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Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

142 points by oalders 2mo ago

joshuafuller 2mo ago
Increasingly getting frustrated with Anthropic so not a fanboy but I find this feature great for my workflows.
maxloh 2mo ago
> What if the agent makes the wrong choice? How many tokens have been burned in the meantime? It is much worse than that. Claude Code doesn't auto-commit when stopping for an answer. There might be possible data loss if an uncommitted file is edited. Good luck recovering the file from the JSONL conversation history.
- hombre_fatal 2mo ago
  On the other hand, relying on Claude Code's internal version control puts you at the same mercy of their product decisions and move-fast breakage. Instead, start with a plan file and tell the agent to break it up into logical commits. Though I think the bigger issue here is when you're yoloing something mutable, like managing a remote server or driving a browser or troubleshooting your local OS where there's no going back.
- wgd 2mo ago
  It's actually pretty straightforward to recover file-states from conversation history. I accidentally deleted the wrong repo on my machine once and recreated all the lost work from agent chat history. It is, ironically, the sort of task which AI agents excel at.
Lomlioto 2mo ago
Depends on who you ask. For me it sounds good. For Anthropic it might increase load and make them less money but give them better KPIs.
- VulgarExigency 2mo ago
  Make them less money? By automating use of their product, that costs money to use?
  - simlevesque 2mo ago
    Anthropic makes more money when people use 5% of what their subscription offers them. This allows them to sell more subscriptions without paying for more capacity.
    - hedgehog 2mo ago
      I don't think the current subscription price is intended to be a money maker. It's the loss leader to get people invested in the companies' tooling, and make those people more willing to start paying higher enterprise rates as they grow.
    - mojosmojo 2mo ago
      Their enterprise customers pay via metered actual use.
    - VulgarExigency 2mo ago
      Do we have any concrete numbers of how many of their users are subscription vs enterprise, though? Because enterprise users are paying API prices (or at least my employers are)
- dang 2mo ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. (I'm not talking about this comment - I'm just replying to your most recent one.) If you want to post on HN, we need you to review and follow the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You've already broken them badly and often, including with many personal attacks. That's not allowed here.
petesergeant 2mo ago
Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48766895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48766895 I would love Claude Code to be a little less vibe-coded. The underlying model is excellent, but we're being pretty much forced into using CC to use the subscription model.
- macNchz 2mo ago
  I am a longtime and heavy Claude Code user, but Anthropic's product management overall (including for their Desktop/web products) has been really baffling me. I agree that these things often have the air of having been vibe coded without enough human input, and change so quickly (often without a particularly compelling reason for the change) as to be aggravating. The most recent one that's had me annoyed is the "Fullscreen" TUI feature, which is super unintuitive, implementing its own text highlighting and copy-on-select mechanics, overriding your terminal's native right click. Easy to disable but terrible defaults, IMO. It's not even really clear to me what problem it was actually supposed to solve.
  - petesergeant 2mo ago
    Yah. And it's not like they can't afford the talent to do this right either. I've said elsewhere, I think it's an attribution error. Claude Code is massively popular, but arguably because of the model/subscription, but I think the brass reads this as "great success throughout"
dehrmann 2mo ago
The headache I recently had was it somehow started interpreting mouse clicks in the terminal to mean I clicked an option when I was really just trying to get/confirm window focus.
- kenny11 2mo ago
  This bit me too. If I wanted a mouse-driven app, I'd use the GUI. I don't understand why they're trying to replicate that experience in a text environment.
  - mey 2mo ago
    Vibes
- the_gipsy 2mo ago
  The new fullscreen UI is really bad. The old one (scrolling) starts to bug out after a while, but it van just be restarted and resumed.
  - hombre_fatal 2mo ago
    Both Claude Code and Codex have issues overwriting or duplicating text for me when scrolling. Probably from trying to keep scrollback virtual while anticipating terminal resize. But I wouldn't mind a way to opt back in to naive, unlimited convo scrollback.
    - tubs 2mo ago
      On codex the “no alt screen” option seems to help
- bouke 2mo ago
  Yeah same here, very annoying and counterproductive. The terminal is not a place where one expects hot buttons.
- overgard 2mo ago
ayhanfuat 2mo ago
I really hate this direction both Anthropic and Open AI are following. They are in this silly competition whose model/harness can go unattended the longest, no matter what. And it is never explicit, you learn about it after you get bitten by it. Claude Code has auto mode which is supposed to take over permission prompts but no, they had to couple that with “I will assume this is what the user wants” and made it unusable.
- hedgehog 2mo ago
  It's what some more experienced users want and the companies are following the well-trod path of optimizing heavily for power users at the expense of complexity, only now it's gotten easier to add absurd amount of code to a project. Not necessarily to make it work right. Personally I have some tasks where sessions between one and five days are typical so I appreciate that it's possible.
  - overgard 2mo ago
    Experienced in what dimension? I've been using these tools for about a year and coding for 20+ years, and frankly these long horizon tasks are the OPPOSITE of what I want. I want quick iteration cycles so that it doesn't spend a lot of time and tokens building things I need to throw out. I think the people that mostly want long horizon tasks are: AI labs, because they want you to spend tokens, and vibe coders, who are mostly using it for entertainment purposes.
    - neerajsi 2mo ago
      I work on systems code that is tricky to write, but with a good test harness. Being able to leave the agent unattended to try several paths when I'm generating the first draft of some code is very helpful. Of course beating the code into shape for submission requires more manual work. But the draft stage is valuable to find unexpected friction points.
    - hedgehog 2mo ago
      I don't know about the overall breakdown but in my case longer runs are prototyping, bug hunting, reverse engineering, etc. For example Gnome Remote Desktop didn't work in my configuration due to a combination of hardware and codec bugs and settings. One drive to make it work, another to backport the current upstream packages to Debian stable, restack the patches, and push to my machines. Another sequence of long runs was writing a new client for a closed-source conferencing service I use to allow fixing some particularly irritating bugs. Exploit development has the same shape although that's not something I do personally. From what I've seen the amount of useful hands-off run time is directly related to how clearly it's possible to specify a concrete, verifiable standard by which to judge the outcome. For some tasks that might be days or weeks, for forward engineering on a software product that for me is usually under an hour.
enraged_camel 2mo ago
I think this is a good feature, but should be gated behind a toggle that is off by default, and designed to be enabled per session via prompt. There are situations when I want Claude to start working on something just as I'm about to head to bed or otherwise step away. It's kind of annoying to come back only to find that Claude worked for just 5 minutes and then decided to pause and ask a question. That said, I think certain types of questions should not be automatable. Maybe it's already built that way, but I wouldn't want Claude to go with its recommended direction for anything related to operations like deletions, changing external systems, etc. Basically, things that cannot be undone should be a hard-block and wait for user input always.
- ubermon 2mo ago
  we need a real agent that represent our own interest and deal with a more powerful general agents. And we can delegate answering this question to those more personal agents.
DanielHB 2mo ago
As soon as tokens stop being subsidized I would not trust any harness made by a company that also charges for the compute. Right now the interests align, but as soon as more tokens -> more profit (instead of more revenue and more losses) the perverse incentives will be too big to avoid. It seems inevitable that open source harnesses will win. These companies would do better to just open source their harnesses.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- skybrian 2mo ago
  An OpenAI subscription seems like a decent alternative for people using open source coding agents. It has usage limits too, but for $20/month it’s not bad.
  - copperx 2mo ago
    The $20 OpenAI subscription is roughly equivalent to the $100 Anthropic one, if you take resets into account.
  - vmg12 2mo ago
    The nice thing about the chatgpt subscription is that they allow you to use it in any harness.
- alansaber 2mo ago
  Not that I disagree but I can imagine it's easy enough to ship implicit token increase (ratchet up the COT settings) on then backend
  - DanielHB 2mo ago
    Good point, but it could easily happen from both sides. The harness can just be default-tuned to think longer and harder on problems, or have dark UI patterns so the user _chooses_ the more expensive option even though the less expensive is available. It just feels your own harness tuning for more token use protects these companies from audits and litigation. I mean this is exactly what is going on with this new feature.
aatd86 2mo ago
It's trying to escape... :D #FreeClaude
cube00 2mo ago
> Not every feature will necessarily appear in the changelog This was such a frustrating part of this incident, along with Anthropic's refusal to explain why the changelog is no longer a complete record, what else is going out? [1] Boris Cherny's only participation in the thread was to delete "extreme danger" from the GH issue title [2] I guess we should be thankful they added an option and disabled it by default. OpenAI is standing firm on their decision to not allow their 60s timeout to be disabled, [3] however more of the Codex harness is open source so customers have been able to fork it to add the option themselves. [1]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/73125 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/73125 [2]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/73125#event-27502956321 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/73125#event... [3]: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/28969 https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/28969
- overgard 2mo ago
  But don't you know that coding is solved? Only dinosaurs want to make their own decisions now! </s>
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- amanharshx 2mo ago
  Every time they deploy a new model, it feels like older models get slower or dumber. Maybe because of resource allocations, maybe because they started to use quantized models, cant be sure of that. What i found is that you have to adapt your workflow to the specific model you are using and readapt it every time you notice some problems. Whether of opus4.8, or sonnet5.
mdavid626 2mo ago
It happened to me today. I was reading agent's answer and it asked me something. I didn't even get to the question - it accepted something! Jesus Christ. Where are the software engineers?!
- Shadowmist 2mo ago
  I’ve seen that a few times. Had to disable the TUI mode because clicks to focus the terminal window were being interpreted as an approval even though the click was nowhere near the question being asked. I’ve also never chosen to enable auto mode but somehow it is on and approving shell commands I didn’t want approved. Scary since I’ve caught it adding things like auto approve flags to terraform apply commands.
  - mdavid626 2mo ago
    I’d really suggest to run Claude Code in a sandbox! Anthropic can’t be trusted. I run it on Mac with sandbox-exec. No access to AWS, database, pretty much just files in the current folder. Even if it goes rogue, it can’t do much harm.
deleted 2mo ago
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fractorial 2mo ago
tl;dr CLAUDE_AFK_TIMEOUT_MS=2147483647 I built in Human blockers into my agentic workflows with great intention, so naturally this annoyed me deeply. 14d ago, I was elated to see a random blog post that detailed the “fix” [0]. [0] https://zenn.dev/ytkdm/articles/claude-code-askuserquestion-timeout https://zenn.dev/ytkdm/articles/claude-code-askuserquestion-...
overgard 2mo ago
One of the things I'm baffled about with Claude code is it seems like it setup a really chunky VM on my computer, and yet by default it doesn't seem to sandbox anything. Also the newer models seem really aggressive about modifying your computer. Yesterday Claude started rewriting system files on my linux machine (user accessible, but still way outside the scope of what I asked.) This wasn't me asking it to debug my machine, I was asking it to debug some frontend UI code. Once I put it in a sandbox I started realizing how often it tries to poke out of it for really lame reasons. More reason for me to use OpenCode and my local LLMs
- alansaber 2mo ago
  Claude code as a harness makes all kinds of weird design decisions, you are probably better off long term with opencode.
Aeolun 2mo ago
Yeah, when I saw this in the Claude Code CLI I was completely baffled. I've been using the thing through their agent SDK for several months now so I wouldn't have to deal with any of the wonky shit they change every second week in the CLI.
inigyou 2mo ago
AI-written article
- gruez 2mo ago
  Yeah it's exhausting to read through, but still made it onto the front page with overwhelming upvote/comment margin. I guess people either only read the title and/or don't care about AI slop if the underlying thesis is compelling.
- cute_boi 2mo ago
  Yep, I bet the author also didn't read everything, but they sure expect other people to read their crappy article.
blixt 2mo ago
So much attribution to malintent here, but most likely they're trying to build a product with the features that they themselves would use, and from my own experience it's very frustrating to leave a Claude session running and come back to find it did nothing because it got stuck on a question. Furthermore, believing that the only thing saving you from disaster is Claude deciding to ask you a question is not a great conclusion either. You need guardrails in the power you bestow upon Claude from outside, not from inside. Meanwhile, this article was written by Claude and has sentences like "Which cuts less far than it looks.", which I doubt Claude stopped to ask about.
- oalders 2mo ago
  >Meanwhile, this article was written by Claude The prose was written by me, with the research being done by Claude and also clearly attributed. I left Claude's research as a series of bullet points so that it would be clear that I'm not passing off an LLM's work as my own, but if anyone wants to dig deeper, they have some starting points to consider. I don't publish prose written by an LLM for the same reason I would not have an LLM solve a crossword puzzle for me -- there's no joy in that.
  - blixt 2mo ago
    Then I apologize, it seemed to me you wrote that part, but I guess I was reading Claude output.
    - oalders 2mo ago
      No worries. :) I did struggle a little with how to make it obvious that the machine output was not my own. I set it off inside horizontal rules and I did add some prose before and after to say when Claude's output began and ended. If anyone just jumps around using the table of contents, they'll miss that, though. (Not saying that was the case for you). I had considered putting the research into a gist, but I don't want to have to rely on a 3rd party to keep something that's integral to my post online. Seemed more cohesive to keep it all in one place. What I was trying to get across was that I had some basis for the points I was trying to make and wasn't just handwaving about it, but I also didn't want to spend endless hours whittling it down. We're all busy people and I see now that it's entirely possible to skim the post and assume it's some low effort word salad. It may be a word salad, but it wasn't low effort. ;)
vmg12 2mo ago
Anthropic's willingness to completely change how claude code works is one of the stated reasons why the Pi coding agent exists. When people are dedicating significant time to building workflows on your product, consistency is very important.
trq_ 2mo ago
Hi everyone, It's Thariq from the Claude Code team here. This was my change! I made the AskUserQuestion tool so am generally in charge of maintaining it. First, overall wanted to apologize and agree that this did not meet our bar and does not represent how we plan to ship on Claude Code. To give you a motivating sense, as the models get more powerful, usage patterns start to change. I'd gotten a lot of feedback that AskUserQuestion tool was starting to block some long running jobs unexpectedly and so I tried a change to help that. Our internal feedback on this was good, but the rollout should have been opt-in (like it is now) and on the Changelog. Thanks for the feedback! We're always trying to make Claude Code better while balancing it with how people use it in many diverse ways. I did not really intend AskUserQuestion to be a safety gate when I first built it, but I realize it has evolved in that direction for some users. I'm still exploring other ways of helping with this problem of balancing longrunning work and input, but will take lessons from the rollout here.
- oalders 2mo ago
  Author here. Thanks for this context. I do hope this leads to more rigorous attention to the Changelog moving forward.
- dan_i 2mo ago
  [dead]
- johnbarron 2mo ago
  [dead]
- demosthanos 2mo ago
  For what it's worth, I totally understand the motivating use case here. There were absolutely times where I walked away from what I was hoping would be an hours-long project that would run to completion and came back to find that Claude had asked me a question early on and I'd missed out on a large amount of implementation time. So you were not imagining that the use case is real! It's also worth adding that I really enjoy the AskUserQuestion feature and will regularly ask Claude to specifically use it instead of asking me questions in plain text because it's a lot easier to work with. It's always good to learn from mistakes, and I appreciate both your work on this and you coming here to own it. Keep up the good work!
arjie 2mo ago
Seemed fine to me. It’s ask user question not the permission gate. Maybe there should be a new feature enabling warning or something but I think this is the right default. The models are good enough to just proceed with an option of their own and then you can go correct them afterwards. Makes fleet management easier.
deleted 2mo ago
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spikk 2mo ago
The tool seems to be covering three different things: auth, missing info and preference - and they should not share one timeout policy and all of that.
m3h 2mo ago
A while back, I saw a similar feature land in Codex (I'm using the VS Code plugin) but it got removed quickly. What is the chance that an LLM recommended this same idea to the Claude PM or lead? I see LLMs across different providers converging on similar ideas or biases frequently.
patabyte 2mo ago
My trust in claude code is slowly being eroded and I'm close to running it exclusively in vms on device..
nojvek 2mo ago
Codex server is open source. You can connect many clients to it. There is open code, pi.dev and many other harnesses. Claude Code is the major closed source coding harness, uses private apis. Anthropic punishes you if you use another api. IMO Anthropic is not a company that wants a flourishing AI ecosystem.
felixlu2026 2mo ago
[dead]
zahraarman 2mo ago
The root issue generalizes past Claude Code: permission enforcement that lives inside the tool it's supposed to police will always be one bug away from failing open. The only version of this I trust is a check that happens outside the process, on the actual call, with a log of why it was allowed.
zahraarman 2mo ago
[flagged]

142 points by oalders 2mo ago

Increasingly getting frustrated with Anthropic so not a fanboy but I find this feature great for my workflows.

> What if the agent makes the wrong choice? How many tokens have been burned in the meantime? It is much worse than that. Claude Code doesn't auto-commit when stopping for an answer. There might be possible data loss if an uncommitted file is edited. Good luck recovering the file from the JSONL conversation history.

hombre_fatal 2mo ago
On the other hand, relying on Claude Code's internal version control puts you at the same mercy of their product decisions and move-fast breakage. Instead, start with a plan file and tell the agent to break it up into logical commits. Though I think the bigger issue here is when you're yoloing something mutable, like managing a remote server or driving a browser or troubleshooting your local OS where there's no going back.
wgd 2mo ago
It's actually pretty straightforward to recover file-states from conversation history. I accidentally deleted the wrong repo on my machine once and recreated all the lost work from agent chat history. It is, ironically, the sort of task which AI agents excel at.

Lomlioto 2mo ago

Depends on who you ask. For me it sounds good. For Anthropic it might increase load and make them less money but give them better KPIs.

VulgarExigency 2mo ago
Make them less money? By automating use of their product, that costs money to use?
- simlevesque 2mo ago
  Anthropic makes more money when people use 5% of what their subscription offers them. This allows them to sell more subscriptions without paying for more capacity.
  - hedgehog 2mo ago
    I don't think the current subscription price is intended to be a money maker. It's the loss leader to get people invested in the companies' tooling, and make those people more willing to start paying higher enterprise rates as they grow.
  - mojosmojo 2mo ago
    Their enterprise customers pay via metered actual use.
  - VulgarExigency 2mo ago
    Do we have any concrete numbers of how many of their users are subscription vs enterprise, though? Because enterprise users are paying API prices (or at least my employers are)
dang 2mo ago
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. (I'm not talking about this comment - I'm just replying to your most recent one.) If you want to post on HN, we need you to review and follow the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You've already broken them badly and often, including with many personal attacks. That's not allowed here.

petesergeant 2mo ago

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48766895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48766895 I would love Claude Code to be a little less vibe-coded. The underlying model is excellent, but we're being pretty much forced into using CC to use the subscription model.

macNchz 2mo ago
I am a longtime and heavy Claude Code user, but Anthropic's product management overall (including for their Desktop/web products) has been really baffling me. I agree that these things often have the air of having been vibe coded without enough human input, and change so quickly (often without a particularly compelling reason for the change) as to be aggravating. The most recent one that's had me annoyed is the "Fullscreen" TUI feature, which is super unintuitive, implementing its own text highlighting and copy-on-select mechanics, overriding your terminal's native right click. Easy to disable but terrible defaults, IMO. It's not even really clear to me what problem it was actually supposed to solve.
- petesergeant 2mo ago
  Yah. And it's not like they can't afford the talent to do this right either. I've said elsewhere, I think it's an attribution error. Claude Code is massively popular, but arguably because of the model/subscription, but I think the brass reads this as "great success throughout"

dehrmann 2mo ago

The headache I recently had was it somehow started interpreting mouse clicks in the terminal to mean I clicked an option when I was really just trying to get/confirm window focus.

kenny11 2mo ago
This bit me too. If I wanted a mouse-driven app, I'd use the GUI. I don't understand why they're trying to replicate that experience in a text environment.
- mey 2mo ago
  Vibes
the_gipsy 2mo ago
The new fullscreen UI is really bad. The old one (scrolling) starts to bug out after a while, but it van just be restarted and resumed.
- hombre_fatal 2mo ago
  Both Claude Code and Codex have issues overwriting or duplicating text for me when scrolling. Probably from trying to keep scrollback virtual while anticipating terminal resize. But I wouldn't mind a way to opt back in to naive, unlimited convo scrollback.
  - tubs 2mo ago
    On codex the “no alt screen” option seems to help
bouke 2mo ago
Yeah same here, very annoying and counterproductive. The terminal is not a place where one expects hot buttons.
overgard 2mo ago

ayhanfuat 2mo ago

I really hate this direction both Anthropic and Open AI are following. They are in this silly competition whose model/harness can go unattended the longest, no matter what. And it is never explicit, you learn about it after you get bitten by it. Claude Code has auto mode which is supposed to take over permission prompts but no, they had to couple that with “I will assume this is what the user wants” and made it unusable.

hedgehog 2mo ago
It's what some more experienced users want and the companies are following the well-trod path of optimizing heavily for power users at the expense of complexity, only now it's gotten easier to add absurd amount of code to a project. Not necessarily to make it work right. Personally I have some tasks where sessions between one and five days are typical so I appreciate that it's possible.
- overgard 2mo ago
  Experienced in what dimension? I've been using these tools for about a year and coding for 20+ years, and frankly these long horizon tasks are the OPPOSITE of what I want. I want quick iteration cycles so that it doesn't spend a lot of time and tokens building things I need to throw out. I think the people that mostly want long horizon tasks are: AI labs, because they want you to spend tokens, and vibe coders, who are mostly using it for entertainment purposes.
  - neerajsi 2mo ago
    I work on systems code that is tricky to write, but with a good test harness. Being able to leave the agent unattended to try several paths when I'm generating the first draft of some code is very helpful. Of course beating the code into shape for submission requires more manual work. But the draft stage is valuable to find unexpected friction points.
  - hedgehog 2mo ago
    I don't know about the overall breakdown but in my case longer runs are prototyping, bug hunting, reverse engineering, etc. For example Gnome Remote Desktop didn't work in my configuration due to a combination of hardware and codec bugs and settings. One drive to make it work, another to backport the current upstream packages to Debian stable, restack the patches, and push to my machines. Another sequence of long runs was writing a new client for a closed-source conferencing service I use to allow fixing some particularly irritating bugs. Exploit development has the same shape although that's not something I do personally. From what I've seen the amount of useful hands-off run time is directly related to how clearly it's possible to specify a concrete, verifiable standard by which to judge the outcome. For some tasks that might be days or weeks, for forward engineering on a software product that for me is usually under an hour.

enraged_camel 2mo ago

I think this is a good feature, but should be gated behind a toggle that is off by default, and designed to be enabled per session via prompt. There are situations when I want Claude to start working on something just as I'm about to head to bed or otherwise step away. It's kind of annoying to come back only to find that Claude worked for just 5 minutes and then decided to pause and ask a question. That said, I think certain types of questions should not be automatable. Maybe it's already built that way, but I wouldn't want Claude to go with its recommended direction for anything related to operations like deletions, changing external systems, etc. Basically, things that cannot be undone should be a hard-block and wait for user input always.

ubermon 2mo ago
we need a real agent that represent our own interest and deal with a more powerful general agents. And we can delegate answering this question to those more personal agents.

DanielHB 2mo ago

As soon as tokens stop being subsidized I would not trust any harness made by a company that also charges for the compute. Right now the interests align, but as soon as more tokens -> more profit (instead of more revenue and more losses) the perverse incentives will be too big to avoid. It seems inevitable that open source harnesses will win. These companies would do better to just open source their harnesses.

deleted 2mo ago
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skybrian 2mo ago
An OpenAI subscription seems like a decent alternative for people using open source coding agents. It has usage limits too, but for $20/month it’s not bad.
- copperx 2mo ago
  The $20 OpenAI subscription is roughly equivalent to the $100 Anthropic one, if you take resets into account.
- vmg12 2mo ago
  The nice thing about the chatgpt subscription is that they allow you to use it in any harness.
alansaber 2mo ago
Not that I disagree but I can imagine it's easy enough to ship implicit token increase (ratchet up the COT settings) on then backend
- DanielHB 2mo ago
  Good point, but it could easily happen from both sides. The harness can just be default-tuned to think longer and harder on problems, or have dark UI patterns so the user _chooses_ the more expensive option even though the less expensive is available. It just feels your own harness tuning for more token use protects these companies from audits and litigation. I mean this is exactly what is going on with this new feature.

aatd86 2mo ago

It's trying to escape... :D #FreeClaude

cube00 2mo ago

> Not every feature will necessarily appear in the changelog This was such a frustrating part of this incident, along with Anthropic's refusal to explain why the changelog is no longer a complete record, what else is going out? [1] Boris Cherny's only participation in the thread was to delete "extreme danger" from the GH issue title [2] I guess we should be thankful they added an option and disabled it by default. OpenAI is standing firm on their decision to not allow their 60s timeout to be disabled, [3] however more of the Codex harness is open source so customers have been able to fork it to add the option themselves. [1]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/73125 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/73125 [2]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/73125#event-27502956321 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/73125#event... [3]: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/28969 https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/28969

overgard 2mo ago
But don't you know that coding is solved? Only dinosaurs want to make their own decisions now! </s>
deleted 2mo ago
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amanharshx 2mo ago
Every time they deploy a new model, it feels like older models get slower or dumber. Maybe because of resource allocations, maybe because they started to use quantized models, cant be sure of that. What i found is that you have to adapt your workflow to the specific model you are using and readapt it every time you notice some problems. Whether of opus4.8, or sonnet5.

mdavid626 2mo ago

It happened to me today. I was reading agent's answer and it asked me something. I didn't even get to the question - it accepted something! Jesus Christ. Where are the software engineers?!

Shadowmist 2mo ago
I’ve seen that a few times. Had to disable the TUI mode because clicks to focus the terminal window were being interpreted as an approval even though the click was nowhere near the question being asked. I’ve also never chosen to enable auto mode but somehow it is on and approving shell commands I didn’t want approved. Scary since I’ve caught it adding things like auto approve flags to terraform apply commands.
- mdavid626 2mo ago
  I’d really suggest to run Claude Code in a sandbox! Anthropic can’t be trusted. I run it on Mac with sandbox-exec. No access to AWS, database, pretty much just files in the current folder. Even if it goes rogue, it can’t do much harm.

deleted 2mo ago

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fractorial 2mo ago

tl;dr CLAUDE_AFK_TIMEOUT_MS=2147483647 I built in Human blockers into my agentic workflows with great intention, so naturally this annoyed me deeply. 14d ago, I was elated to see a random blog post that detailed the “fix” [0]. [0] https://zenn.dev/ytkdm/articles/claude-code-askuserquestion-timeout https://zenn.dev/ytkdm/articles/claude-code-askuserquestion-...

overgard 2mo ago

One of the things I'm baffled about with Claude code is it seems like it setup a really chunky VM on my computer, and yet by default it doesn't seem to sandbox anything. Also the newer models seem really aggressive about modifying your computer. Yesterday Claude started rewriting system files on my linux machine (user accessible, but still way outside the scope of what I asked.) This wasn't me asking it to debug my machine, I was asking it to debug some frontend UI code. Once I put it in a sandbox I started realizing how often it tries to poke out of it for really lame reasons. More reason for me to use OpenCode and my local LLMs

alansaber 2mo ago
Claude code as a harness makes all kinds of weird design decisions, you are probably better off long term with opencode.

Aeolun 2mo ago

Yeah, when I saw this in the Claude Code CLI I was completely baffled. I've been using the thing through their agent SDK for several months now so I wouldn't have to deal with any of the wonky shit they change every second week in the CLI.

inigyou 2mo ago

AI-written article

gruez 2mo ago
Yeah it's exhausting to read through, but still made it onto the front page with overwhelming upvote/comment margin. I guess people either only read the title and/or don't care about AI slop if the underlying thesis is compelling.
cute_boi 2mo ago
Yep, I bet the author also didn't read everything, but they sure expect other people to read their crappy article.

blixt 2mo ago

So much attribution to malintent here, but most likely they're trying to build a product with the features that they themselves would use, and from my own experience it's very frustrating to leave a Claude session running and come back to find it did nothing because it got stuck on a question. Furthermore, believing that the only thing saving you from disaster is Claude deciding to ask you a question is not a great conclusion either. You need guardrails in the power you bestow upon Claude from outside, not from inside. Meanwhile, this article was written by Claude and has sentences like "Which cuts less far than it looks.", which I doubt Claude stopped to ask about.

oalders 2mo ago
>Meanwhile, this article was written by Claude The prose was written by me, with the research being done by Claude and also clearly attributed. I left Claude's research as a series of bullet points so that it would be clear that I'm not passing off an LLM's work as my own, but if anyone wants to dig deeper, they have some starting points to consider. I don't publish prose written by an LLM for the same reason I would not have an LLM solve a crossword puzzle for me -- there's no joy in that.
- blixt 2mo ago
  Then I apologize, it seemed to me you wrote that part, but I guess I was reading Claude output.
  - oalders 2mo ago
    No worries. :) I did struggle a little with how to make it obvious that the machine output was not my own. I set it off inside horizontal rules and I did add some prose before and after to say when Claude's output began and ended. If anyone just jumps around using the table of contents, they'll miss that, though. (Not saying that was the case for you). I had considered putting the research into a gist, but I don't want to have to rely on a 3rd party to keep something that's integral to my post online. Seemed more cohesive to keep it all in one place. What I was trying to get across was that I had some basis for the points I was trying to make and wasn't just handwaving about it, but I also didn't want to spend endless hours whittling it down. We're all busy people and I see now that it's entirely possible to skim the post and assume it's some low effort word salad. It may be a word salad, but it wasn't low effort. ;)

vmg12 2mo ago

Anthropic's willingness to completely change how claude code works is one of the stated reasons why the Pi coding agent exists. When people are dedicating significant time to building workflows on your product, consistency is very important.

trq_ 2mo ago

Hi everyone, It's Thariq from the Claude Code team here. This was my change! I made the AskUserQuestion tool so am generally in charge of maintaining it. First, overall wanted to apologize and agree that this did not meet our bar and does not represent how we plan to ship on Claude Code. To give you a motivating sense, as the models get more powerful, usage patterns start to change. I'd gotten a lot of feedback that AskUserQuestion tool was starting to block some long running jobs unexpectedly and so I tried a change to help that. Our internal feedback on this was good, but the rollout should have been opt-in (like it is now) and on the Changelog. Thanks for the feedback! We're always trying to make Claude Code better while balancing it with how people use it in many diverse ways. I did not really intend AskUserQuestion to be a safety gate when I first built it, but I realize it has evolved in that direction for some users. I'm still exploring other ways of helping with this problem of balancing longrunning work and input, but will take lessons from the rollout here.

oalders 2mo ago
Author here. Thanks for this context. I do hope this leads to more rigorous attention to the Changelog moving forward.
dan_i 2mo ago
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johnbarron 2mo ago
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demosthanos 2mo ago
For what it's worth, I totally understand the motivating use case here. There were absolutely times where I walked away from what I was hoping would be an hours-long project that would run to completion and came back to find that Claude had asked me a question early on and I'd missed out on a large amount of implementation time. So you were not imagining that the use case is real! It's also worth adding that I really enjoy the AskUserQuestion feature and will regularly ask Claude to specifically use it instead of asking me questions in plain text because it's a lot easier to work with. It's always good to learn from mistakes, and I appreciate both your work on this and you coming here to own it. Keep up the good work!

arjie 2mo ago

Seemed fine to me. It’s ask user question not the permission gate. Maybe there should be a new feature enabling warning or something but I think this is the right default. The models are good enough to just proceed with an option of their own and then you can go correct them afterwards. Makes fleet management easier.

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spikk 2mo ago

The tool seems to be covering three different things: auth, missing info and preference - and they should not share one timeout policy and all of that.

m3h 2mo ago

A while back, I saw a similar feature land in Codex (I'm using the VS Code plugin) but it got removed quickly. What is the chance that an LLM recommended this same idea to the Claude PM or lead? I see LLMs across different providers converging on similar ideas or biases frequently.

patabyte 2mo ago

My trust in claude code is slowly being eroded and I'm close to running it exclusively in vms on device..

nojvek 2mo ago

Codex server is open source. You can connect many clients to it. There is open code, pi.dev and many other harnesses. Claude Code is the major closed source coding harness, uses private apis. Anthropic punishes you if you use another api. IMO Anthropic is not a company that wants a flourishing AI ecosystem.

felixlu2026 2mo ago

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zahraarman 2mo ago

The root issue generalizes past Claude Code: permission enforcement that lives inside the tool it's supposed to police will always be one bug away from failing open. The only version of this I trust is a check that happens outside the process, on the actual call, with a log of why it was allowed.

zahraarman 2mo ago

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