I am Claude Max subscriber. There’s some shady stuff going on in the background, for sure, from my perspective and experience during my year or so of intense usage.

afro88 7mo ago
Man, you have to read the article, not just the headline
- MicKillah 7mo ago
  That would definitely be helpful, but the headline hit a painful spot for me and I went in! You’re right tho! I was in my feelins. I still am. lol

wouldbecouldbe 7mo ago

Developers are just complainers.

ffritz 7mo ago

What if it’s used with a different harness, e.g. Opencode?

minimaxir 7mo ago
You infamously cannot use Claude Code with a different harness anymore (without shenanigans that will likely draw Anthropic's ire).

turnsout 7mo ago

As a heavy CC user, I appreciate a cleaner console output. If you really need to know which 3 files CC read, AI-assisted coding agents might not be for you.

turnsout 7mo ago
Downvoted, but fight me on this… It's important to see what it wrote, but what it read?
- FergusArgyll 7mo ago
  If there's obviously important context in foo and I see that it didn't read foo then I know that means it's making assumptions which are wrong

artisin 7mo ago

Vibe-coders griping about Claude's vibe-coded CLI hits all the right vibes.

WXLCKNO 7mo ago
Jokes about vibe-coded CLI aside, I think that's the issue for me, the defaults are being tailored to vibe coders. (and the general weirdness of trying to fix it with verbose mode) I like that people who were afraid of CLIs perhaps are now warming up to them through tools like Claude Code but I don't think it means the interfaces should be simplified and dumbed down for them as the primary audience. Sure you can press CTRL+O, but that's not realtime and you have to toggle between that and your current real time activity. Plus it's often laggy as hell.
Maxion 7mo ago
Literally the opposite though, as being able to see what it reads allows you to tell it to ignore certain files when you see it read the wrong one, and adjust the claude.md file to ensure that it does not read incorrect files given a specific input. True vibe coders don't care about this.
koverstreet 7mo ago
Yeah, these all sound like complete non issues if you're actually... keeping your codebase clean and talking through design with Claude instead of just having it go wild. I'm using it for converting all of the userspace bcachefs code to Rust right now, and it's going incredibly smoothly. The trick is just to think of it like a junior engineer - a smart, fast junior engineer, but lacking in experience and big picture thinking. But if you were vibe coding and YOLOing before Claude, all those bad habits are catching up with you suuuuuuuuuuuper hard right now :)
red_hare 7mo ago
I hate to say it, but "vibe-coders" are just "coders" now. It's a huge shift, but we need to start thinking of AI-tools as developer tools, just like a formatter, linter, or IDE would be. The right move is diversity. Just like diversity of editors/IDEs. We need good open source claude code alternatives.

hirako2000 7mo ago

Sounds like the compacting issue. > Compacting fails when the thread is very large > We fixed it. > No you did not > Yes now it auto compacts all messages. > Ok but we don't want compaction when the thread isn't large, plus, it still fails when the compacted thread is too large > ...

Joel_Mckay 7mo ago
Let me fix that for you: > Compacting fails when the thread is very large Flips coin, it is Heads > We fixed it. > No you did not Flips coin, it is Tails > Yes now it auto compacts all messages. Flips coin, it is Heads > Ok but we don't want compaction when the thread isn't large, plus, it still fails when the compacted thread is too large Flips coin, it is Grapefruit > ... Congratulations on a vibe solution, if you are unhappy with the frequency of isomorphic plagiarism... the vendor still has your money and new data =3

eptcyka 7mo ago

Can we not like, just apply a patch? Or will anthropic be mad if I run their client with my own patch? Nix makes it easy to package up esotheric patches reliably and reproducibly, claude lowers the cost of creating such patches, the only roadblocks Inforesee are legal.

tylergetsay 7mo ago
Claude code is distributed as a minified JS bundle so you cant just easily patch in this functionality
- eptcyka 7mo ago
  I’m told that this new LLM tech is great at deminimizing minified javascript, no?
jy14898 7mo ago
https://github.com/aleks-apostle/claude-code-patches/pull/9 https://github.com/aleks-apostle/claude-code-patches/pull/9 is what I found, not tested yet

lukev 7mo ago

If you're not vibecoding your own UX to render CC's output the way you like it, you're not living.

co_king_3 7mo ago
If you're not vibecoding your own UX to render CC's output the way you like it, you're getting replaced by AI.
- scottyah 7mo ago
  If you're not replacing the replacers, you're the replaced.
  - tclancy 7mo ago
    This is why I joined The Watchmen.

ares623 7mo ago

"This is as bad as it's going to be" turning out to be wrong They could change course, obviously. But how does the saying go again -- it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a VC funded tech startup to not enshittify.

Retr0id 7mo ago

I also found this change annoying. Often a codebase ends up with non-authoritative references for things (e.g. docs out of sync with implementation, prototype vs "real" version), and the proper solution is to fix and/or document that divergence. But let's face it, that doesn't always happen. When the AI reads from the wrong source it only makes things worse, and when you can't see what it's reading it's harder to even notice that it's going off track.

jascha_eng 7mo ago

There are a lot of non developer claude code users these days. The hype about vibe coding lets everyone think they can now be an engineer. Problem is if anthropic caters to that crowd the devs that are using it to do somewhat serious engineering tasks and don't believe in the "run an army of parallel agents and pray" methodology are being alienated. Maybe Claude Code web or desktop could be targeted to these new vibe coders instead? These folks often don't know how simple bash commands work so the terminal is the wrong UX anyway. Bash as a tool is just very powerful for any agentic experience.

MattGaiser 7mo ago
Anecdotally, all the non-technical people I know are adapting fine to the console. You don’t need to know how bash commands work to use it as you are just approving commands, not writing them.
- fcatalan 7mo ago
  Approving commands you don't understand doesn't seem ideal
  - operatingthetan 7mo ago
    People are handing over their entire system to openclaw, so that's about where we are.
    - system2 7mo ago
      Because we haven't heard about the disaster stories yet, give it some time and see how people will talk about it as if it were a virus.
WXLCKNO 7mo ago
Exactly how I feel. I'm happy that more people are using these tools and learning (hopefully) about engineering but it shouldn't degrade the core experience for let's say "more advanced" users who don't see themselves as Vibe coders and want precise control over what's happening.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

parhamn 7mo ago

We opensourced our claude code ui today: https://github.com/bearlyai/openade https://github.com/bearlyai/openade I wanted a terminal feel (dense/sharp) + being able to comment directly on plans and outputs. It's MIT, no cloud, all local, etc. It includes all the details for function runs and some other nice to haves, fully built on claude code. Particularly we found planning + commenting up front reduces a lot of slop. Opus 4.6 class models are really good at executing an existing plan down to a T. So quality becomes a function of how much you invest in the plan.

ramoz 7mo ago
Built similar focused specifically on planning annotations. https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator It integrates with the CLI through hooks. completely local.
- parhamn 7mo ago
  That looks great! Planning phase is really key.

mnicky 7mo ago

At least now we also have a tracker: https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/ https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/

WXLCKNO 7mo ago
Saw this the other day and loved it. Especially seeing Opus 4.5 degrading prior to the 4.6 release (IIRC) and Codex staying very stable and even improving over time. But FYI the blog post is not about the actual model being dumbed down, but the command line interface.

dogleash 7mo ago

>Try using it for a few days. We've been using this internally at Anthropic for about a month now, and found that it took people a few days to mentally switch over to the new UI. Once they did, it "clicked" and they appreciated the reduced noise and focus on the tools that actually do need their attention. Ah, the old "you're holding it wrong."

WXLCKNO 7mo ago
Sorry I'm dumber than the average Anthropic employee, might just take me a few more days for it to "click" that I'm no longer seeing useful information and that this is good.
layer8 7mo ago
They’re dog-fooding it wrong. ;)

iamleppert 7mo ago

As soon as there is a viable alternative to Claude Code, I'm gone after this change. It appears minor on the surface but their response to all the comments tells you everything you need to know. They don't even want to concede at all, or at least give a flag to enable the old behavior, what was deployed and working for many users before. It's a signal that someone, somewhere at Anthropic is making decisions based on ego, not user feedback. The other fact pattern is their CLI is not open source, so we can't go in and change it ourselves. We shouldn't have to. They have also locked down OpenCode and while there are hacks available, I shouldn't have to resort to such cat and mouse games as someone who pays $200/month for a premium service. I'm aggressively exploring other options, and it's only a matter of if -- not when, one surfaces.

WXLCKNO 7mo ago
"It appears minor on the surface but their response to all the comments tells you everything you need to know." I mean I hope it's just a single developer being stubborn rather than guidance from management asking everyone to simplify Claude Code for maximum mass appeal. But I agree otherwise, it's telling.
deagle50 7mo ago
codex cli. I switched, no regrets. Also, $20 for top model vs being limited to sonnet.
- stefan_ 7mo ago
  Plus (the $20 plan) is still stuck on 5.2 right now..
  - deagle50 7mo ago
    5.3 codex xhigh works for me
    - ReptileMan 7mo ago
      Honestly even medium is quite good.

nekusar 7mo ago

Well, they already fucked over the community with their "lol not really unlimited" rug-pull. For those of you who are still suckered in paying for it, why do you think the company would care how they abuse the existing users? You all took it the last time.

self_awareness 7mo ago

Add another LLM to extract paths from verbose mode...

jwr 7mo ago

I really dislike this trend that unfortunately has become, well, a trend. And has followers. Namely, let's simplify to "reduce noise" and "not overwhelm users", because "the majority of users don't need…". This is spreading like a plague: browser address bars are being trimmed down to nothing. Good luck figuring out which protocol you're using, or soon which website you are talking to. The TLS/SSL padlock is gone, so is the way to look into the site certificate (good luck doing that on recent Safari versions). Because users might be confused. Well the users are not as dumb as you condescendingly make them out to be. And if you really want to hide information, make it a config setting. Ask users if they want "dumbo mode" and see if they really do.

titanomachy 7mo ago
The TLS thing at least kind of makes sense. 99.9% of sites that the typical user visits will have a correctly configured and trusted certificate and communicate over TLS, so the browsers only show an indicator when that’s not the case. I think it’s a sensible evolution given how the internet has changed.
- jwr 7mo ago
  Again with the "99.9%" argument. This is always the beginning of a path towards dumbing things down. "99% of users…, 99% of sites…, in 99% of cases…" — this is always how these things begin. Also, was the padlock really such a problem? Did it really have to be removed? If not, perhaps another easily accessible way to access this data could be invented. Like, I don't know, a menu item perhaps?
  - titanomachy 7mo ago
    In chrome on macOS, the information is still there. It’s right where it used to be, to the left of the url. But quickly glancing at safari on Mac and phone I wasn’t able to find the information at all, which, yeah, I disagree with that decision. Both browsers show “not secure” pretty prominently for non-TLS sites, and very loudly complain about sites with untrusted certificates, so the absence of either of those things signals a trusted cert, which is now the most common case by a very wide margin for me.

boutell 7mo ago

Strong meme game. I'm on an older release and now I'm reluctant to update. In my current release, the verbosity is just where I want it and control-o is there when I really need it.

SOLAR_FIELDS 7mo ago

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8477 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8477 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/15263 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/15263 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/9099 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/9099 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8371 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8371 It's very clear that Anthropic doesn't really want to expose the secret sauce to end users. I have to patch Claude every release to bring this functionality back.

resiros 7mo ago
Honestly, just use OpenCode. It works with Claude Code Max, and the TUI is 100x better. The only thing that sucks is Compaction.
- kakugawa 7mo ago
  How much longer is Anthropic going to allow OpenCode to use Pro/Max subscriptions? Yes, it's technically possible, but it's against Anthropic's ToS. [1] 1: https://blog.devgenius.io/you-might-be-breaking-claudes-tos-without-knowing-it-228fcecc168c https://blog.devgenius.io/you-might-be-breaking-claudes-tos-...
  - exitb 7mo ago
    Consider switching to an OpenAI subscription, which allows OpenCode use.
    - Aeolun 7mo ago
      Yeah. OpenAI allows any client, and only one single fixed system prompt. All their control is on the backend, which is worse than Claude.
  - azinman2 7mo ago
    Doesn’t Claude code have an agents sdk that officially allows you to use the good parts?

lionkor 7mo ago

Meanwhile GPT-5.3-Codex which just released recently is a huge change and much better. It now displays intermediate thinking summaries instead of being silent.

fooker 7mo ago
My experience using it from cursor has been fairly disappointing
- chairmanwow1 7mo ago
  Much better in the codex cli harness
  - fooker 7mo ago
    Interesting, I can give that a try at some point.
  - roflcopter69 7mo ago
    There's one really confusing thing in Codex CLI from my perspective. How do I make it run unsandboxed but still ask me for approvals? I'm fine with it running bare on my machine but I like to approve first before it runs commands. But I only see how I can configure to have both or none. What am I missing?
    - machiaweliczny 7mo ago
      --help explains this, -s for sandbox and -a for approvals
      - roflcopter69 7mo ago
        Thanks! That helped. Really strange though, that the slash commands inside the CLI do not allow for such a detailed configuration. It allows for the sandbox and approvals options but there's only "default" and "just allow everything" while the CLI flags or the config.toml allows for more nuanced options.

juancn 7mo ago

Just stop using the damn thing if you don't like it.

ukuina 7mo ago

It's clear we're seeing the same code-vs-craft divergence play out as before, just at a different granularity. Codex/Claude would like you to ignore both the code AND the process of creating the code.

paseante 7mo ago

I have been using it extensively, and for me it's fine as it is. Also, the title is just false. How did this get into HN frontpage, that's a good question.

jtrn 7mo ago

I find it hard to care about claims of degradation of quality, since this has been a firehouse of claims that don't map onto anything real and is extremely subjective. I myself made the claim in error. I think this is just as ripe for psychological analysis as anything else.

layer8 7mo ago
You seem to be referring to something else than the topic the article is about.
thunfischtoast 7mo ago
Did you read the article? It's not about subjective claims, it's about a very real feature getting removed (file reads showing the filepath and numbers of lines read).
- jtrn 7mo ago
  This is exactly what I am talking about. Let me try to explain. I am interested in the more abstract and general concept of: "People excessively feel that things are worse, even if they are not." And I see this A LOT in the AI/LLM area. For instance, the claim that Claude Code, on the UX/DX side, is dumbed down seems to me absolutely not a reasonable take. The "hiding" of the file name being read is no longer being shown neither supports that claim, AND has to be seen in the context of Claude Code as a whole. On the first point: Could one not make the argument that "not showing files read", is part of a more advanced abstraction layer, switching emphasis to something else in the UX experience? That could, by some, be seen as the overall package becoming more advanced and making choices as to what is presented for cognitive load. Secondly... it's not removed. It's just not default shown in non-verbose mode. As I understand it, you can just hit CTRL+O to see it again. Secondly, even if it was done ONLY to be less for "power user focus," and more for dumb people (got to love the humility in the developer world), it's blindly obvious that you can't just mention ONE change as proof that Claude Code is dumbed down. And to me, it just does not compute to say that Claude Code feels dumbed down over the last patches. The amount of more advanced features, like seeing background tasks, the "option" selection feature, lifecycle hooks, sub-agents, agent swarms, skills—all of these have been released in just the last few months. I have used Claude Code since the very beginning, and it is just insane to claim that it's getting dumber as a tool. And this is just in relationship to the actual functionality, UX, and DX, not the LLM quality. But people see "I now have to hit CTRL+O to see files being read = DUMBED DOWN ENSHITFICATION!!!" I don't get it. My point was simply... I'm much more interested in the psychological aspects driving everybody to predictably always claim that "things are getting worse," when it seems to not be the case. Be that in the exaggerated (but sometimes true) claims of model degradation, or as in this example of Claude Code getting dumbed down. What is driving this bias towards seeing and claiming things are getting worse, out of proportion to reality? Or even shorter: why are we obsessed with the narrative of decline?

heywoods 7mo ago

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/24537 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/24537 Seems like a dashboard mode toggle to run in a dedicated terminal would be a good candidate to move some of this complexity Anthropic seems to think “most” users can’t handle. When your product is increasing cognitive load the answer isn’t always to remove the complexity entirely. That decision in this case was clearly the wrong one.

locusofself 7mo ago

Working at Microsoft, I've just now hooked up to Claude Code (my department was not permitted to use it previously), through something called "Agent Maestro", a vscode extension which I guess pipes claude code API requets to our internally hosted Claude models, including Opus 4.6. I do wonder if there is going to be much of a difference between using Claude Code vs. Copilot CLI when using the same models.

pletnes 7mo ago
I honestly don’t think the models are as important as people tend to believe. More important is how the models are given tools - find, grep, git, test runners, …
- Galanwe 7mo ago
  > I honestly don’t think the models are as important as people tend to believe. I tend to disagree. While I don't see meaningful _reasoning power_ between frontier models, I do see differences in the way they interact with my prompts. I use exclusively Anthropic models because my interactions with GPT are annoying: - Sonnet/Opus behave like a mix of a diligent intern, or a peer. It does the work, doesn't talk too much, gives answers, etc. - GPT is overly chatty, it borderline calls me "bro", tend to brush issues I raise "it should be good enough for general use", etc. - I find that GPT hardly ever steps back when diagnosing issues. It picks a possible cause, and enters a rabbit hole of increasingly hacky / spurious solutions. Opus/Sonnet is often to step back when the complexity increases too much, and dig an alternative. - I find Opus/Sonnet to be "lazy" recently. Instead of systematically doing an accurate search before answering, it tries to "guess", and I have to spot it and directly tell it to "search for the precise specification and do not guess". Often it would tell me "you should do this and that", and I have to tell it "no, you do it". I wonder if it was done to reduce the number of web searches or compute that it uses unless the user explicitly asks.
nfg 7mo ago
> I do wonder if there is going to be much of a difference between using Claude Code vs. Copilot CLI when using the same models. I’m also at MS, not (yet?) using Claude Code at work and pondering precisely the same question.

kittbuilds 7mo ago

[dead]

unltdpower 7mo ago

This is the end game I've been Casandra'ing since the beginning. You all are refining these models through their use, and the model owners will be the only ones with access to true models while you will be fed whatever degraded slop they give you. You all are helping concentrate even more power in these sociopaths.

vintagedave 7mo ago

> That’s it. “Read 3 files.” Which files? Doesn’t matter. “Searched for 1 pattern.” What pattern? Who cares. Product manager here. Cynically, this is classic product management: simplify and remove useful information under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism if you're more overt about your influences. It's something that as an industry we should be over by now. It requires deep understanding of customer usage in order not to make this mistake. It is _really easy_ to think you are making improvements by hiding information if you do not understand why that information is perceived as valuable. Many people have been taught that streamlining and removal is positive. It's even easier if you have non-expert users getting attention. All of us here at HN will have seen UIs where this has occurred.

idopmstuff 7mo ago
Also product manager here. Not at all cynically, this is classic product management - simplify by removing information that is useful to some users but not others. We shouldn't be over it by now. It's good to think carefully about how you're using space in your UI and what you're presenting to the user. You're saying it's bad because they removed useful information, but then why isn't Anthropic's suggestion of using verbose mode a good solution? Presumably the answer is because in addition to containing useful information, it also clutters the UI with a bunch of information the user doesn't want. Same thing's true here - there are people who want to see the level of detail that the author wants and others for whom it's not useful and just takes up space. > It requires deep understanding of customer usage in order not to make this mistake. It requires deep understanding of customer usage to know whether it's a mistake at all, though. Anthropic has a lot deeper understanding of the usage of Claude Code than you or I or the author. I can't say for sure that they're using that information well, but since you're a PM I have to imagine that there's been some time when you made a decision that some subset of users didn't like but was right for the product, because you had a better understanding of the full scope of usage by your entire userbase than they did. Why not at least entertain the idea that the same thing is true here?
- lp0_on_fire 7mo ago
  > You're saying it's bad because they removed useful information, but then why isn't Anthropic's suggestion of using verbose mode a good solution? Because reading through hundreds of lines verbose output is not a solution to the problem of "I used to be able to see _at a glance_ what files were being touched and what search patterns were being used but now I can't".

torginus 7mo ago

My issue with CC is that its interface deliberately obscures the code from you, making you treat it more like a genie you make wishes of rather than making changes and checking the output. I may not be up to date with the latest & greatest on how to code with AI, but I noticed that as opposed to my more human in the loop style,

deagle50 7mo ago
Because they don't want you to improve.

tern 7mo ago

Claude's brand is sliding dangerously close to "the Microsoft of AI." DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS I write mainly out of the hope that some Anthropic employees read this: you need an internal crusade to fight these impulses. Take the high road in the short-term and you may avoid being disrupted in the long-term. It's a culture issue. Probably your strongest tool is specifically educating people about the history. Microsoft in the late 90s and early 00s was completely dominant, but from today's perspective it's very clear: they made some fundamental choices that didn't age well. As a result, DX on Windows is still not great, even if Visual Studio has the best features, and people with taste by and large prefer Linux. Apple made an extremely strategic choice: rebuild the OS around BSD, which set them up to align with Linux (the language of servers). The question is: why? Go find out. The difference is a matter of sensibility, and a matter of allowing that sensibility to exist and flourish in the business.

mightybyte 7mo ago
The thing that annoys me most of all is they block me from using OpenCode with my Claude Max plan. I find the OpenCode UI to be meaningfully better than Claude Code's, so this is really annoying.
- seeEllArr 7mo ago
  if you are an expert developer smarter than everyone at anthropic, like everyone else commenting on this post, you'll know that it's not difficult to use the claude agent sdk behind an api to achieve almost exactly the same thing
- marinhero 7mo ago
  Some workarounds are here https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/7410 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/7410 but I agree with you, this should be a native feature.
NewsaHackO 7mo ago
Huh? Why wouldn’t developers (who probably have stock options in Claude) try to prevent becoming 'the Microsoft of AI'? That's probably what they are actively trying to do.

shevy-java 7mo ago

This shows one problem here: a private entity controls Claude Code. You can reason that it brings benefits (perhaps), but to me it feels wrong to allow my thinking or writing code be controlled by a private entity. Perhaps I have been using Linux for too long - I may turn into RMS 2.0 (not really though, I like BSD/MIT licences too).

evo_9 7mo ago

Serous question - why do people stick with Clause Code over Cursor? With Cursors base subscription I have access to pretty much all the Frontier models and can pick and choose. Anthropic models haven’t been my go-to in months, Gemini and Codex produce much better results for me.

esafak 7mo ago
Wouldn't you run out of tokens sooner? That's the big problem.
flaviolivolsi 7mo ago
Because when it's good, it's really good - Cursor doesn't work as well for me and also I prefer the TUI experience. If anything, the real alternative is OpenCode.
CharlesW 7mo ago
My answer is that I tested both, and Claude Code (~8 months ago) was so obviously better than Cursor that I continue to happily pay Anthropic $200/month. Based on anecdotes I happen to catch, I don't believe Cursor's caught up. The value isn't just the models. Claude Code is notably better than (for example) OpenCode, even when using the same models. The plug-in system is also excellent, allowing me to build things like https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ that everyone can benefit from.
elzbardico 7mo ago
Part of the sauce is not in the model, but in the agent itself. And for that matter, I think AMP an incredibly better agent that Claude Code. But then, Claude heavily subsidized subscription prices are hard to beat.
SatvikBeri 7mo ago
Cursor performs notably worse for me on my medium-sized codebase (~500kloc), possibly because they try to aggressively conserve context. This is especially true for debugging, Claude Code will read dozens of files and do a surprisingly good job of finding complex bugs, while Cursor seems to just respond with the first hypothesis it comes up with. That said, Cursor Composer is a lot faster and really nice for some tasks that don't require lots of context.

elzbardico 7mo ago

This was really useful; sometimes, by a glance, you'd see Claude looking at the wrong files or searching the wrong patterns, and would be able to immediately interrupt it. For those of us who like to be deeply involved in what Claude is doing, those updates were terribly disappointing.

_user_account 7mo ago

[dead]

idopmstuff 7mo ago

I've been on the other side of this as a PM, and it's tough because you can't always say what you want to, which is roughly: This product is used by a lot of users with a range of use cases. I understand this change has made it worse for you, and I'm genuinely sorry about that, but I'm making decisions with much more information than you have and many more stakeholders than just you. > What majority? The change just shipped and the only response it got is people complaining. I'll refer you to the old image of the airplane with red dots on it. The people who don't have a problem with it are not complaining. > People explained, repeatedly, that they wanted one specific thing: file paths and search patterns inline. Not a firehose of debug output. Same as above. The reality is there are lots of people whose ideal case would be lots of different things, and you're seeking out the people who feel the same as you. I'm not saying you're wrong and these people don't exist, but you have to recognize that just because hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people want something from a product that is used by millions does not make it the right decision to give that thing to all of the users. > Across multiple GitHub issues opened for this, all comments are pretty much saying the same thing: give us back the file paths, or at minimum, give us a toggle. This is a thing that people love to suggest - I want a feature but you're telling me other people don't? Fine, just add a toggle! Problem solved! This is not a good solution! Every single toggle you add creates more product complexity. More configurations you have to QA when you deploy a new feature. Larger codebase. There are cases for a toggle, but there is also a cost for adding one. It's very frequently the right call by the PM to decline the toggle, even if it seems like such an obvious solution to the user. > The developer’s response to that? > I want to hear folks’ feedback on what’s missing from verbose mode to make it the right approach for your use case. > Read that again. Thirty people say “revert the change or give us a toggle.” The answer is “let me make verbose mode work for you instead.” Come on - you have to realize that thirty people do not in any way comprise a meaningful sample of Claude Code users. The fact that thirty people want something is not a compelling case. I'm a little miffed by this post because I've dealt with folks like this, who expect me as a PM to have empathy for what they want yet can't even begin to considering having empathy for me or the other users of the product. > Fucking verbose mode. Don't do this. Don't use profanity and talk to the person on the other side of this like they're an idiot because they're not doing what you want. It's childish. You pay $20/month or maybe $100/month or maybe even $200/month. None of those amounts entitles you to demand features. You've made your suggestion and the people at Anthropic have clearly listened but made a different decision. You don't like it? You don't have to use the product.

arjie 7mo ago

The histrionic tone is annoying but this is actually a feature failure. The utility of seeing what files were being read is I could help direct its use if it goes down the wrong pathway. I use a monorepo so that's an easy mistake for the software to make.

james_marks 7mo ago

Since last Friday it’s felt like CC rolled back a year of progress. Not sure what to attribute it to, or what this article seems to be about but it _felt_ much dumber.

g-mork 7mo ago

Absolutely worse than dumbed down, 4.6 is a mess. Ask it the simplest of questions, look away, and come back to 700 parallel tool uses. https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1r1cfha/is_anyone_else_burning_through_opus_46_limits_10x/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1r1cfha/is_anyone...

ergonaught 7mo ago

If you've got a solution to the problem of bad decisions made by people who shouldn't be empowered to make them in the first place, you'll solve more than Claude Code.

madrox 7mo ago

I have noticed, if I hit my session quota before it resets, that Claude gets "sleepy" for a day or so afterward. It's demonstrably worse at tasks...especially complex ones. My cofounder and I have both noticed this. Our theory is that Claude gets limited if you meet some threshold of power usage.

peacebeard 7mo ago

My biggest beef in recent versions is the automatic use of generic built in skills. I hate it when I ask a simple question and it says "OK! Time to use the RESEARCHING_CRAZY_PROBLEM skill! I'll kickstart the 20 step process!" when before it would just answer the question. You can control this behavior, so it's not a dealbreaker. But it shows a sort of optimism that skills make everything better. My experience is that skills are only useful for specific workflows, not as a way to broadly or generally enhance the LLM.

bayindirh 7mo ago

It's pretty interesting to watch AI companies start to squeeze their users as the constraints (financial, technical, capacity-wise) start to squeeze the companies. Ads in ChatGPT. Removing features from Claude Code. I think we're just beginning to face the music. It's also funny that how Google "invented" ad injection in replies with real-time auction capabilities, yet OpenAI would be the first implementer of it. It's similar to how transformers played out. For me, that's another "popcorn time". I don't use any of these to any capacity, except Gemini, which I seldom use to ask stuff when deep diving in web doesn't give any meaningful results. The last question I asked managed to return only one (but interestingly correct) reference, which I followed and continued my research from there.

viraptor 7mo ago

I don't get why people cling to the Claude Code abusive relationship. It's got so many issues, it's getting worse, and it's clear that there's no plan to make it open for patching. Meanwhile OpenCode is right there. (despite Anthropic efforts, you can still use it with a subscription) And you can tweak it any way you want...

thisisit 7mo ago

My last experience with Claude support was a fun merry go round. I had used a Visa card to buy monthly Pro subscription. One day I ran out of credits so I go to buy extra credit. But my card is declined. I recheck my card limit and try again. Still declined. To test the card I try extending the Pro subscription. It works. That's when I notice that my card has a security feature called "Secure by Visa". To complete transaction I need to submit OTP on a Visa page. I am redirected to this page while buying Pro subscription but not when trying to buy extra usage. I open a ticket and mention all the details to Claude support. Even though I give them the full run down of the issue, they say "We have no way of knowing why your card was declined. You have to check with your bank". Later I get hold of a Mastercard with similar OTP protection. It is called Mastercard Securecode. The OTP triggers on both subscription and extra usage page. I share this finding with support as well. But the response is same - "We checked with our engineering team and we have no way of knowing why the other Visa card was declined. You have to check with your bank". I just gave up trying to buy extra usage. So, I am not really surprised if they keep making the product worse.

encom 7mo ago
I guarantee you talked to a chat bot. There are no human support agents anywhere anymore.
- thisisit 7mo ago
  I did talk to human support after going through multiple rounds of "check with your bank" with the chatbot. The response was slow, taking over 24hrs between each response.
polski-g 7mo ago
Its true. They have no idea why your bank was declining the charge, only that it was declined.

chickensong 7mo ago

For a general tool that has such a broad user base, the output should be configurable. There's no way a single config, even with verbose mode, will satisfy everyone. Set minimal defaults to keep output clean, but let users pick and choose items to output across several levels of verbosity, similar to tcpdump, Ansible, etc. (-v to -vvvvv). I know businesses are obsessed with providing Apple-like "experiences", where the product is so refined there's just "the one way" to magically do things, but that's not going to work for a coding agent. It needs to be a unix-like experience, where the app can be customized to fit your bespoke workflow, and opening the man page does critical damage unless you're a wizard. LLMs are already a magic box, which upsets many people. It'll be a shame if Anthropic alienates their core fan base of SWEs by making things more magical.

brundolf 7mo ago

What a weird hill to die on

hungryhobbit 7mo ago
And also a complete PR fail. This is damaging their brand with devs for no meaningful benefit.
- brundolf 7mo ago
  I didn't even see it was a brand blog. Sheesh

hungryhobbit 7mo ago

Everyone, file your own ticket (check the box saying you searched for existing tickets anyway)! After the Anthropic PMs have to delete their hundredth ticket about this issue, they will feel the need to fix it ... if only to stop the ticket deluge!

choldstare 7mo ago

not getting dumbed down, ai is getting smarter than you at a speed faster than you can keep up or understand, have to abstract things and simplify so you can stay connected.

stillpointlab 7mo ago

I'm old, so I remember when Skyrim came out. At the time, people were howling about how "dumbed down" the RPG had become compared to previous versions. They had simplified so many systems. Seemed to work out for them overall. I understand the article writers frustration. He liked a thing about a product he uses and they changed the product. He is feeling angry and he is expressing that anger and others are sharing in that. And I'm part of another group of people. I would notice the files being searched without too much interest. Since I pay a monthly rate, I don't care about optimizing tokens. I only care about the quality of the final output. I think the larger issue is that programmers are feeling like we are losing control. At first we're like, I'll let it auto-complete but no more. Then it was, I'll let it scaffold a project but not more. Each step we are ceding ground. It is strange to watch someone finally break on "They removed the names of the files the agent was operating on". Of all of the lost points of control this one seems so trivial. But every camels back has a breaking point and we can't judge the straw that does it.

root_axis 7mo ago
If you're paying a monthly rate you still have to optimize for tokens, otherwise you'll be rate limited.
- kingkawn 7mo ago
  And not just by the day! The weekly limits are the biggest mistake imaginable for maintaining user engagement on a project.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
Der_Einzige 7mo ago
Skyrim is one of the most over-rated games of all time. Dark Messiah Might and Magic did everything except music and exploration/scale better, and I mean a LOT better. It's from 2006. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p3zj0YKKYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p3zj0YKKYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeRUHzYJwNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeRUHzYJwNE

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

Robdel12 7mo ago

I’m a heavy Claude code user and it’s pretty clear they’re starting to bend under their vibe coding. Each Claude code update breaks a ton of stuff, has perf issues, etc. And then this. They want to own your dev workflow and for some reason believe Claude code is special enough to be closed source. The react TUI is kinda a nightmare to deal with I bet. I will say, very happy with the improvements made to Codex 5.3. I’ve been spending A LOT more time with codex and the entire agent toolchain is OSS. Not sure what anthropic’s plan is, but I haven’t been a fan of their moves in the past month and a half.

binsquare 7mo ago
Same, codex 5.3 was able to solve a problem that I personally was stuck on even with help from Claude for the last 2 weeks.
viking123 7mo ago
I switched to Codex 5.3 too, it's cheaper also anyway and as dumb as it sounds, Scam Altman is actually the less annoying CEO compared to Amodei which is kind of an achievement. Amodei really looking more and more like some huckster giving these idiotic predictions to the press.
- Der_Einzige 7mo ago
  Scam Altman is Epstein tier: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz6lq6x2gd9o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz6lq6x2gd9o https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/technology/sam-altman-sister-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/technology/sam-altman-sis...
  - OrangeMusic 7mo ago
    So he's been accused of various crimes and has not been not found guilty? Not like Epstein at all then.
- amai 7mo ago
  OpenAI’s president is a Trump mega-donor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46771231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46771231

oxag3n 7mo ago

So much for human replacement. Map it to a workplace: - Hey Joe, why did you stop adding code diff to your review requests? - Most reviewers find it simpler. You can always run tcpdump on our shared drive to see what exactly was changed. - I'm the only one reviewing your code in this company...

qwertox 7mo ago

It was because of the (back then) new Haiku model, maybe 3.5, that i decided to subscribe yearly. more than good enough for a language layer to interact with the mcp server. Now I'm even hesitant to use it.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

runjake 7mo ago

> “Read 3 files.” Which files? > “Searched for 1 pattern.” Hit Ctrl-o like it mentions right there, and Claude Code will show you. Or RTFM and adjust Output Styles[1]. If you don't like these things, you can change them. Like it or not, agentic coding is going mainstream and so they are going to tailor the default settings toward that wider mainstream audience. 1. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles

muyuu 7mo ago

Perhaps some power user of Claude Code can enlighten me here, but why not just using OpenCode? I admit I've only briefly tried Claude Code, so perhaps there are unique features there stopping the switch, or some other form of lock-in.

TJTorola 7mo ago
Anthropic is actively blocking calls from anything but claude code for it's claude plans. At this point you either need to be taking part in the cat and mouse game to make that plan work with opencode or you need to be paying the much more expensive API prices.
- muyuu 7mo ago
  i see i guess they were blocking OpenCode for a reason this will put people to the test that use mainly Anthropic, to have a second look at the results from other models

anupamchugh 7mo ago

[flagged]

greenie_beans 7mo ago

can't stand not seeing what exactly an ai agent is doing on my machine

searls 7mo ago

LOL, no, dumbing down was when I paid two months of subscription with the model literally struggling to write basic functions. Something Anthropic eventually acknowledged but offered no refunds for. https://ilikekillnerds.com/2025/09/09/anthropic-finally-admits-claude-quality-degradation/ https://ilikekillnerds.com/2025/09/09/anthropic-finally-admi... I care A LOT about the details, and I couldn't care less that they're cleaning up terminal output like this.

qwertox 7mo ago

I absolutely love reading thoughts and see the commands it uses. It teaches me new stuff, and I think this is what young people need: be able to know WHAT it is doing and WHY it is doing it. And have the ability to discuss with another agent about what the agent and me are trying to archive, and we can ask them questions we have without disturbing the flow, but seeing the live output. Regarding the thoughts: it also allows me to detect problematic paths it takes, like when it can't find a file. For example today I was working on a project that depends on another project, managed by another agent. While refactoring my code it noticed that it needs to see what this command is which it is invoking, so it even went so far as to search through vs code's user data to find the recent files history if it can find out more about that command... I stopped it and told it that if it has problems, it should tell me. It explained it can't find that file, i gave it the paths and tokens were saved. Note that in that session I was manually approving all commands, but then rejected the one in the data dir. Why dumb it down?

ayewo 7mo ago
> While refactoring my code it noticed that it needs to see what this command is which it is invoking, so it even went so far as to search through vs code's user data to find the recent files history if it can find out more about that command... I stopped it and told it that if it has problems, it should tell me. TIL that there's an especially apt xkcd comic for this scenario: "Zealous Autoconfig" https://xkcd.com/416/ https://xkcd.com/416/

486sx33 7mo ago

[dead]

vincentjiang 7mo ago

It's nerfed to a point that it feels more like lawyer than a coding assistant now. We were arguing about an 3rd party API ToU for 1 hour last night. VSC Copilot executed it within 1 minute.

svnt 7mo ago

They don’t seem to realize that doing vibe coding requires enough information to get the vibes. There are no vibes in “I am looking at files and searching for things” so I have zero weight to assign to your decision quality up until the point where it tells me the evals passed at 100%. Your agent is not good enough. I trust it like I trust a toddler not to fall into a swimming pool. It’s not trying to, but enough time around the pool and it is going to happen, so I am watching the whole time, and I might even let it fall in if I think it can get itself out.

nektro 7mo ago
the definition of vibe coding is that you never check what it's doing, you only check its output; eg the actual website/feature you're having it build.
- svnt 7mo ago
  I could accept that definition, but really that seems less like vibe coding and more like just not coding. Vibe coding for me is more like: yeah this doesn’t look insane and you got the interface from the right git repo. Like I wouldn’t put my name on it at work and defend it in a code review but I also didn’t just push the button and hope.

tzury 7mo ago

Here's my honest take on this: You're mass-producing outrage out of a UX disagreement about default verbosity levels in a CLI tool. Let's walk through what actually happened: a team shipped a change that collapsed file paths into summary lines by default. Some users didn't like it. They opened issues. The developers engaged, explained their reasoning, and started iterating on verbose mode to find a middle ground. That's called a normal software development feedback loop. Now let's walk through what you turned it into: a persecution narrative complete with profanity, sarcasm, a Super Bowl ad callback, and the implication that Anthropic is "hiding what it's doing with your codebase" — as if there's malice behind a display preference change. A few specific points: The "what majority?" line is nonsense. GitHub issues are a self-selecting sample of people with complaints. The users who found it cleaner didn't open an issue titled "thanks, this is fine." That's how feedback channels work everywhere. You know this. "Pinning to 2.1.19" is your right. Software gives you version control. Use it. That's not the dramatic stand you think it is. The developers responding with "help us understand what verbose mode is missing" is them trying to solve the problem without a full revert. You can disagree with the approach, but framing genuine engagement as contempt is dishonest. A config toggle might be the right answer. It might ship next week. But the entitlement on display here isn't "give us a toggle" — it's "give us a toggle now, exactly as we specified, and if you try any other approach first, you're disrespecting us." That's not feedback. That's a tantrum dressed up as advocacy. You're paying $200/month for a tool that is under active development, with developers who are visibly responding to issues within days. If that feels like disrespect to you, you have a calibration problem. With kind regards, Opus 4.6

nikcub 7mo ago

claude code is big enough now that it really needs a preview / beta release channel where features like this can be tested against a smaller audience before being pushed out. as a regular and long-term user, it's frequently jarring being pushed new changes / bugs in what has become a critical tool. surprised their enterprise clients haven't raised this

dev_l1x_be 7mo ago

Give me my local models so I can write a locally handcrafted tool that does what I want, goddamit.

the__alchemist 7mo ago

Hey... I have been experimenting with Claude for a few days, and am not thrilled with it compared to web chatbots. I suspect this is partly me being new and unskilled with it, but this is a general summary. ChatGPT or Gemini: I ask it what I wish to do, and show it the relevant code. It gives me a often-correct answer, and I paste it into my program. Claude: I do the same, and it spends a lot of time thinking. When I check the window for the result, it's stalled with a question... asking to access a project or file that has nothing to do with the problem, and I didn't ask it to look for. Repeat several times until it solves the problem, or I give up with the questions.

syspec 7mo ago

RooCode is a better version of ClaudeCode than ClaudeCode. No affiliation, just a fan.

tryauuum 7mo ago

can't you write some tool to display the files being read with the inotify system call? Usually I hate programming but it feels like a nice little tool to create

singularfutur 7mo ago

Anthropic is optimizing for enterprise contracts, not hacker cred. This is what happens when you take VC money and need to sell to Fortune 500s. The "dumbing down" is just the product maturing beyond the early adopter phase.

smcleod 7mo ago

> That’s it. “Read 3 files.” Which files? Doesn’t matter. It doesn't say "Read 3 files." though - it says "Read 3 files (ctrl+o to expand)" and you press ctrl+o and it expands the output to give you the detail. It's a really useful feature to increase the signal to noise ratio where it's usually safe to do so. I suspect the author simply needs to enable verbose mode output.

pkilgore 7mo ago
This is directly addressed in the article.

aipatselarom 7mo ago

Exact same thing with Codex from 5.2 to 5.3. There's no conspiracy, though, other than more tokens consumed = more money, and they want that.

myko 7mo ago

I really hate this change. I had just given a demo about how Claude Code helped me learn some things by showing exactly what it was doing, and now it doesn't do that any more. So frustrating.

supermatt 7mo ago

And they hate that people are using different agents (like opencode) with their subscription - to the extent that they have actively been trying to block it. With stupidity like this what do they expect? It’s only a matter of time before people jump ship entirely.

testfrequency 7mo ago

I agree the quality of Claude Code recent has felt poor and frustrating. I’ve been persistently dealing with the agent running in circles on itself when trying to fix bugs, not following directions fully and choosing to only accomplish partial requests, failing to compact and halting a session, and ignoring its MCP tooling and doing stupid things like writing cruddy python and osascripts unnecessarily. I’ve been really curious about codex recently, but I’m so deep into Claude Code with multiple skills, agents, MCPs, and a skill router though. Can anyone recommend an easy migration path to codex as a first time codex user from Claude code?

mnewme 7mo ago

Just use pi, love it!

mrinterweb 7mo ago

I thought this was going to talk about a nerfed Opus 4.6 experience. I believe I experienced one of those yesterday. I usually have multiple active claude code sessions, using Opus 4.6, running. The other sessions were great, but one session really felt off. It just felt much more dumbed down than what I was used to. I accidentally gave that session a "good" feedback, which my inner conspiracy theorist immediately jumps to a conclusion that I just helped validate a hamstrung model in some A/B test.

pkilgore 7mo ago

https://www.conductor.build/ https://www.conductor.build/

jgb1984 7mo ago

I like claude models, but crush and opencode are miles ahead of claude code. It's a pity anthropic forces us to use inferior tooling (I'm on a "team" plan from work). I can use an API key instead but then I'll blow past 25$ in an hour.

bcherny 7mo ago

Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. I wanted to take a sec to explain the context for this change. One of the hard things about building a product on an LLM is that the model frequently changes underneath you. Since we introduced Claude Code almost a year ago, Claude has gotten more intelligent, it runs for longer periods of time, and it is able to more agentically use more tools. This is one of the magical things about building on models, and also one of the things that makes it very hard. There's always a feeling that the model is outpacing what any given product is able to offer (ie. product overhang). We try very hard to keep up, and to deliver a UX that lets people experience the model in a way that is raw and low level, and maximally useful at the same time. In particular, as agent trajectories get longer, the average conversation has more and more tool calls. When we released Claude Code, Sonnet 3.5 was able to run unattended for less than 30 seconds at a time before going off the rails; now, Opus 4.6 1-shots much of my code, often running for minutes, hours, and days at a time. The amount of output this generates can quickly become overwhelming in a terminal, and is something we hear often from users. Terminals give us relatively few pixels to play with; they have a single font size; colors are not uniformly supported; in some terminal emulators, rendering is extremely slow. We want to make sure every user has a good experience, no matter what terminal they are using. This is important to us, because we want Claude Code to work everywhere, on any terminal, any OS, any environment. Users give the model a prompt, and don't want to drown in a sea of log output in order to pick out what matters: specific tool calls, file edits, and so on, depending on the use case. From a design POV, this is a balance: we want to show you the most relevant information, while giving you a way to see more details when useful (ie. progressive disclosure). Over time, as the model continues to get more capable -- so trajectories become more correct on average -- and as conversations become even longer, we need to manage the amount of information we present in the default view to keep it from feeling overwhelming. When we started Claude Code, it was just a few of us using it. Now, a large number of engineers rely on Claude Code to get their work done every day. We can no longer design for ourselves, and we rely heavily on community feedback to co-design the right experience. We cannot build the right things without that feedback. Yoshi rightly called out that often this iteration happens in the open. In this case in particular, we approached it intentionally, and dogfooded it internally for over a month to get the UX just right before releasing it; this resulted in an experience that most users preferred. But we missed the mark for a subset of our users. To improve it, I went back and forth in the issue to understand what issues people were hitting with the new design, and shipped multiple rounds of changes to arrive at a good UX. We've built in the open in this way before, eg. when we iterated on the spinner UX, the todos tool UX, and for many other areas. We always want to hear from users so that we can make the product better. The specific remaining issue Yoshi called out is reasonable. PR incoming in the next release to improve subagent output (I should have responded to the issue earlier, that's my miss). Yoshi and others -- please keep the feedback coming. We want to hear it, and we genuinely want to improve the product in a way that gives great defaults for the majority of users, while being extremely hackable and customizable for everyone else.

kshri24 7mo ago

Hilarious! Anthropic can just vibe code the boolean flag in.

ares623 7mo ago
I think they already do? Which is commendable tbh. But I keep my popcorn ready and warm for the day when their vibe coding can't keep up with the codebase. Of course they will try their best to hide that fact for as long as possible.

markoa 7mo ago

Like any CLI Claude Code should follow decades old tradition of providing configurable verbosity levels, like tcpdump's -v to -vvvvv to accommodate varying usage contexts.

keeganpoppen 7mo ago

this has got to be one of the worst comments sections i've ever seen on HN... people shouting past each other... into the void...

ares623 7mo ago
WHAT??

neom 7mo ago

If you've not, I recommend giving Opus[1m] + teams a shot, warning it's hella expensive but holy cow... what a tool.

slantaclaus 7mo ago

$200 a month? I buy compute credits as needed and have used maybe $300 in a year

Johnny_Bonk 7mo ago

I unfortunately have unsubbed from my 200 plan after having it for months, It really really seems to me that you never 100% feel like you're getting 4.6 and the same was happening with 4.5, some sessions it truly felt like haiku was being used despite the default setting and high thinking.

purplecats 7mo ago

shrinkflation

go_photon_go 7mo ago

Gemini CLI shows all the file paths.

go_photon_go 7mo ago

Gemini CLI shows the file paths

tehjoker 7mo ago

It's kind of annoying to see headlines complaining about some consumer facing UI that sound like a fundamental change in the model.

kittbuilds 7mo ago

[dead]

perrygeo 7mo ago

I must use AI differently than y'all. Do we not use plan mode? There is almost no value in watching the stream of intermediate tokens. There's no need to micromanage the agent's steps. Just monitor the artifact and insist the LLM summarizes findings in plain English. If it can't explain the proposed change coherently, it can't code it coherently either. `git restore .` I find it much more effective to throw away bad sessions, try a new prompt than to massage the existing context swamp.

ndespres 7mo ago

It makes sense that any product written after the advent of these AI code generators, including the AI code generators themselves, will get worse as it starts to eat itself.

bandrami 7mo ago

No, it's a psychological effect. Claude Code pushes the reward center in your brain, and that reward center gets tired after a while.

causal 7mo ago

Could write a similar post about their cloud UI. Feel like you have so little control over the thing. I think Cursor has an uphill battle by having to go through the API, but they certainly do a better job of making conversations and context more transparent and manageable.

dacapoday 7mo ago

Goodbye Claude Code. Welcome Pi.

BuleBule 7mo ago

I've been using Claude Code heavily for the past few weeks on a production project. Opus 4.6 is noticeably more capable than what I was using before, longer autonomous runs, better contextual awareness across files, fewer hallucinated edits. The UX changes I'm less sure about. The progressive disclosure thing makes sense in theory but sometimes I want to see exactly what it's doing without clicking through. The terminal is where I work, don't hide things from me. Boris's response here is the right move though. Acknowledging the miss and committing to a fix in the next release is how you build trust with a dev audience.

bennydog224 7mo ago

It feels like CC got nerfed after the 4.6 drop.

leejongyon 7mo ago

Many people are complaining, and that is indeed a meaningful step toward improvement. However, I just want to say 'Thank you' here.

toliveistobuild 7mo ago

This isn't just a UI preference issue, it's the observability problem that every agentic system hits eventually. When you're building agents that interact with real environments (browsers, codebases, APIs), the single hardest thing to get right isn't the model's reasoning. It's giving the operator enough visibility into what the agent is actually doing without drowning them in noise. There's a narrow band between "Read 3 files" (useless) and a full thinking trace dump (unusable), and finding it requires treating observability as a first-class design problem, not a verbosity slider. The frustrating part is that Anthropic clearly understands this in other contexts. Their own research on agent safety talks extensively about the need for human oversight of autonomous actions. But the moment it's their own product, the instinct is to simplify away the exact information that makes oversight possible. The people pinning to 2.1.19 aren't being difficult. They're telling you that when an agent touches my codebase, I need to know which files it read and what it searched for — not because I want to micromanage, but because that's literally the minimum viable audit trail. Take that away and you're asking users to trust a black box that edits production code.

tefkah 7mo ago
this isn't just an empty comment -- it's the same llm slop infesting every part of your existence.

ashwinr2002 7mo ago

This is a horrible change! I agree with everything in the article

kittbuilds 7mo ago

[dead]

userbinator 7mo ago

AI so intelligent, it enshittifies itself and your codebase for you.

consciousTed 7mo ago

I liked the way it was. Its a companion developer not an autonomous one. Let it speak developer to me or give it a know. Run from naive to hacker

jongjong 7mo ago

The dumbing down of LLMs seems to be working in my favor so far as my platform provides guardrails for LLMs by abstracting away complexity. They could potentially dumb it down further, but if they did that, it would hurt other use cases and competitors much more.

Lockal 7mo ago

One good solution should be mentioned here - run Claude under strace/ltrace/LD_PRELOAD/etc. The fact that LLM miss to read files is crucial for solving tasks. It does not matter that LLM later say "Yeah, I've fully read the specification and here is your code" if you check the log and it says: "Reading SPEC.md lines 1-400" <end_of_read>. Overall, the complete log of interaction with the system should always be available, otherwise it is effectively a malware. That's not an exaggeration: consider that at any point of time any side part can spit out a prompt injection. Consider the use case: previously in xz-utils it was needed to sabotage the landlock kernel level sandbox, AND to exist in the memory of sshd, AND to be able to hijacking the RSA_public_decrypt. Now the only thing is needed - printf.

singularfutur 7mo ago

Claude got smarter so we see less. Same playbook every SaaS uses when power users become edge cases. File paths aren't noise. They're the only thing stopping your LLM from hallucinating your codebase into garbage.

PostOnce 7mo ago

You open your toolbox to get your pliers, but due to nanite software updates, your pliers are now a chisel. We carefully considered this change and feel it brings the most value to our users, and we hope you'll love chisel as much as we do. One day, you guys are gonna learn not to tie your livelihoods to the whim of a corporation, but today isn't that day.

jillesvangurp 7mo ago

The meta issue here with AI companies is that they while they excel at producing LLMs, they don't have any inherent advantages when eating their own dog food and it shows in the quality and UX of their products. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have been maintaining a high pace of releasing often poorly thought through new products and experimenting with features. A lot of their product releases show all the hallmarks of vibe coding: randomly breaking features, poor QA and testing on releases, etc. OpenAI seems to have the upper hand in UX currently. Their products feel a bit more polished and they've clearly tried to up their game. Taking over Jony Ive's company a few months ago is a clear signal that they want to do better. The Codex AI desktop app was a clear step up from their web app and cli. I've been using both before that was released. Both companies are spread very thin trying to do both end user and developer oriented products and features while keeping existing paying users happy as well. Both companies also have had a string of rushed product releases that kind of fizzled out: OpenAI's Atlas, which was a response to Anthropic's Comet. Neither of which seem to be very popular at this point. Several false starts with apps (OpenAI), Claude Cowork, etc. There are a lot of half formed product ideas there that than don't get the attention they deserve. And it's not like MS, Google, and Apple are any better. If anything they are more hesitant and out of their depth here. They are all dancing around the hard issues here which are UX and security/trust models. Also, while coders get a lot of toys, nailing agentic tools for business users is proving to be a lot harder. Blanket access to everything via an agentic browser is not a viable solution. I can agentically code a structured document via latex or markdown. But the same tools are relatively useless in spreadsheets, presentations, and documents. And while you can do a lot of potentially interesting things if you surrender your inbox, the security failure modes around that remain a show stopping obstacle for wide adoption. There's a lot of stage fright, hesitation, and immature product management in this sector. There's a bit of gold rush in terms of rapid experimentation. But as the stakes get higher, a lot of these companies are increasingly lacking the freedom to move as fast as needed. Fear of liability issues is preventing them to do a lot. Which is why most progress is concentrated around developer tools.

zeptonix 7mo ago

Yeah just adding to this -- being able to see the files being operated on is absolutely essential for figuring out if you need to ^C it and try again or if you need to let it keep going.

bluesnowmonkey 7mo ago

Along the same lines: I want the context window percentage visible at all times, not just when it drops below 10%. By that point it's too late to do anything useful. I can't even get it to finish up and dump its state to a file before the window is full. If I could see the percentage the whole time, I could pace my work and wrap things up cleanly instead of slamming into the wall.

tom_m 7mo ago

Yes. Because there's not enough compute. Most providers do this.

samspot 7mo ago

Posting like this is an anti-pattern. "Everyone wants what I want, and if you don't build it my way you are stupid." Props to teams that can find some value in feedback like this, but I think I would have stopped reading. If you have really valuable feedback for a product the last thing you want to do is deliver it wrapped in ignorance and entitlement.

MantraHQ 7mo ago

[dead]