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Has anybody else noticed a pretty significant shift in sentiment when discussing Claude/Codex with other engineers since even just a few months ago? Specificall

Has anybody else noticed a pretty significant shift in sentiment when discussing Claude/Codex with other engineers since even just a few months ago? Specifically because of the secret/hidden nature of these changes. I keep getting the sense that people feel like they have no idea if they are getting the product that they originally paid for, or something much weaker, and this sentiment seems to be constantly spreading. Like when I hear Anthropic mentioned in the past few weeks, it's almost always in some negative context.

jakobnissen 5mo ago
Yeah I’ve seen this too. It’s difficult for me to tell if the complaints are due to a legitimate undisclosed nerf of Claude, or whether it’s just the initial awe of Opus 4.6 fading and people increasingly noticing its mistakes.
- kingkongjaffa 5mo ago
  Just one more anecdote: I'm on the enterprise team plan so a decent amount of usage. In March I could use Opus all day and it was getting great results. Since the last week of March and into April, I've had sessions where I maxed out session usage under 2 hours and it got stuck in overthinking loops, multiple turns of realising the same thing, dozens of paragraphs of "But wait, actually I need to do x" with slight variations of the same realisation. This is not the 'thinking effort' setting in claude code, I noticed this happening across multiple sessions with the same thinking effort settings, there was clearly some underlying change that was not published that made the model get stuck in thinking loops more for longer and more often without any escape hatch to stop and prompt the user for additional steering if it gets stuck.
  - UqWBcuFx6NV4r 5mo ago
    Whenever I see Opus say “but wait, …”—which is all the time—I get a little bit closer toward throwing my computer out the window. Sometimes I just collapse the thinking section, cross my fingers, and wait for the answer. It’s too frustrating watching the thinking process.
    - natpalmer1776 5mo ago
      I stop the thinking and manually correct with explicit instructions or direction. I treat my agents like well meaning ivy-league graduate interns. They lack the experience to know what to do sometimes and need a “common sense” direction every now and then.
    - oldmanhorton 5mo ago
      Have you considered just… writing code? Like we used to in the good old days? If the tool drives you to that point of frustration, maybe it’s time to give the tool a break.
      - trollbridge 5mo ago
        A lot of folks aren't "allowed" to write code anymore.
  - adahn 5mo ago
    I’ve seen the point raised elsewhere that this could be the double usage promo that was available from the 13th of March to the 28th. ie. people getting used to the promo then feeling impacted when it finished. Although it seems that enterprise wasn’t included, so maybe not in your case. https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14063676-claude-march-2026-usage-promotion https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14063676-claude-march...
    - cyanydeez 5mo ago
      its sounds like, tinfoil hat, they reduced the quant size of their model and tried to mask the change with the promo. your theory only addresses the spend not the reduced realiability
    - derangedHorse 5mo ago
      To me, doubling session usage always seemed like a way to gaslight users into thinking their perception of smaller usage limits after that period ended was just them readjusting to the normal usage limits. Whether from a different model being used or an intentional reduction in weekly usage, I've noticed a difference.
  - derangedHorse 5mo ago
    It's probably because you didn't specify "make no mistakes" /s In all seriousness though, I've observed the same thing with my own usage.
  - gfody 5mo ago
    this timing matches my experience, enterprise plan, but using opus from vscode - finished a heavy refactor of a large C# codebase mid march, tried to do basically the same thing early april and couldn't
  - chrsw 5mo ago
    I'm also an enterprise user and this has been my experience exactly. Same asks, same code bases, same models, much worse results. Everyone on my team is expressing the same thing. Not only that, but the lack of transparency about what's happening, in clear and simple terms, directly from Anthropic is concerning. I've already told my org's higher ups that in the current situation we're not close to getting our money's worth with these models.
  - sysid 5mo ago
    Same experience, here. Very hard to base on facts, because every problem and prompt is an individual use-case and measuring agent reasoning quality is notoriously difficult anyway. But I spend a lot of time with Claude and my overall "feeling" fully matches your description. Quality has deteriorated, thinking takes longer and results become shallow. Something is off...
- iLoveOncall 5mo ago
  I think there's a much more nefarious reason that you're missing. It's pretty clear that OpenAI has consistently used bots on social networks to peddle their products. This could just be the next iteration, mass spreading lies about Anthropic to get people to flock back to their own products. That would explain why a lot of users in the comments of those posts are claiming that they don't see any changes to limits.
  - hirako2000 5mo ago
    Judging from the number of GitHub issues on Anthropic, shamelessly being dismissed as "fixed", I doubt openai needs the bots to tarnish that competitor.
  - javawizard 5mo ago
    The trouble with that argument, though, is that it works the other way as well: how do I, a random internet citizen, know that you're not doing the same thing for Anthropic with this comment? (FWIW I have definitely noticed a cognitive decline with Claude / Opus 4.6 over the past month and a half or so, and unless I'm secretly working for them in my sleep, I'm definitely not an Anthropic employee.)
    - iLoveOncall 5mo ago
      Oh it's pretty clear to me that Anthropic employs the same tactics and uses bots on socials to push its products too. On Reddit a couple of months ago it was simply unbearable with all the "Claude Opus is going to take all the jobs". You definitely shouldn't trust me, as we're way beyond the point where you can trust ANYTHING on the internet that has a timestamp later than 2021 or so (and even then, of course people were already lying). Personally I use Claude models through Bedrock because I work for Amazon, and I haven't noticed any decline. Instead it's always been pretty shit, and what people describe now as the model getting lost of infinite loops of talking to itself happened since the very start for me.
    - felixgallo 5mo ago
      https://isitnerfed.org/ https://isitnerfed.org/ in short, it looks like nothing has been nerfed, but sentiment has definitely been negative. I suspect some of the openclaw users have been taking out their frustrations.
- PunchyHamster 5mo ago
  Both can be a thing at same time
- babaganoosh89 5mo ago
  It's not just you, there is a github issue for it: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796
pxtail 5mo ago
There's still plenty of "leave my fellow multbillion corp alone" type ones,it means that corp can and should screw it's loving customer base harder.
- simianwords 5mo ago
  The enshittification meme has been taken too seriously to the point where it is shoehorned into every single place possible. It is not in the interests for Anthropic to screw its customer base. Running a frontier lab comes with tradeoffs between training, inference and other areas.
  - officialchicken 5mo ago
    The investors are their customers - not the users of the end-product.
    - simianwords 5mo ago
      This shows a lack of understanding of how markets work. Investors make money when the valuation of the company increases. The valuation of the company is the best prediction of future profit risk adjusted. How would anthropic increase future profits without satisfying customers?
      - bitwize 5mo ago
        Have you seen the business models for these companies? Literal underpants gnome memes. OpenAI's goes like this: 1. Build AGI 2. Use said AGI to tell us how to become profitable 3. Profit! Anthropic seems to be going all in on enterprise sales. Which means they don't actually have to please customers, or it's what ThePrimeagen humorously calls a "yacht problem"—a problem that only needs a solution after the IPO. For now all they have to do is convince corporate leadership that this is the future of work and sow enough FOMO to close those sales contracts and their projected sales, and stock valuation, goes through the roof. Of course that value will collapse if they go without delivering on their promises long enough. That's why they call it a bubble. But by then, hopefully, Dario and the early investors will be long gone and even richer than they were to start. Their only competitor, OpenAI, is confronted with the same issues: the scalability problems won't go away, and addressing them doesn't drive stock valuation the way promising high rollers that AGI and total workforce automation are just around the corner does.
matheusmoreira 5mo ago
I certainly noticed a significant drop in reasoning power at some point after I subscribed to Claude. Since then I've applied all sorts of fixes that range from disabling adaptive thinking to maxing out thinking tokens to patching system prompts with an ad-hoc shell script from a gist. Even after all this, Opus will still sometimes go round and round in illogical circles, self-correcting constantly with the telltale "no wait" and undoing everything until it ends up right where it started with nothing to show for it after 100k tokens spent. Whether it's due to bugs or actual malice, it's not a good look. I genuinely can't tell if it's buggy, if it's been intentionally degraded, if it's placebo or if it's all just an elaborate OpenAI psyop.
- babaganoosh89 5mo ago
  There's a github issue for this: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796
  - matheusmoreira 5mo ago
    Yes, I commented on it and applied all remedies suggested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664442 Configuration and environment variables seem to have improved things somewhat but it still seems to be hit or miss.
  - watt 5mo ago
    That issue now is closed, probably as "not planned".
- beering 5mo ago
  The real question I see nobody asking is how GPT-5.4 beats Opus at a fraction of the price. I doubt it’s only a question of subsidization. My impression from the past is that GPT-5 was around a Sonnet-sized model, and 5-mini was Haiku-sized. At least on my codebase anyways, Codex one-shots tricky things that Opus needs several tries to fully get right.
  - 5mo ago
andai 5mo ago
Well, off the top of my head: - Banning OpenClaw users (within their rights, of course, but bad optics) - Banning 3rd party harnesses in general (ditto) (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?) - Lowering reasoning effort (and then showing up here saying "we'll try to make sure the most valuable customers get the non-gimped experience" (paraphrasing slightly xD)) - Massively reduced usage (apparently a bug?) The other day I got 21x more usage spend on the same task for Claude vs Codex. - Noticed a very sharp drop in response length in the Claude app. Asked Claude about it and it mentioned several things in the system prompt related to reduced reasoning effort, keeping responses as brief as possible, etc. It's all circumstantial but everything points towards "desperately trying to cut costs". I love Claude and I won't be switching any time soon (though with the usage limits I'm increasingly using Codex for coding), but it's getting hard to recommend it to friends lately. I told a friend "it was the best option, until about two weeks ago..." Now it's up in the air.
- risyachka 5mo ago
  >> apparently a bug? it's a bug only if they get a harsh public response, otherwise it becomes a feature
  - OtomotO 5mo ago
    A bug for one side can be a feature for another
- esperent 5mo ago
  > claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked I've used it with a sub a lot. Concurrency of 40 writing descriptions of thousands of images, running for hours on sonnet. I have a lot of complaints. I've cancelled my $200 subscription and when it runs out in a few days I'll have to find something else. But claude -p is fine. ... Or it was 2 week ago. Who knows if they've silently throttled it by now?
zazibar 5mo ago
A month ago the company I work at with over 400 engineers decided to cancel all IDE subscriptions (Visual Studio, JetBrains, Windsurf, etc.) and move everyone over to Claude Code as a "cost-saving measure" (along with firing a bunch of test engineers). There was no migration plan - the EVP of Technology just gave a demo showing 2 greenfield projects he'd built with Claude Opus over a weekend and told everyone to copy how he worked. A week later the EVP had to send out an email telling people to stop using Opus because they were burning through too many tokens. Claude seems to be getting nerfed every week since we've switched. I wonder how our EVP is feeling now.
- dickersnoodle 5mo ago
  Hopefully that EVP feels embarrassed that a big bet was made that not only didn't pay off but left the company in a worse position. Some schadenfreude may be all you can expect, since this is an executive.
- derangedHorse 5mo ago
  Pretty bad decision on his part. I've been telling other engineers within my company who felt threatened by AI that this would happen. That prices would rise and the marginal cost for changes to big codebases would start to exceed the cost of an engineer's salary. API credits are expensive, especially for huge contexts, and sometimes the model will use $200 in credits trying to solve a problem that could be fixed in an hour by a good engineer with enough context. It kind of reminds me of the joke where a plumber charges $500 for a 5 minute visit. When the client complains the plumber says it's $50 for labor and $450 for knowing how to fix the problem.
  - christoph 5mo ago
    A good lesson for all - I always really liked the Picasso version: In a bustling restaurant, an excited patron recognized the famous artist Picasso dining alone. Seizing the moment, the patron approached Picasso with a simple request. With a plain napkin and a big smile, he asked the artist for a drawing. He promised payment for his troubles. Picasso, ever the creator, didn’t hesitate. From his pocket, he produced a charcoal pencil and he brought to life a stunning sketch of a goat on the napkin—a clear mark of his unique style. Proudly, he presented it to the patron. The artwork mesmerized the patron, who reached out to take it, only to be stopped by Picasso’s firm hand. “That will be $100,000,” Picasso declared. Astonished, the patron balked at the sum. “But it took you just a few seconds to draw this!” With a calm demeanor, Picasso took back the napkin, crumpled it, and tucked it away into his pocket, replying, “No, it has taken me a lifetime.”
oezi 5mo ago
On OpenRouter token consumption is up 5x since November 2025. If this is indicative of the industries growth then I can't fathom how we will not hit resource constraints.
faangguyindia 5mo ago
This is actually great feature, you can do bait and switch with AI.
estimator7292 5mo ago
I can't believe how quickly they went from riding high on anti-OpenAI sentiment post-DOD fiasco, to shooting themselves and all their users new and old in the foot. The ideal time to make your product worse is probably not at the same point that all of your competitor's customers are looking. Anthropic really, really fucked up here. And beyond that, there's a ton of people who are just regular 9-5 Claude CLI users with an enterprise subscription who are getting punished with a worse model at the same price just as if we were Claw users. This kind of thing does not make one feel warm and fuzzy. I feel like I just got a boot to the teeth.
- jeremyjh 5mo ago
  The hypothesis that makes the most sense is not that they are idiots, but that they have no choice. They cannot meet the new demand. So they’ve quantized the model.
stavros 5mo ago
It feels like I'm getting less and less for my money every day. A few weeks ago I was programming all week and never getting close to the limit, yesterday half my weekly limit went away in a day. Changing the limits mid-subscription is just theft.
AznHisoka 5mo ago
Its not just engineers, and its not just about the 3rd party/rate limiting stuff. I feel like the reasoning capabilities have deteriorated too for non-coding tasks.
nojs 5mo ago
My working theory is that all models are approximately the same, and the variance in quality mostly depends on how long they think for. So the trick is to always set to max, and then begin every task with “this is an extremely complex task, do not complete it without extensive deep thinking and research” or whatever. You’re basically fighting a battle to make the model think more, against the defaults getting more and more nerfed to save costs.
- beering 5mo ago
  My experience has been that this isn’t generally true, mainly because worse models pursue red herrings or get confused and stuck. a better model will get to the correct solution in fewer tokens, and my surface-level understanding of how RL works supports this.
felixgallo 5mo ago
https://isitnerfed.org/ https://isitnerfed.org/
drzaiusx11 5mo ago
At some point these AI companies need to pay the piper as it were and actually provide a return for their investors. Expect cost cutting attempts to continue unless backlash is great enough to pose an existential threat to these companies.
ruler88 5mo ago
Anthropic seems to be playing the giant-tech-rent-capture game that all of the old guards have done for the past few years. We thought that the new age of AI might bring some fresh air into the mix, but I guess that optimism quickly faded.
swasheck 5mo ago
it has been my go-to provider for things but i noticed extraordinarily high usage rate last month on a little side project i started so that i could learn about things that are interesting to me while helping my day to day responsibilities (creating an iceberg data lake from my existing parquet files). i used my month’s worth of corporate subscription allocated tokens in 3 days. never seen that before so now i’m a lot more apprehensive about getting into the weeds with claude but i’m also so much less impressed with the other available models for work in this domain.
wouldbecouldbe 5mo ago
Developers are a tough crowd, stubborn, know it alls.
pstuart 5mo ago
The past two weeks I've had code that was delivered and declared as done (it did pass tests) but failed in a review by Codex. This has looped to a painful extent. The code in question deals with concurrency issues so there's an acknowledgement that its tricker, but still, I expect more from Claude.
jitl 5mo ago
I saw a big hit to Claude’s intelligence w/ the 1M context window model and the change to adaptive reasoning (github issue linked elsewhere in this thread). I’m pretty much using 90% Codex now, although since Claude is consistently faster at answering quick questions, I still keep it open for that and for code-reviewing codex/human work before commit.
alpha_squared 5mo ago
I'm pretty sure this is an attempt by both companies to shape a reasonable finance story for their eventual IPO. They need to make this look a lot better than a pump and dump (raising on wild valuations then offloading onto public investors).
motbus3 5mo ago
I think so, but more than that, the performance of those tools seems to be terribly degrading when they keep saying they have created some crap like AGI which we know is a lie. And to me, this lie is mostly a fight to see who bites the biggest chunk of the war death machine.
trashface 5mo ago
The $20 a month plan still seems like a pretty good deal for me (intermittent coding and not doing it for income).
taf2 5mo ago
I switched off claude when they nerfed opus 4.5 in August 2025, since then codex has clearly produced better code with fewer bugs. Opus 4.6 was more a temporary de-nerf of 4.5 but did not materially improve. codex has now a proven track record of producing stable results while introducing far fewer bugs.
OtomotO 5mo ago
I measured it for my specific usecases and have cancelled my Anthropic subscription (the Max x20 Plan)
sneak 5mo ago
They broke my openclaw last week; I switched to “extra usage” and prepaid a grand for same. A few days later it simply stopped working again, API authentication error. What must I do to have working, paid, premium service? Screwing around with it today, it works 5x slower and times out all of the time. I'm paying more and getting waaaaay less. Why can't companies just raise prices like normal?
jclardy 5mo ago
Just anecdotal, but I was using Claude Code for everything a few months ago, and it seemed great. Now, it is making a ton of mistakes, doing the wrong thing, misunderstanding context, and just generally being unusable. I now have been using Codex and everything has been great (I still swap back and forth but generally to check things out.) My theory is just that the models are great after release to get people switching, then they cut them back in capabilities slowly over time until the next major release to increase the hype cycle.
- MattDamonSpace 5mo ago
  Part hypecycle, part desperate attempts to rein in usage
- oorza 5mo ago
  Is it the models themselves or the tools around them? There's that patch[1] that floats around for Claude Code that's supposed to solve a lot of these problems by adjusting its tool-level prompts. Also, if it were the models themselves, wouldn't Cursor users have the same complaints (do they? I haven't heard anything but the only Cursor users I talk to are coworkers)? I think it's more likely they're trying to optimize the Claude Code prompts to reduce load on their system and have overcorrected at the cost of quality. 1: https://gist.github.com/roman01la/483d1db15043018096ac3babf5688881 https://gist.github.com/roman01la/483d1db15043018096ac3babf5...
- FireBeyond 5mo ago
  Yeah, shorter time frame but I've been noticing that too. Just the other day I was experimenting with some workflow stuff. "Do x and y and run tests and then merge into develop." Duly runs, and finishes. "All merged into develop". I do some other work, don't see any of this, double check myself, I'm working off of develop. "Hey, where is this work?" "It is in this branch and this worktree, as you would expect, you will need to merge into develop." "I'm confused, I asked you to do that and you said it was done." "You're right and I did say that but I didn't do it. Shall I do it now?" There's like this really weird balancing act between managing usage, but making people burn more tokens...
throwpoaster 5mo ago
Generally, across AI providers, I have come to interpret sudden degradation in existing capabilities as a signal that a new, more expensive, product tier is about to launch.
Papazsazsa 5mo ago
Yes. Anthropic is burning much of the goodwill they built up in contrast to OAI, and I personally am taking it as a sign to limit dependencies. Luckily for me I am not at all dependent on frontier models, and it's increasingly apparent that nobody else is too. It looks like the spreadsheet-touchers over at Anthropic won out over the brand leaders, which is too bad as good will can be a trench if you don't abuse your customers.
- beering 5mo ago
  I think on HN we always underestimate how much momentum matters. Anthropic has so much clout and mindshare that even if they continue burning goodwill and everyone on HN ditches Claude Code and stops recommending it, they will still be revenue leader for years to come. Those enterprise contracts aren’t month-to-month.
raincole 5mo ago
That's a seasonal phenomenon. You can save this comment and look back three to six months later. By the time people will be like "is it just me or ChatGPT has been so bad lately?" If you don't believe me you can search HN posts about Codex/Claude six months ago.
LunaSea 5mo ago
> people feel like they have no idea if they are getting the product that they originally paid for They do indeed get the product they originally paid for. It's simply that they were suckers and didn't read the "fine" print of the product they bought. The label says "more tokens than the lower tier".
indigodaddy 5mo ago
Is it perhaps not a model problem but a Claude Code harness problem? For instance on exe.dev VMs with Shelley agent/harness and Opus 4.5/4.6, I haven't noticed any deterioration. Any similar feedback perhaps from Opencode / GH Copilot subscription-provided Opus models?
jrockway 5mo ago
I have read the HN articles and seen the grumbling from coworkers, but I haven't felt it myself. I am not really a one-shotter, though. I kind of think about how I would refactor / write something myself and walk Claude through that, and nitpick it at each step... and the recent changes haven't really bothered me there. Likely due to being new at it. Sometimes Claude can be a little weird. I was asking it about some settings in Grafana. It gave me an answer that didn't work. I told it that. "Yeah, I didn't really check, I just guessed." Then I said, "please check" and it said "you should read the discussion forums and issue tracker". I said "YOU should read the discussion forms and issue tracker". It consumed 35k tokens and then told me the thing I wanted was a checkbox. It was! I am not sure this saved me time, Claude. I am not experienced enough to say that this is a deal breaker. While this is burned into my mind as an amusing anecdote, it doesn't ruin the service for me. My coworkers have noticed a degradation and feel vindicated by some of the posts here that I link. A lot of them are using Cursor more now. I have not tried it yet because I kind of like the Claude flow and /effort max + "are you sure?" yield good results. For now. I'm always happy to switch if something is clearly better.
- giancarlostoro 5mo ago
  How exactly do you use Claude Code, in the browser? Claude Code? The Desktop App (which has a "Code" tab) or some other way? I feel like people who have issues with Claude / Anthropic are not conveying where they are struggling. I see people say they tried "Claude" and didn't like it, but the secret sauce is Claude Code. Claude Code is what most people enjoy using, even if we all wish they would open up the harness, because there's so many more improvements that could go into it.
  - jrockway 5mo ago
    Yeah, sorry. Claude Code in my case. I do use the browser version on occasion. I have no strong feelings one way or the other there. I like it better than Google search in many cases, but probably just search more often.
blueboo 5mo ago
Wait till Codex doubles prices/halves quotas on May 31
Grimblewald 5mo ago
I'd say weaker, tasks claude code was aceing before it now fails with the exact same prompts, taking several rounds before it works. I'm looking to jump ship.
Aeolun 5mo ago
I dunno, I haven’t really felt gimped in the past few months. My last issue was somewhere after the holidays when the usage suddenly felt like it cratered, but quality has been consistent.
data-ottawa 5mo ago
I was going to do a deep analysis on this, and then I noticed that Claude Code deleted all of my sessions before March 6. So yeah... I'm not thrilled with that, because I had done a similar analysis in December and had plenty of logs to review. The results I do have for the last month aren't great. If you're curious I did post the results on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47679661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47679661
lumost 5mo ago
Codex is my favored coding agent for generic "I need an agent tasks." GPT-5.4 does a bit better with images compared to claude, and debugs a little bit better. The UX of codex is exceptionally nice however.

jakobnissen 5mo ago

Yeah I’ve seen this too. It’s difficult for me to tell if the complaints are due to a legitimate undisclosed nerf of Claude, or whether it’s just the initial awe of Opus 4.6 fading and people increasingly noticing its mistakes.

kingkongjaffa 5mo ago
Just one more anecdote: I'm on the enterprise team plan so a decent amount of usage. In March I could use Opus all day and it was getting great results. Since the last week of March and into April, I've had sessions where I maxed out session usage under 2 hours and it got stuck in overthinking loops, multiple turns of realising the same thing, dozens of paragraphs of "But wait, actually I need to do x" with slight variations of the same realisation. This is not the 'thinking effort' setting in claude code, I noticed this happening across multiple sessions with the same thinking effort settings, there was clearly some underlying change that was not published that made the model get stuck in thinking loops more for longer and more often without any escape hatch to stop and prompt the user for additional steering if it gets stuck.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 5mo ago
  Whenever I see Opus say “but wait, …”—which is all the time—I get a little bit closer toward throwing my computer out the window. Sometimes I just collapse the thinking section, cross my fingers, and wait for the answer. It’s too frustrating watching the thinking process.
  - natpalmer1776 5mo ago
    I stop the thinking and manually correct with explicit instructions or direction. I treat my agents like well meaning ivy-league graduate interns. They lack the experience to know what to do sometimes and need a “common sense” direction every now and then.
  - oldmanhorton 5mo ago
    Have you considered just… writing code? Like we used to in the good old days? If the tool drives you to that point of frustration, maybe it’s time to give the tool a break.
    - trollbridge 5mo ago
      A lot of folks aren't "allowed" to write code anymore.
- adahn 5mo ago
  I’ve seen the point raised elsewhere that this could be the double usage promo that was available from the 13th of March to the 28th. ie. people getting used to the promo then feeling impacted when it finished. Although it seems that enterprise wasn’t included, so maybe not in your case. https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14063676-claude-march-2026-usage-promotion https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14063676-claude-march...
  - cyanydeez 5mo ago
    its sounds like, tinfoil hat, they reduced the quant size of their model and tried to mask the change with the promo. your theory only addresses the spend not the reduced realiability
  - derangedHorse 5mo ago
    To me, doubling session usage always seemed like a way to gaslight users into thinking their perception of smaller usage limits after that period ended was just them readjusting to the normal usage limits. Whether from a different model being used or an intentional reduction in weekly usage, I've noticed a difference.
- derangedHorse 5mo ago
  It's probably because you didn't specify "make no mistakes" /s In all seriousness though, I've observed the same thing with my own usage.
- gfody 5mo ago
  this timing matches my experience, enterprise plan, but using opus from vscode - finished a heavy refactor of a large C# codebase mid march, tried to do basically the same thing early april and couldn't
- chrsw 5mo ago
  I'm also an enterprise user and this has been my experience exactly. Same asks, same code bases, same models, much worse results. Everyone on my team is expressing the same thing. Not only that, but the lack of transparency about what's happening, in clear and simple terms, directly from Anthropic is concerning. I've already told my org's higher ups that in the current situation we're not close to getting our money's worth with these models.
- sysid 5mo ago
  Same experience, here. Very hard to base on facts, because every problem and prompt is an individual use-case and measuring agent reasoning quality is notoriously difficult anyway. But I spend a lot of time with Claude and my overall "feeling" fully matches your description. Quality has deteriorated, thinking takes longer and results become shallow. Something is off...
iLoveOncall 5mo ago
I think there's a much more nefarious reason that you're missing. It's pretty clear that OpenAI has consistently used bots on social networks to peddle their products. This could just be the next iteration, mass spreading lies about Anthropic to get people to flock back to their own products. That would explain why a lot of users in the comments of those posts are claiming that they don't see any changes to limits.
- hirako2000 5mo ago
  Judging from the number of GitHub issues on Anthropic, shamelessly being dismissed as "fixed", I doubt openai needs the bots to tarnish that competitor.
- javawizard 5mo ago
  The trouble with that argument, though, is that it works the other way as well: how do I, a random internet citizen, know that you're not doing the same thing for Anthropic with this comment? (FWIW I have definitely noticed a cognitive decline with Claude / Opus 4.6 over the past month and a half or so, and unless I'm secretly working for them in my sleep, I'm definitely not an Anthropic employee.)
  - iLoveOncall 5mo ago
    Oh it's pretty clear to me that Anthropic employs the same tactics and uses bots on socials to push its products too. On Reddit a couple of months ago it was simply unbearable with all the "Claude Opus is going to take all the jobs". You definitely shouldn't trust me, as we're way beyond the point where you can trust ANYTHING on the internet that has a timestamp later than 2021 or so (and even then, of course people were already lying). Personally I use Claude models through Bedrock because I work for Amazon, and I haven't noticed any decline. Instead it's always been pretty shit, and what people describe now as the model getting lost of infinite loops of talking to itself happened since the very start for me.
  - felixgallo 5mo ago
    https://isitnerfed.org/ https://isitnerfed.org/ in short, it looks like nothing has been nerfed, but sentiment has definitely been negative. I suspect some of the openclaw users have been taking out their frustrations.
PunchyHamster 5mo ago
Both can be a thing at same time
babaganoosh89 5mo ago
It's not just you, there is a github issue for it: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796

pxtail 5mo ago

There's still plenty of "leave my fellow multbillion corp alone" type ones,it means that corp can and should screw it's loving customer base harder.

simianwords 5mo ago
The enshittification meme has been taken too seriously to the point where it is shoehorned into every single place possible. It is not in the interests for Anthropic to screw its customer base. Running a frontier lab comes with tradeoffs between training, inference and other areas.
- officialchicken 5mo ago
  The investors are their customers - not the users of the end-product.
  - simianwords 5mo ago
    This shows a lack of understanding of how markets work. Investors make money when the valuation of the company increases. The valuation of the company is the best prediction of future profit risk adjusted. How would anthropic increase future profits without satisfying customers?
    - bitwize 5mo ago
      Have you seen the business models for these companies? Literal underpants gnome memes. OpenAI's goes like this: 1. Build AGI 2. Use said AGI to tell us how to become profitable 3. Profit! Anthropic seems to be going all in on enterprise sales. Which means they don't actually have to please customers, or it's what ThePrimeagen humorously calls a "yacht problem"—a problem that only needs a solution after the IPO. For now all they have to do is convince corporate leadership that this is the future of work and sow enough FOMO to close those sales contracts and their projected sales, and stock valuation, goes through the roof. Of course that value will collapse if they go without delivering on their promises long enough. That's why they call it a bubble. But by then, hopefully, Dario and the early investors will be long gone and even richer than they were to start. Their only competitor, OpenAI, is confronted with the same issues: the scalability problems won't go away, and addressing them doesn't drive stock valuation the way promising high rollers that AGI and total workforce automation are just around the corner does.

matheusmoreira 5mo ago

I certainly noticed a significant drop in reasoning power at some point after I subscribed to Claude. Since then I've applied all sorts of fixes that range from disabling adaptive thinking to maxing out thinking tokens to patching system prompts with an ad-hoc shell script from a gist. Even after all this, Opus will still sometimes go round and round in illogical circles, self-correcting constantly with the telltale "no wait" and undoing everything until it ends up right where it started with nothing to show for it after 100k tokens spent. Whether it's due to bugs or actual malice, it's not a good look. I genuinely can't tell if it's buggy, if it's been intentionally degraded, if it's placebo or if it's all just an elaborate OpenAI psyop.

babaganoosh89 5mo ago
There's a github issue for this: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796
- matheusmoreira 5mo ago
  Yes, I commented on it and applied all remedies suggested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664442 Configuration and environment variables seem to have improved things somewhat but it still seems to be hit or miss.
- watt 5mo ago
  That issue now is closed, probably as "not planned".
beering 5mo ago
The real question I see nobody asking is how GPT-5.4 beats Opus at a fraction of the price. I doubt it’s only a question of subsidization. My impression from the past is that GPT-5 was around a Sonnet-sized model, and 5-mini was Haiku-sized. At least on my codebase anyways, Codex one-shots tricky things that Opus needs several tries to fully get right.
- 5mo ago

andai 5mo ago

Well, off the top of my head: - Banning OpenClaw users (within their rights, of course, but bad optics) - Banning 3rd party harnesses in general (ditto) (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?) - Lowering reasoning effort (and then showing up here saying "we'll try to make sure the most valuable customers get the non-gimped experience" (paraphrasing slightly xD)) - Massively reduced usage (apparently a bug?) The other day I got 21x more usage spend on the same task for Claude vs Codex. - Noticed a very sharp drop in response length in the Claude app. Asked Claude about it and it mentioned several things in the system prompt related to reduced reasoning effort, keeping responses as brief as possible, etc. It's all circumstantial but everything points towards "desperately trying to cut costs". I love Claude and I won't be switching any time soon (though with the usage limits I'm increasingly using Codex for coding), but it's getting hard to recommend it to friends lately. I told a friend "it was the best option, until about two weeks ago..." Now it's up in the air.

risyachka 5mo ago
>> apparently a bug? it's a bug only if they get a harsh public response, otherwise it becomes a feature
- OtomotO 5mo ago
  A bug for one side can be a feature for another
esperent 5mo ago
> claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked I've used it with a sub a lot. Concurrency of 40 writing descriptions of thousands of images, running for hours on sonnet. I have a lot of complaints. I've cancelled my $200 subscription and when it runs out in a few days I'll have to find something else. But claude -p is fine. ... Or it was 2 week ago. Who knows if they've silently throttled it by now?

zazibar 5mo ago

A month ago the company I work at with over 400 engineers decided to cancel all IDE subscriptions (Visual Studio, JetBrains, Windsurf, etc.) and move everyone over to Claude Code as a "cost-saving measure" (along with firing a bunch of test engineers). There was no migration plan - the EVP of Technology just gave a demo showing 2 greenfield projects he'd built with Claude Opus over a weekend and told everyone to copy how he worked. A week later the EVP had to send out an email telling people to stop using Opus because they were burning through too many tokens. Claude seems to be getting nerfed every week since we've switched. I wonder how our EVP is feeling now.

dickersnoodle 5mo ago
Hopefully that EVP feels embarrassed that a big bet was made that not only didn't pay off but left the company in a worse position. Some schadenfreude may be all you can expect, since this is an executive.
derangedHorse 5mo ago
Pretty bad decision on his part. I've been telling other engineers within my company who felt threatened by AI that this would happen. That prices would rise and the marginal cost for changes to big codebases would start to exceed the cost of an engineer's salary. API credits are expensive, especially for huge contexts, and sometimes the model will use $200 in credits trying to solve a problem that could be fixed in an hour by a good engineer with enough context. It kind of reminds me of the joke where a plumber charges $500 for a 5 minute visit. When the client complains the plumber says it's $50 for labor and $450 for knowing how to fix the problem.
- christoph 5mo ago
  A good lesson for all - I always really liked the Picasso version: In a bustling restaurant, an excited patron recognized the famous artist Picasso dining alone. Seizing the moment, the patron approached Picasso with a simple request. With a plain napkin and a big smile, he asked the artist for a drawing. He promised payment for his troubles. Picasso, ever the creator, didn’t hesitate. From his pocket, he produced a charcoal pencil and he brought to life a stunning sketch of a goat on the napkin—a clear mark of his unique style. Proudly, he presented it to the patron. The artwork mesmerized the patron, who reached out to take it, only to be stopped by Picasso’s firm hand. “That will be $100,000,” Picasso declared. Astonished, the patron balked at the sum. “But it took you just a few seconds to draw this!” With a calm demeanor, Picasso took back the napkin, crumpled it, and tucked it away into his pocket, replying, “No, it has taken me a lifetime.”

oezi 5mo ago

On OpenRouter token consumption is up 5x since November 2025. If this is indicative of the industries growth then I can't fathom how we will not hit resource constraints.

faangguyindia 5mo ago

This is actually great feature, you can do bait and switch with AI.

estimator7292 5mo ago

I can't believe how quickly they went from riding high on anti-OpenAI sentiment post-DOD fiasco, to shooting themselves and all their users new and old in the foot. The ideal time to make your product worse is probably not at the same point that all of your competitor's customers are looking. Anthropic really, really fucked up here. And beyond that, there's a ton of people who are just regular 9-5 Claude CLI users with an enterprise subscription who are getting punished with a worse model at the same price just as if we were Claw users. This kind of thing does not make one feel warm and fuzzy. I feel like I just got a boot to the teeth.

jeremyjh 5mo ago
The hypothesis that makes the most sense is not that they are idiots, but that they have no choice. They cannot meet the new demand. So they’ve quantized the model.

stavros 5mo ago

It feels like I'm getting less and less for my money every day. A few weeks ago I was programming all week and never getting close to the limit, yesterday half my weekly limit went away in a day. Changing the limits mid-subscription is just theft.

AznHisoka 5mo ago

Its not just engineers, and its not just about the 3rd party/rate limiting stuff. I feel like the reasoning capabilities have deteriorated too for non-coding tasks.

nojs 5mo ago

My working theory is that all models are approximately the same, and the variance in quality mostly depends on how long they think for. So the trick is to always set to max, and then begin every task with “this is an extremely complex task, do not complete it without extensive deep thinking and research” or whatever. You’re basically fighting a battle to make the model think more, against the defaults getting more and more nerfed to save costs.

beering 5mo ago
My experience has been that this isn’t generally true, mainly because worse models pursue red herrings or get confused and stuck. a better model will get to the correct solution in fewer tokens, and my surface-level understanding of how RL works supports this.

felixgallo 5mo ago

https://isitnerfed.org/ https://isitnerfed.org/

drzaiusx11 5mo ago

At some point these AI companies need to pay the piper as it were and actually provide a return for their investors. Expect cost cutting attempts to continue unless backlash is great enough to pose an existential threat to these companies.

ruler88 5mo ago

Anthropic seems to be playing the giant-tech-rent-capture game that all of the old guards have done for the past few years. We thought that the new age of AI might bring some fresh air into the mix, but I guess that optimism quickly faded.

swasheck 5mo ago

it has been my go-to provider for things but i noticed extraordinarily high usage rate last month on a little side project i started so that i could learn about things that are interesting to me while helping my day to day responsibilities (creating an iceberg data lake from my existing parquet files). i used my month’s worth of corporate subscription allocated tokens in 3 days. never seen that before so now i’m a lot more apprehensive about getting into the weeds with claude but i’m also so much less impressed with the other available models for work in this domain.

wouldbecouldbe 5mo ago

Developers are a tough crowd, stubborn, know it alls.

pstuart 5mo ago

The past two weeks I've had code that was delivered and declared as done (it did pass tests) but failed in a review by Codex. This has looped to a painful extent. The code in question deals with concurrency issues so there's an acknowledgement that its tricker, but still, I expect more from Claude.

jitl 5mo ago

I saw a big hit to Claude’s intelligence w/ the 1M context window model and the change to adaptive reasoning (github issue linked elsewhere in this thread). I’m pretty much using 90% Codex now, although since Claude is consistently faster at answering quick questions, I still keep it open for that and for code-reviewing codex/human work before commit.

alpha_squared 5mo ago

I'm pretty sure this is an attempt by both companies to shape a reasonable finance story for their eventual IPO. They need to make this look a lot better than a pump and dump (raising on wild valuations then offloading onto public investors).

motbus3 5mo ago

I think so, but more than that, the performance of those tools seems to be terribly degrading when they keep saying they have created some crap like AGI which we know is a lie. And to me, this lie is mostly a fight to see who bites the biggest chunk of the war death machine.

trashface 5mo ago

The $20 a month plan still seems like a pretty good deal for me (intermittent coding and not doing it for income).

taf2 5mo ago

I switched off claude when they nerfed opus 4.5 in August 2025, since then codex has clearly produced better code with fewer bugs. Opus 4.6 was more a temporary de-nerf of 4.5 but did not materially improve. codex has now a proven track record of producing stable results while introducing far fewer bugs.

OtomotO 5mo ago

I measured it for my specific usecases and have cancelled my Anthropic subscription (the Max x20 Plan)

sneak 5mo ago

They broke my openclaw last week; I switched to “extra usage” and prepaid a grand for same. A few days later it simply stopped working again, API authentication error. What must I do to have working, paid, premium service? Screwing around with it today, it works 5x slower and times out all of the time. I'm paying more and getting waaaaay less. Why can't companies just raise prices like normal?

jclardy 5mo ago

Just anecdotal, but I was using Claude Code for everything a few months ago, and it seemed great. Now, it is making a ton of mistakes, doing the wrong thing, misunderstanding context, and just generally being unusable. I now have been using Codex and everything has been great (I still swap back and forth but generally to check things out.) My theory is just that the models are great after release to get people switching, then they cut them back in capabilities slowly over time until the next major release to increase the hype cycle.

MattDamonSpace 5mo ago
Part hypecycle, part desperate attempts to rein in usage
oorza 5mo ago
Is it the models themselves or the tools around them? There's that patch[1] that floats around for Claude Code that's supposed to solve a lot of these problems by adjusting its tool-level prompts. Also, if it were the models themselves, wouldn't Cursor users have the same complaints (do they? I haven't heard anything but the only Cursor users I talk to are coworkers)? I think it's more likely they're trying to optimize the Claude Code prompts to reduce load on their system and have overcorrected at the cost of quality. 1: https://gist.github.com/roman01la/483d1db15043018096ac3babf5688881 https://gist.github.com/roman01la/483d1db15043018096ac3babf5...
FireBeyond 5mo ago
Yeah, shorter time frame but I've been noticing that too. Just the other day I was experimenting with some workflow stuff. "Do x and y and run tests and then merge into develop." Duly runs, and finishes. "All merged into develop". I do some other work, don't see any of this, double check myself, I'm working off of develop. "Hey, where is this work?" "It is in this branch and this worktree, as you would expect, you will need to merge into develop." "I'm confused, I asked you to do that and you said it was done." "You're right and I did say that but I didn't do it. Shall I do it now?" There's like this really weird balancing act between managing usage, but making people burn more tokens...

throwpoaster 5mo ago

Generally, across AI providers, I have come to interpret sudden degradation in existing capabilities as a signal that a new, more expensive, product tier is about to launch.

Papazsazsa 5mo ago

Yes. Anthropic is burning much of the goodwill they built up in contrast to OAI, and I personally am taking it as a sign to limit dependencies. Luckily for me I am not at all dependent on frontier models, and it's increasingly apparent that nobody else is too. It looks like the spreadsheet-touchers over at Anthropic won out over the brand leaders, which is too bad as good will can be a trench if you don't abuse your customers.

beering 5mo ago
I think on HN we always underestimate how much momentum matters. Anthropic has so much clout and mindshare that even if they continue burning goodwill and everyone on HN ditches Claude Code and stops recommending it, they will still be revenue leader for years to come. Those enterprise contracts aren’t month-to-month.

raincole 5mo ago

That's a seasonal phenomenon. You can save this comment and look back three to six months later. By the time people will be like "is it just me or ChatGPT has been so bad lately?" If you don't believe me you can search HN posts about Codex/Claude six months ago.

LunaSea 5mo ago

> people feel like they have no idea if they are getting the product that they originally paid for They do indeed get the product they originally paid for. It's simply that they were suckers and didn't read the "fine" print of the product they bought. The label says "more tokens than the lower tier".

indigodaddy 5mo ago

Is it perhaps not a model problem but a Claude Code harness problem? For instance on exe.dev VMs with Shelley agent/harness and Opus 4.5/4.6, I haven't noticed any deterioration. Any similar feedback perhaps from Opencode / GH Copilot subscription-provided Opus models?

jrockway 5mo ago

I have read the HN articles and seen the grumbling from coworkers, but I haven't felt it myself. I am not really a one-shotter, though. I kind of think about how I would refactor / write something myself and walk Claude through that, and nitpick it at each step... and the recent changes haven't really bothered me there. Likely due to being new at it. Sometimes Claude can be a little weird. I was asking it about some settings in Grafana. It gave me an answer that didn't work. I told it that. "Yeah, I didn't really check, I just guessed." Then I said, "please check" and it said "you should read the discussion forums and issue tracker". I said "YOU should read the discussion forms and issue tracker". It consumed 35k tokens and then told me the thing I wanted was a checkbox. It was! I am not sure this saved me time, Claude. I am not experienced enough to say that this is a deal breaker. While this is burned into my mind as an amusing anecdote, it doesn't ruin the service for me. My coworkers have noticed a degradation and feel vindicated by some of the posts here that I link. A lot of them are using Cursor more now. I have not tried it yet because I kind of like the Claude flow and /effort max + "are you sure?" yield good results. For now. I'm always happy to switch if something is clearly better.

giancarlostoro 5mo ago
How exactly do you use Claude Code, in the browser? Claude Code? The Desktop App (which has a "Code" tab) or some other way? I feel like people who have issues with Claude / Anthropic are not conveying where they are struggling. I see people say they tried "Claude" and didn't like it, but the secret sauce is Claude Code. Claude Code is what most people enjoy using, even if we all wish they would open up the harness, because there's so many more improvements that could go into it.
- jrockway 5mo ago
  Yeah, sorry. Claude Code in my case. I do use the browser version on occasion. I have no strong feelings one way or the other there. I like it better than Google search in many cases, but probably just search more often.

blueboo 5mo ago

Wait till Codex doubles prices/halves quotas on May 31

Grimblewald 5mo ago

I'd say weaker, tasks claude code was aceing before it now fails with the exact same prompts, taking several rounds before it works. I'm looking to jump ship.

Aeolun 5mo ago

I dunno, I haven’t really felt gimped in the past few months. My last issue was somewhere after the holidays when the usage suddenly felt like it cratered, but quality has been consistent.

data-ottawa 5mo ago

I was going to do a deep analysis on this, and then I noticed that Claude Code deleted all of my sessions before March 6. So yeah... I'm not thrilled with that, because I had done a similar analysis in December and had plenty of logs to review. The results I do have for the last month aren't great. If you're curious I did post the results on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47679661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47679661

lumost 5mo ago

Codex is my favored coding agent for generic "I need an agent tasks." GPT-5.4 does a bit better with images compared to claude, and debugs a little bit better. The UX of codex is exceptionally nice however.