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Discussion Sentiment

58% Positive

Analyzed from 10630 words in the discussion.

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#claude#more#code#anthropic#codex#same#model#models#usage#need

Discussion (394 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

sunaurus•1 day ago
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.

andai•1 day 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.

rlpb•1 day ago
> It's all circumstantial but everything points towards "desperately trying to cut costs".

I have been wondering if it's more geared at reducing resource usage, given that at the moment there's a known constraint on AI datacenter expansion capability. Perhaps they are struggling to meet demand?

stingraycharles•about 21 hours ago
It’s more that Anthropic knows that the models themselves are non-sticky, and the real moat is in the ecosystem around it.

It only makes sense for them to get users to use their ecosystem, rather than other tools.

sshine•about 22 hours ago
> Perhaps Anthropic is struggling to meet demand?

Yes, definitely, they’re gracefully failing to meet demand. They could also deny new customers, but it would probably be bad for business.

MuffinFlavored•about 18 hours ago
I wish they would just rip the bandaid to stop everybody's entitled whining.

"We're sorry, what we were able to give you for $100/mo before now needs to be $200/mo (or more). We miscalculated/we were too generous/gave too much away for too little. It's a new technology, we are seeing a ton of demand, we are trying to run a business, hope you understand. If you don't want it, don't pay for it."

aftbit•about 13 hours ago
Huh I've noticed that! Opus hallucinates answers and provides contradictory reasoning to me much more regularly during the past couple of weeks than it did in February.

For example, after a question about a script that used taskset and CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES to handle NUMA domains on a parallel GLUE evaluation run:

>Round 2 tasks reuse GPU slots that Round 1 may still be occupying. Cola, SST-2, and QQP are small datasets and will likely finish before MNLI, but QNLI is sizable. If QNLI (GPU 3, slot 3) is still running when Round 2 launches, that's fine — they're on different slots. But more importantly, Round 2 uses slots 5/6/7 (GPUs 7/0/1), while Round 1 uses slots 0/1/2/3/4 (GPUs 4/5/2/3/6). So there's no GPU collision — you're good here actually. Disregard, this is clean.

Bolwin•about 17 hours ago
Claude -p is allowed. They're not going to give you a feature then ban you for using it.

What they changed is that it now uses extra usage, which is charged at api rates

TheDong•about 7 hours ago
"claude -p" does not charge api rates by itself, I just ran "claude -p 'write hello world to foo.txt'", and it didn't.

What they changed is that if you have OpenClaw run 'claude -p' for you, that gets your account banned or charged API rates, and if they think your usage of 'claude -p' is maybe OpenClaw, even if it's not, you get charged API rates or banned.

It seems so silly to me. They built a feature with one billing rate, and the feature is a bash command. If you have a bad program run the bash command, you get billed at a different rate, if you have a good script you wrote yourself run it, you're fine, but they have literally no legitimate way to tell the difference since either way it's just a command being run.

The justification going around is that OpenClaw usage is so heavy that it impacts the service for other people, but like OpenClaw was just using the "claude code max" plan, so if they can't handle the usage the plan promises, they should be changing the plan.

If they had instead said "Your claude code max plan, which has XX quota, will get charged API rates if you consistently use 50% of your quota. The quota is actually a lie, it's just the amount you can burst up to once or twice a week, but definitely not every day" and just banned everyone that used claude code a lot, I wouldn't be complaining as much, that'd be much more consistent.

wild_egg•about 16 hours ago
It only switches to charging API rates if some part of your prompt triggers their magic string detector. Lot of examples of that floating around where swapping "is" for "are" or whatever will magically allow the request against your subscription plan again.
deaux•about 19 hours 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. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?)

How often? Realistically, if you invoke it occasionally, for what's clearly an amount that's "reasonable personal use", then no you don't get nuked.

ls612•about 18 hours ago
It’s the same problem people have with Google. If they ban you for some AI hallucinated reason you have no recourse other than going viral on Hacker News.
siva7•about 13 hours ago
Anthropic has become shady as hell in less than a few weeks. The DoD Story and the overall popularity among developers got them a huge leap over OAI but i certainly won't renew my subscription with them. The Claude SDK feels like a constant fight against its own limitations compared to Codex and other Harnesses.
rendaw•about 18 hours ago
They also screwed up the API token detection and also blocked a bunch of 1st party tool users for ~24h.

Support consisted of AI bots saying you did something stupid, you did something wrong, you were abusing the system, followed by (only when I asked for it explicitly) claiming to file a ticket with a human who will contact you later (and it either didn't happen or their ticket system is /dev/null).

(By the way this is the 2nd time I've been "please hold" gaslit by support LLMs this exact same way, the other being with Square)

fluidcruft•about 21 hours ago
claude -p not working would be instant unsubscribe downgrade from Max to Pro and further drive my use of codex. I use both but overall have noticed I reach for Claude less than codex lately because claude keeps getting slower and slower (I have not noticed a drop off in quality, but I use it less and less so maybe I'm not in a good position to notice).

Generally I find codex and claude make a good team. I'm not a heavy user, but I am currently Claude Max 5x and ChatGPT Plus. Now that OpenAI has a $100 offering and I am finding myself using Claude less, I am considering switching to Claude Pro and ChatGPT Pro x5. The work hours restriction on Claude Max x5 really pisses me off.

I am not a heavy user. Historically I only break over 50% weekly one week a month and average about 30-40% of Max x5 over the entire month. I went Max because of the weekly limits and to access the better models and because I felt I was getting value. I need an occasional burst of usage, not 24/7 slow compute. But even for pay-as-you-go burst usage Anthropic's API prices are insane vs Max.

I have yet to ever hit a limit on codex so it's not on my mind. And lately it seems like Claude is likely to be having a service interruption anyway. A big part of subscribing to Claude Max was to get away from how the usage limits on Pro were causing me to architect my life around 5hr windows. And now Anthropic has brought that all back with this don't use it before 2pm bullshit. I want things ready to go when the muses strike. I'm honestly questioning whether Anthropic wants anyone who isn't employed as a software engineer to use their kit.

Anyway for the last month or so codex "just works" and Claude has been an invitation for annoyances. There was a time when codex was quite a bit behind claude-code. They have been roughly equal (different strength and weaknesses) since at least February (for me).

visarga•about 17 hours ago
I might consider switching to codex from claude pro 20x but I need the post tool use, pre file write and post user message hooks. Waiting on codex to deliver.

- pre file write -> block editing code files without a task and plan of work

- post tool use -> show next open checkbox in the task to the agent, like an instruction pointer

- post user message -> log all user messages for periodic review of intent alignment

These 3 hooks + plain md files make my claude harness.

timtimmy•about 16 hours ago
Perhaps Anthropic should put a freeze on new signups until they can increase capacity. This is the best kind of problem for a business, I'm cheering for them.
sscaryterry•about 14 hours ago
This requires ethics.
greenavocado•about 15 hours ago
If there is one thing that is crystal clear, its that LLM providers will always take your money, no matter how bad the service is.
joshstrange•1 day 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. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?)

100% this, I’ve posted the same sentiment here on HN. I hate the chilling effect of the bans and the lack of clarity on what is and is not allowed.

stingraycharles•about 21 hours ago
In this case, they handled things pretty well. You can still use openclaw etc with your regular Anthropic subscription, it will just count towards your extra credits / usage which you can buy for a 30% discount compared to API pricing. And they gave everyone one month’s value in credits.

I don’t think they could have done that much better I’d say.

politelemon•1 day ago
Why were third party harnesses banned? Surely they'd want sticking power over the ecosystem.
cedws•1 day ago
There’s the argument that Anthropic has built Claude Code to use the models efficiently, which the subscription pricing is based on.

Maybe there’s some truth to that, but then why haven’t OpenAI made the same move? I believe the main reason is platform control. Anthropic can’t survive as a pipeline for tokens, they need to build and control a platform, which means aggressively locking out everybody else building a platform.

lelanthran•about 15 hours ago
> Why were third party harnesses banned? Surely they'd want sticking power over the ecosystem.

Third-party harnesses are the exact opposite of stickiness!

Ditching Claude Code for a third party harness while using the Claude Code subscription means it's trivial to switch to a different model when you {run out of credits | find a cheaper token provider | find a better model}.

klempner•about 22 hours ago
Note that the thing that's banned is using third party harnesses with their subscription based pricing.

If you're paying normal API prices they'll happily let you use whatever harness you want.

brookst•about 22 hours ago
To be clear they weren’t banned from Claude usage, they were required to use the API and API rates rather than Claude Max tokens.

Claude code uses a bunch if best practices to maximize cache hit rate. Third party harnesses are hit or miss, so often use a lot more tokens for the same task.

sshine•about 22 hours ago
One thing is lack of control of token efficiency on what’s already a subsidised product.

Another thing is branding: Their CLI might be the best right now, but tech debt says it won’t continue to be for very long.

By enforcing the CLI you enforce the brand value — you’re not just buying the engine.

visarga•about 17 hours ago
I want to differentiate 2 kinds of harnesses

1. openclaw like - using the LLM endpoint on subscription billing, different prompts than claude code

2. using claude cli with -p, in headless mode

The second runs through their code and prompts, just calls claude in non-interactive mode for subtasks. I feel especially put off by restricting the second kind. I need it to run judge agents to review plans and code.

esperent•1 day 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?

andai•about 23 hours ago
The other day I read that letting another agent invoke claude -p was considered a violation (i.e. letting OpenClaw delegate to Claude Code).

Not sure how that's enforced though. I was in OpenClaw discord a while ago and enforcement seemed a bit random.

I'll try to find the source, I might have gotten the details mixed up.

smrtinsert•about 12 hours ago
I will say I have noticed none of these things in my enterprise account. Is this is a known targeting of non-enterprise clients only?
stefan_•about 17 hours ago
I think we are about a month away from a class action lawsuit, at their revenue they are a juicy target. And god knows they got the entirely self inflicted unholy combination going on, marketing & sales that borders on fraud (X times the usage of plan Y which has Z times of free tier which has unknowable "magic tokens") and then of course the actual fraud, reducing usage in fifteen different non obvious non public ways.
risyachka•1 day ago
>> apparently a bug?

it's a bug only if they get a harsh public response, otherwise it becomes a feature

OtomotO•about 17 hours ago
A bug for one side can be a feature for another
retinaros•about 14 hours ago
i dont know why ppl are surprised. you just need to see what they say on china, open source and fake safety blogs to understand they re not a company that devs should give their code for free to
infecto•about 17 hours ago
Most of those are issues are coming from a very small minority. A lot of times its good for businesses to focus on the customers that are driving them the highest margin, most likely not users like yourself.

1) Nobody should expect to use OpenClaw without API usage.

2) We have known for a long time that the plans are subsidized. It was not as big of a deal but now that demand has continued to explode at a multiple and tools like OpenClaw were creating a lot of usage from a small minority of customers, prices change.

Everything for me points more towards, we have made a service people really want to use and we are trying to balance a supply shortage (compute) with pricing. Nothing is stopping folks like yourself from simply paying the API rates. It is the simple no hassle way to get around any issue you are having, pay the API cost and you will have no limitations!

zazibar•1 day 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.

derangedHorse•about 24 hours 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•about 24 hours 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.”

wat10000•about 9 hours ago
It seems very unlikely that prices would rise in the long term. Yes, RAM and GPU prices are suddenly going up due to the demand spike and OpenAI's shenanigans, but I doubt it's going to last very long. Some combination of new capacity and reduced demand will most likely put things back on the usual course where this stuff gradually gets cheaper over time. And models are getting better, so next year you can probably get the same results for less compute. That $200 in credits becomes $150, then $100, then....
charcircuit•about 17 hours ago
>That prices would rise

Competition will prevent that from happening. When anyone can host open models and there is giant demand for LLMs companies can not easily raise token prices without sending a lot of traffic to their competitors.

breton•about 19 hours ago
> the model will use $200 in credits trying to solve a problem that could be fixed in an hour by a good engineer with enough context

So the price for fixing the problem is equal. Sounds like a great argument for AI.

jrpear•about 17 hours ago
Even if you take it as true that prices have risen recently, and may continue to rise as the VC subsidies dry up, they will fall again long-term. Inference will get more power efficient with model-on-chip solutions like Taalas and God willing we will get cheaper and cheaper renewable energy.

Despite this I don't think engineers should feel threatened. As long as there is a need for a human in the loop, as today, there will still be engineering jobs. And if demand for engineering effort is elastic enough, there could easily be even more jobs tomorrow.

Rather than threatened, I think engineers should feel exposed. To danger, yes, but opportunity as well.

groundzeros2015•about 21 hours ago
I can’t believe how many small to mid size companies are being destroyed by bad decisions like this.

A friend’s company fired all EMs and have engineers reporting to product managers. They aren’t allowed to do refactors because the CTO believes the AI doesn’t need organized code.

aerhardt•about 17 hours ago
How do people like that ascend to CTO?
kubb•about 21 hours ago
He must be feeling pretty good, after all he still believes that it was the right call, and he definitely won't be admitting a mistake.

There's 0 chance of him facing the consequences for it either.

sgt•about 22 hours ago
But cancelling IDE subscriptions? You need a proper IDE to along side AI augmented development unless you want to simply be along for the ride.
slashdave•about 18 hours ago
Well, you can resubscribe in an afternoon. The fired workers? No real recovery from that.
silverwind•about 11 hours ago
`git diff` is probably all you need.
derwiki•about 21 hours ago
Free VS Code is probably fine
dickersnoodle•about 24 hours 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.
giancarlostoro•about 13 hours ago
Should have started slowly instead of being so aggressive with it.
jimmydoe•about 19 hours ago
lol. dude is so incompetent. changing tool for cost cutting is so stupid, we all know real cost cutting is firing people. if he is really good at he's doing, just fire 10% people and replace them with his Claude. If that didn't get backfired in 3 months, he will be CT0.
thefourthchime•about 18 hours ago
Wow, that sounds like you have a astoundingly terrible EVP.
jclardy•about 16 hours 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.

oorza•about 15 hours 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/483d1db15043018096ac3babf5...

alphabettsy•about 5 hours ago
People keep saying this, but I’m not sure I buy it.

I was using both Codex and Claude Code heavily on some projects this weekend.

In one project Codex was screwing everything up and in another one absolutely killing it. I’ve seen the same from Claude.

In the bad Codex example it had the wrong idea and kept trying to figure out how to accomplish the same thing no matter how many times I attempt to correct it. Undoing the recent changes where it went down the wrong path was the only way to get things back on track.

I wonder if context poisoning is a bigger problem than people realize.

MattDamonSpace•about 15 hours ago
Part hypecycle, part desperate attempts to rein in usage
FireBeyond•about 11 hours 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...

alphabettsy•about 5 hours ago
Prompt cache expired?
matheusmoreira•1 day 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.

beering•about 17 hours 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.
alphabettsy•about 5 hours ago
IMO it doesn’t handily beat it.

It’s typically equivalent, sometimes better, sometimes behind. Better at following a well defined plan, less good at concept exploration and planning imo.

At 1m context it’s basically the same price.

matheusmoreira•about 17 hours ago
I wanted to choose Anthropic because they were apparently more ethical compared to OpenAI, but... Yeah.

Right now the only blocker for me is the lack of Linux support.

babaganoosh89•1 day ago
watt•about 15 hours ago
That issue now is closed, probably as "not planned".
matheusmoreira•1 day ago
Yes, I commented on it and applied all remedies suggested.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664442

Configuration and environment variables seem to have improved things somewhat but it still seems to be hit or miss.

jakobnissen•1 day 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.
babaganoosh89•1 day ago
It's not just you, there is a github issue for it: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796
PunchyHamster•1 day ago
Both can be a thing at same time
kingkongjaffa•1 day 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•1 day 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.
chrsw•about 15 hours 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.

adahn•1 day 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...

gfody•about 18 hours 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
derangedHorse•about 24 hours 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.

iLoveOncall•1 day 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.

javawizard•1 day 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.)

hirako2000•1 day 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.
jrockway•about 13 hours 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•about 13 hours 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•about 13 hours 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.

pxtail•1 day 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•1 day 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•1 day ago
The investors are their customers - not the users of the end-product.
georgemcbay•about 22 hours ago
It doesn't matter if it is in Anthropic's interest to screw its customer base, if their reported monthly revenue growth is accurate then it makes perfect sense why Claude would be getting dumber...

Demand is way up and compute supply is extremely limited because data center buildouts can't keep up with demand.

In the face of rising demand and insufficient compute their only practical options (other than refusing new business until demand can be met) are signicantly raising the price of tokens (and more tighly limiting subscription options) or doing behind the scenes inference optimizations that are likely to make the model dumber.

It is very easy to believe that they took the route of inference optimizations that have reduced quality of the service and that that is where the perceived enshittification is coming from.

ruler88•about 20 hours 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.
trashface•about 18 hours ago
The $20 a month plan still seems like a pretty good deal for me (intermittent coding and not doing it for income).
data-ottawa•about 9 hours 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

jitl•about 18 hours 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.

taf2•about 17 hours 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.
oezi•1 day 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.
lumost•about 7 hours 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.

Papazsazsa•about 15 hours 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•about 15 hours 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.
Aeolun•about 9 hours 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.
LunaSea•about 15 hours 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".

Grimblewald•about 11 hours 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.
indigodaddy•about 15 hours 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?

nojs•about 22 hours 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•about 15 hours 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.
drzaiusx11•about 21 hours 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.
swasheck•about 20 hours 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.
AznHisoka•about 21 hours 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.
stavros•about 22 hours 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.
echelon•1 day ago
Anthropic isn't your friend.

Phase 1: $200/mo prosumer engineer tool

Phase 2: AI layoffs / "it's just AI washing"

Phase 3: $20,000/mo limited release model "too dangerous" to use

Phase 4: Accelerated layoffs / two person teams. Rehiring of certain personnel at lower costs.

Phase 5: "Our new model can decompile and rewrite any commercial software. We just wrote a new kernel after looking at Linux (bye, bye GPL!) We also decompiled the latest Zelda game, ported the engine to Rust, and made a new game with it. Source code has no value. Even compiled and obfuscated code is a breeze to clone."

Phase 6: $100k/mo model that replicates entire engineering teams, only large companies can afford it. Ordinary users can't buy. More layoffs.

Phase N: People can't afford computing anymore. Everything is thin clients and rented. It's become like the private railroad industry. End of the PC era. Like kids growing up on smartphones, there's nothing to tinker with anymore. And certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-skilled labor capital.

Anothropic used to be cool before they started gating access. Limiting Claw/OpenCode was strike one. Mythos is strike two.

Y'all should have started hating on their ethics when they started complaining about being distilled. For training they conducted on materials they did not own.

We need open weights companies now more than ever. Too bad China seems to be giving up on the idea.

"You wouldn't distill an Opus."

PunchyHamster•1 day ago
Stop thinking billion dollar publicly traded companies are "cool" just because they make widget you like.

You will be backstabbed

You will be squeezed for all they can.

And you will be betrayed.

> Phase N: People can't afford computing anymore. Everything is thin clients and rented. It's become like the private railroad industry. End of the PC era. Like kids growing up on smartphones, there's nothing to tinker with anymore. And certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-skilled labor capital.

Thankfully none of them actually makes money and just runs on investment so there is a good chance bubble will drop and the price of PC equipment will... continue to rise as US gives up Taiwan to China

dns_snek•about 22 hours ago
> Stop thinking billion dollar publicly traded companies are "cool" just because they make widget you like.

Anthropic is a private company but nevertheless, the sentiment is accurate and applies to all kinds of corporations.

andai•1 day ago
What I want to know is how did they make the only LLM that doesn't sound cringe?

I think it has something to do with mode collapse (although Claude certainly has its own "tells"), but I'm not sure.

It sounds trivial but even for Agentic, I found the writing style to be really important. When you give Claude a persona, it sounds like the thing. When you give GPT a persona, it sounds like GPT half-assedly pretending to be the thing.

---

Some other interesting points about Anthropic's models. I don't know if any of these relate to my LLM style question, but seems worth mentioning:

Claude models also use way less tokens for the same task (on ArtificialAnalysis, they are a clear outlier on this metric).

And there's a much stronger common sense, subjectively. (Not sure if we have a good way to actually measure that, though.) It takes context and common sense into account, to a much greater degree.

(Which ties in with their constitution. Understanding why things are wrong at a deeper level, rather than just surface level pattern matching.)

Opus is great but it should be bigger. You notice the difference between Sonnet and Opus, but with heavy use you notice Opus's limitations, too.

hirako2000•1 day ago
Good read on the situation.

It all boils down to a brilliant but extremely expensive technology. Both to build and to run.

We've been sold a product with heavy subsidy. The idea (from Sam) scale out and see what happens.

Those who care to read between the lines can see what's happening. A perfect storm of demand that attract VCs who can't understand they are the real customers. Once they understand that it will be too late.

Regarding open weight models: eventually we will, as humanity, benefit from the astronomical capital poured into developing a technology ahead of its time. In a few years this and even more will run on edge.

Written by open source developers, likely former openai and anthropic employees who got so much cash in the bank they don't need to worry about renting their knowledge.

jhancock•1 day ago
What leads you to say China AI is giving up on open weights?

I've been using GLM for over 6 months and pretty happy.

PunchyHamster•1 day ago
Why would any company release open weights once the investment money stops ?

Releasing open weights have been basically a PR move, the moment those companies need to actually make money they will cut it out as that reduces their client base.

They DO NOT want you to run AI. They want you to pay them to do it

Zetaphor•about 23 hours ago
People keep repeating this without any real thought behind it because of the high profile resignations on the Qwen team. Meanwhile the Minimax team just released a new open weights version of their 229B model yesterday. So much for that narrative.

The AI landscape in China is larger than just Qwen and Alibaba.

marcus_cemes•1 day ago
> We need open weights companies now more than ever.

If you're objective it to democratize AI, sure. But for those fed up with it and the devastating effects it's having on students, for example, can opt to actively avoid paying for products with AI (I say this as someone who uses it every day, guilty). At some point large companies will see that they're bleeding money for something that most people don't seem to want, and cancel those $100k/mo deals. I've already experienced one AI-developer-turned company crash and burn.

Personally, I don't think this LLM-based AI generation will have any significant positive impacts. Time, energy (CO2) and money would have been far better spent elsewhere.

Zetaphor•about 16 hours ago
There's plenty of valuable use cases for being able to give natural language instructions to a tool and have it act on that input. I do however agree that the current hype and valuations far exceed the real value being offered.

Like with the dot com bubble there will be a crash and then whatever shakes out of that will be the companies and products who invested in understanding the actual strengths and weaknesses of the tech, instead of just trying to slap an "AI" sticker on everything.

magic_hamster•1 day ago
> End of the PC era, there's nothing to tinker with anymore. And certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-skilled labor capital.

This one seems too far fetched. Training models is widespread. There will always be open weight models in some form, and if we assume there will be some advancements in architecture, I bet you could also run them on much leaner devices. Even today you can run models on Raspberry Pis. I don't see a reason this will stop being a thing, there will be plenty of ways to tinker.

However, keep in mind the masses don't care about tinkering and never have. People want a ChatGPT experience, not a pytorch experience. In essence this is true for all tech products, not just AI.

slashdave•about 18 hours ago
When did Hacker News become a fountain of dystopian science fiction?
Throaway199999•about 17 hours ago
from its inception lol
alpha_squared•about 18 hours 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).
raincole•about 15 hours 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.

estimator7292•about 22 hours 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•about 21 hours 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.
wouldbecouldbe•about 20 hours ago
Developers are a tough crowd, stubborn, know it alls.
faangguyindia•about 23 hours ago
This is actually great feature, you can do bait and switch with AI.
motbus3•about 18 hours 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.

throwpoaster•about 16 hours 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.
sneak•about 16 hours 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?

OtomotO•about 17 hours ago
I measured it for my specific usecases and have cancelled my Anthropic subscription (the Max x20 Plan)
pstuart•about 19 hours 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.
felixgallo•about 21 hours ago
blueboo•about 12 hours ago
Wait till Codex doubles prices/halves quotas on May 31
foofloobar•about 15 hours ago
Claude Code and the subscription are now less useful than a few months ago. Claude Code and the service seem to pick up more and more issues as time goes by: more bugs, fast quota drain, reduced quota, poor model performance, cache invalidation problems, MCP related bugs, potential model quantization and other problems.

Claude Code was able to implement something in one shot. It was decent for a proof of concept initial implementation. It's barely able to do work now with full specs and detailed plans.

ChatGPT is also being watered down.

It seems obvious that Anthropic and OpenAI aren't the solution to any problem.

trollbridge•about 15 hours ago
I caught up with a friend who said he's really happy with Cursor (currently using the multi-model option where it composes, and reserving use of Opus 4.6 for only when he actually needs the extra power).

Quite interesting considering all the claims that Cursor was dead a few months ago.

foofloobar•about 15 hours ago
I wouldn't trust another company either. Some people have reported some issues with Cursor. The solution is probably not a cloud API with unknown quotas or pay as you go pricing.
ecocentrik•about 15 hours ago
They are clearly straining under new demand and everyone is being served highly quantized models without notice.
throw_m239339•about 13 hours ago
Every single one of these AI services are running at loss, they are subsidized. Anybody who is surprised that these services are going to get degraded and their cost go up substantially learned nothing from the last 20 years of SAAS. It never gets cheaper.
vbezhenar•about 8 hours ago
Use cloud AI hoster with open model. Can't get more transparent and reliable than that. They won't subsidize anything, because the whole point of their business is to rent hardware. Open models won't go anywhere, they're there to stay.

The quality will be a bit behind frontier proprietary models. You gotta pay for what you use, no way to cover your expenses from peers underusing their subscription. But otherwise it should be a reasonable middle ground, with very little risk of rug being pulled out from you.

cassianoleal•1 day ago
The title should be changed. It makes it look like they upped the TTL from 1 h to 5 months.

The SI symbol for minutes is "min", not "M".

A compromise would be to use the OP notation "m".

gib444•about 13 hours ago
I love the title change that totally hides the scale of the issue. Good job poster/mods.
PontifexMinimus•1 day ago
I agree. My first reaction was "what the fuck's an 'M'?"
isoprophlex•about 23 hours ago
Five million. No matter the unit, just, 5.000.000
albert_e•about 21 hours ago
So a side effect of this is -- even at 1 hour caching -- ...

If you run out of session quota too quickly and need to wait more than an hour to resume your work ... you are paying even more penalty just to resume your work -- a penalty you wouldnt have needed if session quota was not so restrictive in first place, and which in turn causes you to burn through next session quota even faster.

Seems like a vicious cycle that made the UX very poor. I remember Claude Code with Pro became virtually unuseable in middle of March with session quota expiring within first hour or less for me -- which was wildly different experience from early March.

disillusioned•1 day ago
It's also routinely failing the car wash question across all models now, which wasn't the case a month ago. :-/

Seeing some things about how the effort selector isn't working as intended necessarily and the model is regressing in other ways: over-emphasizing how "difficult" a problem is to solve and choosing to avoid it because of the "time" it would take, but quoted in human effort, or suggesting the "easier" path forward even if it's a hack or kludge-filled solution.

tetraodonpuffer•about 17 hours ago
it does feel something in the hidden system prompt makes it try less hard, so many times in the past several weeks I have found divergences with what was in plan and looking back at the jsonl it's always some variant of "doing it this way would be too complicated, let me take this hardcoded way out". If asked to review the change, it will find it, and it will say also yeah I agree prompt said not to do this, but I did anyways, not sure why.

As others have said, anthropic is between a rock and a hard place, you can't scale compute as quickly, and the influx of new accounts has definitely made things tough for them: I think all the "how is claude this session 1/2/3/4" questions that keep coming up must be part of some a/b on just how far to quantize / lower thinking while still maintaining user satisfaction.

andai•about 23 hours ago
> over-emphasizing how "difficult" a problem is to solve and choosing to avoid it because of the "time" it would take

I heard a while back Claude refused to attempt a task for days, saying it would take weeks of work. Eventually the user convinced it to try, and it one-shotted it in 30 seconds.

apetresc•about 22 hours ago
For days? Someone spent days trying to convince Claude to do something?
layer8•about 21 hours ago
If you asked yesterday, and asked again today, then you asked for days. OP might be trying to express that it wasn’t just a temporary fluke.
empath75•about 17 hours ago
I have noticed refusals as context windows grow.
themafia•about 14 hours ago
Step 1: Sell at a loss.

Step 2: Panic.

Step 3: Destroy product.

_blk•1 day ago
Awesome, I didn't know about the car wash question.

Totally true, also tokens seem to burn through much faster. More parallelism could explain some of it but where I could work on 3-5 projects at once on the max plan a month ago, I can't even get one to completion now on the same Opus model before the 5h session locks me up..

colechristensen•about 18 hours ago
>“idgaf about risk you coward, waste some time just do it and stop bitching”

The above was a successful prompt to get Claude to stop whining about effort, difficulty, and time.

Unfortunately abusive language well placed is an effective LLM motivator.

itemize123•about 7 hours ago
are you sure other forms of language to express urgency doesn't work as well or better?
benced•about 18 hours ago
supermdguy•about 17 hours ago
Bizarre reading the thread, it feels like their Claude responding to the other posters’ Claudes
phreack•about 16 hours ago
That was my immediate impression too! It feels like it's all AI maximalists who seem to have a need to filter their every interaction through an LLM. And the result looks and reads just like Moltbook.
tkel•about 10 hours ago
Yeah and the employee who generated an AI response to the AI-generated bug report, is Jared Sumner who is the founder of Bun which was acquired by Anthropic. Pretty sad state of affairs all around.
pllbnk•about 4 hours ago
It feels (nobody can prove it) that all user-facing applications are fully vibe-coded and no internal developers have any idea how they work, so they just keep redirecting user questions to Claude to answer on behalf of them. That's why they are dealing with regressions and downtimes every few releases as it's the usual pattern with vibe coding that bug keep resurfacing.
TheTaytay•about 14 hours ago
This should be the top comment. The OP misunderstands the change and has their LLM write an expose. The company responds with a well-reasoned explanation that it would actually cost MORE money if there was a global 1h default for ALL prompts. It gets downvoted and the pitchforks stay out because…I presume the words like “cache read likelihood” sounds like made up fluff to the audience, rather than an actual explanation?
jwitthuhn•about 4 hours ago
It only potentially saves money for people on API pricing, it exhausts tokens faster with no benefit for users on the Claude Code subscription. Those users had their cache TTL reduced from 1 hour to 5 minutes and are saving no money because they were not paying based on the cache time in the first place.
glenngillen•about 12 hours ago
Because it is made up fluff for this audience. There is a wall of data and evidence + anecdotes from many people pointing to the exact problem here and giving concrete examples of how this absolutely does cost more.

And an admittedly uncharitable TLDR on the response is: "yeah... but most users just ask one thing and barely use the product so they never need the cache. Also trust me bro".

Which sure, fine. I'm willing to bet is technically true. I'd also bet those users never previously came close to hitting their session limits given their usage because their usage is so low. But now people who were previously considered low to moderate users are hitting limits within minutes.

They may as well have just said "we've looked at the data and we're happy with this change because it's a performance improvement for people we make the most margin on. Sucks to be you".

dnw•about 17 hours ago
Interesting that they actually acknowledge there was a change on March 6th. Kudos to the prompt analysis work that uncovered it!
layer8•about 21 hours ago
From the recent-ish Dwarkesh podcast, Anthropic seems to be wary about buying/building too much compute [0]. That probably means that they have to attempt to minimize compute usage when there is a surge in demand. Following the argument in the podcast, throwing more money after them, as some in this thread are suggesting, won’t solve the issue, at least not in the short term.

[0] https://www.dwarkesh.com/i/187852154/004620-if-agi-is-immine...

shdh•about 15 hours ago
Likely accurate

This tends to happen during pretraining phase of new models

Happened with 3.x too

davidkuennen•1 day ago
On slightly off topic note: Codex is absolutely fantastic right now. I'm constantly in awe since switching from Claude a week ago.
yukIttEft•1 day ago
I'm currently "working" on a toy 3d Vulkan Physx thingy. It has a simple raycast vehicle and I'm trying to replace it with the PhysX5 built in one (https://nvidia-omniverse.github.io/PhysX/physx/5.6.1/docs/Ve...)

I point it to example snippets and webdocumentation but the code it gens won't work at all, not even close

Opus4.6 is a tiny bit less wrong than Codex 5.4 xhigh, but still pretty useless.

So, after reading all the success stories here and everywhere, I'm wondering if I'm holding it wrong or if it just can't solve everything yet.

59nadir•about 14 hours ago
LLMs can really only mostly do trivial things still, they're always going to do very bad work outside of what your average web developer does day-to-day, and even those things aren't a slam dunk in many cases.
philpem•about 8 hours ago
That fits with my experience. I used Claude Code to put together a pretty complex CRUD app and it worked quite well. I prompted it to write the code for the analysis worker, and it produced some quite awful code with subtle race conditions which would periodically crash the worker and hang the job.

On the plus side, I got to see first-hand how Postgres handles deadlocks and read up on how to avoid them.

skullone•about 12 hours ago
I don't know about "only doing trivial things". I've built a fully threaded webmail replacement for Gmail using imap, indexes mail to postgres, local Django webapp renders everything in a Gmail/Outlook style threaded view with text/html bodies and attachments and a better local search than gmail, and runs all locally. Started as a "could I?" and ended up exceeding all my expectations
neomantra•about 20 hours ago
While I’ve had tremendous success with Golang projects and Typescript Web Apps, when I tried to use Metal Mesh Shaders in January, both Codex and Claude both had issues getting it right.

That sort of GPU code has a lot of concepts and machinery, it’s not just a syntax to express, and everything has to be just right or you will get a blank screen. I also use them differently than most examples; I use it for data viz (turning data into meshes) and most samples are about level of detail. So a double whammy.

But once I pointed either LLM at my own previous work — the code from months of my prior personal exploration and battles for understanding, then they both worked much better. Not great, but we could make progress.

I also needed to make more mini-harnesses / scaffolds for it to work through; in other words isolating its focus, kind of like test-driven development.

shdh•about 15 hours ago
I’ve noticed the models still can’t complete complex tasks

Such as:

Adding fine curl noise to a volumetric smoke shader

Fixing an issue with entity interpolation in an entity/snapshot netcode

Find some rendering bugs related to lightmaps not loading in particular cases, and it actually introduced this bug.

Just basic stuff.

computerex•about 14 hours ago
They are definitely behind in 3D graphics from my experience. But surprisingly decent at HPC/low level programming. I think they are definitely training on ML stuff to perhaps kick off recursive self improvement.
seba_dos1•about 24 hours ago
It works somewhat well with trivial things. That's where most of these success stories are coming from.
shdh•about 15 hours ago
Exactly this, the SNR is polluted by this anecdata because someone was able to implement a CRUD backend they couldn’t before
layer8•about 21 hours ago
My impression is that it always comes down to how well what you’re trying to do pattern-matches the training set.
embedding-shape•about 20 hours ago
When it comes to agents like codex and CC it seems to come down to how well you can describe what you want to do, and how well you can steer it to create its own harness to troubleshoot/design properly. Once you have that down, I haven't found a lot of things you cannot do.
wahnfrieden•about 13 hours ago
Instead of "pointing it" at docs, you need to paste the docs into context. Otherwise it will skim small parts by searching. Of course if you're using an obscure tool you need to supply more context.

Xhigh can also perform worse than High - more frequent compaction, and "overthinking".

nothinkjustai•about 16 hours ago
Nah, it only lives up to the hype for crud apps and web ui. As soon as you stop doing webshit it becomes way less useful.

(Don’t get mad at me, I’m a webshit developer)

wg0•about 22 hours ago
Most of the folks are building CRUD apps with AI and that works fine.

What you're doing is more specialized and these models are useless there. It's not intelligence.

Another NFT/Crypto era is upon us so no you're not holding it wrong.

MattRix•about 18 hours ago
This is pretty wrong. Anyone who thinks this stuff is similar to NFTs and crypto hasn’t been paying attention.
lukan•1 day ago
" or if it just can't solve everything yet."

Obviously it cannot. But if you give the AI enough hints, clear spec, clear documentation and remove all distracting information, it can solve most problems.

shdh•about 15 hours ago
Most simple problems with plenty of prior art, sure
glerk•about 13 hours ago
Codex/GPT5.4 is just superior to Opus4.6 for coding. I swear it costs me 1/2 of the tokens to achieve the same results and it always follows through the plan to completion compared to Opus that takes shortcuts and sweeps things under the rug until I discover them through testing.

I'm not accusing anyone of foul play and I don't have financial interests in either company, but it feels like "something" within Code Claude/Anthropic models is optimizing to make you spend more tokens instead of helping you complete the task.

toenail•1 day ago
I have also switched from claude to codex a few weeks ago. After deciding to let agents only do focused work I needed less context, and the work was easier to review. Then I realized codex can deliver the same quality, and it's paid through my subscription instead of per token.
vidarh•1 day ago
Codex has been good quality wise, but I hit limits on the Codex team subscription so quickly it's almost more hassle that it is worth.
lifty•1 day ago
I made this switch months ago, ChatGPT 5.4 being a smarter model, but I’ve had subjective feelings of degradation even on 5.4 lately. There’s a lot of growth in usage right now so not sure what kind of optimizations their doing at both companies
CamperBob2•about 12 hours ago
Agreed. Watching the intermediate "Thinking about X ... Now I'll do Y" text on GPT 5.4 lately has been like watching a hypothetical smart drug wear off.

All of the major models have been getting worse lately, not just Opus.

philpem•about 8 hours ago
Makes me wonder if the output is starting to get back into the training input and we're seeing the first signs of model collapse.
lores•1 day ago
I would switch to Codex, but Altman is such a naked sociopath and OpenAI so devoid of ethical business practices that I can't in good conscience. I'm not under any illusion that Anthropic is ethical, but it is so far a step up from OpenAI.
groundzeros2015•about 21 hours ago
Enemy centered decision making
bob1029•1 day ago
I'm with you on the ethical part, but everything is a spectrum. All the AI leadership are some shade of evil. There's no way the product would be effective if they weren't. I don't like that Sam Altman is a lunatic, but frankly they all are. I also recognize that these are massive companies filled with non shitty engineers who are actually responsible for a lot of the magic. Conflating one charlatan with the rest of it is a tragedy of nuance.
subscribed•about 23 hours ago
Yeah, but there's distinct difference between "risks their company because they refuse to help with killing little kids" and "happily helping with genocide".

One of these is better.

nh2•1 day ago
Cannot you use Codex (which is open source, unlike Claude Code) with Claude, even via Amazon Bedrock?
embedding-shape•about 20 hours ago
Codex with Anthrophic's models is not as good as using the models with the harness it was trained in mine for. Same goes vice-versa too.
onion2k•1 day ago
I use Codex at home and Opus at work. They're both brilliant.
hirako2000•about 21 hours ago
There is a chef, he opens a restaurant. Delicious food.

It costs him more in ingredients alone than he charges. He even offers some pseudo unlimited buffet, combo sets, and happy hours.

He announced a new restaurant, apparently it will be even better, so good he's a bit worried. He makes sure to share his worries while he picks a few select enterprise for business parties and the likes.

In the meantime he cracks down on free buffet goers who happen to eat too much, and downgrades all ingredients without notice to finally hope to make a profit.

MattRix•about 18 hours ago
This is close, but the real problem isn’t that the food is underpriced, it’s that the supply of ingredients is severely limited.
stri8ted•about 16 hours ago
Those are the same thing
greycol•about 14 hours ago
They are not if there aren't customers who are willing to pay more. For instance imagine a widget that lasts 1 year and is just under 1/2 the price of one that lasts 2 years. There may be high demand because it's the more economical option. If you raise the price so that it's 1/2 the price of the 2 year widget then demand collapses without effecting supply.
JackYoustra•about 16 hours ago
Is this not the same thing?
MattRix•about 9 hours ago
No, they are quite different.
embedding-shape•about 20 hours ago
Pretty much capitalism in a nut shell, yeah.
Tarcroi•1 day ago
This coincides with Anthropic's peak-hour announcement (March 26th). Could the throttling be partly a response to infrastructure load that was itself inflated by the TTL regression?
HauntingPin•1 day ago
It would be too fucking funny if this were the case. They're vibe coding their infrastructure and they vibe coded their response to the increased load.
KronisLV•1 day ago
You'd think they would have dashboards for all of this stuff, to easily notice any change in metrics and be able to track down which release was responsible for it.
HauntingPin•1 day ago
They probably do, then they pipe it into a bunch of Claude subagents and then you get the current mess.
zoogeny•about 11 hours ago
As an aside, I built a tool to manage my own chat interface over the provider APIs. I added caching because the savings are quite significant and I have a little countdown timer that shows me how much time remaining until the cache is expired.

However, for the basic turn-based conversation the cache (at 5 minutes) is almost always insufficient. By the time I read the LLM response, consider my next question, write it out, etc. I frequently miss the cache.

I imagine it is much more useful if you have a tool that has a common prefix (like a system instruction, tool specs or common set of context across many users).

If you can get it to work frequently enough the savings are quite worth it.

onoesworkacct•about 3 hours ago
give it a skill that runs a timer in the background and every 4.5 minutes says "ping? pong!"
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perks_12•1 day ago
Just give us the option to get the quality back, Anthropic. I get that even a $200 subscription is not possible eventually, but give us the option to sub the $1000 tier or tell us to use the API tier, but give us some consistency.
jwr•about 22 hours ago
This. I get much more value than 90€ from my Claude Code subscription. I am willing to pay more for consistency and not having to watch my back all the time, because I might get screwed over.
hattimaTim•about 17 hours ago
Classic scammer tactics: first, lure users in by promising a huge deal, then scam the hell out of them.
bsaul•about 20 hours ago
could it be that anthropic is experiencing a massive shortage of compute capacity, and is desperately trying to find means to overcome it ?

All the news i hear about this company for the past weeks made it sound like they're really desperate.

throwaway2027•1 day ago
I also noticed this, just resuming something eats up your entire session. The past two weeks also felt like a substantial downgrade and made me regret renewing my subscription, it sucks because I wish I kept my Codex subscription instead and renewed that.
beering•about 15 hours ago
Are you locked into your current subscription?
par•about 14 hours ago
Claude code has gone down hill in a really bad way. It is often far too quick to make significant changes, and requires much higher level of hand-holding and explanation than I am used to. r/claudecode on reddit shows a litany of complaints!
foobar10000•about 20 hours ago
So, this especially bites if your validation step (let’s say integration tests) take 1hr plus. The harness is just waiting, prefix caching should happily resume things with just a minor new prefill chunk of output from the harness, and bam - completely new prefill.
almog•about 11 hours ago
Given how the cache eviction policy is mismatched with the 5h usage window, it might make sense to just stop at say 97% of the session max usage and keep running a script every 4 min and 50 sec that consumes a minimal number of tokens whose entire purpose is to keep the cache. reply
zeckalpha•about 16 hours ago
I find similar happening with Gemini Pro. Despite paying for Pro, it regularly locks me out, without visibility into consumption. Nothing on the plan comparison page indicates limits. https://one.google.com/about/plans

Edit: I may have conflated these two threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47739260

jasonjmcghee•about 11 hours ago
All the weird stuff happening with anthropic / Claude aside- just talking about this post:

Looking at the table with February and April- I don't get it. What am I missing?

The cost and number of calls look pretty aligned on all rows

throwaway2027•1 day ago
It's absolutely ridiculous how stupid Claude is now. I sometimes notice it and last year too but it feels like it's just last year before December model.
config_yml•about 22 hours ago
Feels similar to Claude last August/September. Knowing Claude some Agent probably reverted the fix from back then ^^

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-...

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azuanrb•about 21 hours ago
As a Pro user, even though these issues and bugs are “new,” the downgrade has been noticeable since January. I’ve unsubscribed because the Pro plan is no longer usable for me.

It’s only making the news now because it’s affecting Max users as well ($100/$200 plans). I understand the need for change, but having zero communication about it is just wrong.

motbus3•about 18 hours ago
The TOS basically states you need to deal with whatever they want.

Meanwhile their 'best' competitor just announced they want to provide unreliable mass destruction guidance tools but they don't wanna feel said.

Honestly speaking, we are wrong whenever we do business with this sort of people

bigyabai•about 18 hours ago
> The TOS basically states you need to deal with whatever they want.

FWIW that's what most TOSes say for the majority of online services. Some even include arbitration clauses to prevent civil suits and class-action cases.

pkaye•about 16 hours ago
Actually I remember the change being reported in the Reddit /r/claueai chat back around that time frame. I was concerned that it would increase costs but nobody made a fuss so I presumed it was not a big deal.
the_mitsuhiko•1 day ago
Since I (until Anthropic decided to remove access for subs) used Anthropic models extensively with pi I explored the two caching options and the much higher cost of 1h caches is almost never a good tradeoff.

Since the caching really primarily is something they can be judged at scale from across many users I can only assume that Anthropic looked at their infra load and impact and made a very intentional change.

willworktill4pm•about 17 hours ago
This Friday CC wrote wall off gibberish text for me. No reason, happened twice with different gibberish text

https://ibb.co/4wcVQG5k

beering•about 15 hours ago
maybe numerics issues after quantization? Looks like it really went off the rails
espeed•about 14 hours ago
Does Anthropic's real time data ingestion effect its model behavior globally? Could a file read by your agent effect the behavior of mine?
PunchyHamster•1 day ago
Well, how entirely expected. The money man comes to collect and they are squeezing for money
c16•about 17 hours ago
I’ve definitely noticed in evenings it stops trying as hard to solve the issue and suggests I go find the answer. Never the case in the morning.
ikekkdcjkfke•1 day ago
If youre reading this claude, people are willing to pay extra if you want to make more money, just please stop doing this undermining, it devreases the trust of your platform to something that cannot be relied on
andai•about 23 hours ago
It looks like selling reputation to save money.

But more likely they are constrained on GPUs and can't get them fast enough.

(My guess having no understanding of how this industry actually works.)

srsbzns•about 10 hours ago
Gotta use the API directly for cache control
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poly2it•about 24 hours ago
One of the largest AI companies on Earth cannot figure out an algorithm for when not to drop caches in long-running sessions?
snowstormsun•about 16 hours ago
Well, the 10x promised revenue increase must come from somewhere...
lordmoma•about 17 hours ago
Claude Code is not performing on par since September 2025, there was already a huge backlash then, and many people just keep cheering for CC every time it made some model upgrade or TUI change, it just feels so unreal.
sscaryterry•1 day ago
Anthropic is leaving so much evidence around… proving damages and a pattern is becoming trivial
taffydavid•1 day ago
This is the same shit openAI used to do last year, quietly downgrading their offerings while hyping the next big thing. I thought Anthropic were different but it seems they're playing the exact same long con with Mythos.

They can't really revolutionize AI again so they make the product worse and worse and then offer you a "better" one

simianwords•1 day ago
There’s a case for intelligent caching: coarse grained 1h and 5min type TTls are not optimal.
PunchyHamster•1 day ago
Caching LLM is not like caching normal content; the longer it is the more beneficial it is and it only stops being worth when user stops current session.

So you'd need some adaptive algorithm to decide when to keep caching and when to purge it whole, possibly on client side, but if you give client the control, people will make it use most cache possible just to chase diminishing returns. So fine grained control here isn't all that easy; other possible option is just to have cache size per account and then intelligently purge it instead of relying just on TTL

cyanydeez•1 day ago
keep in mind, efficient KV caching needs to be next to the GPU, so you sls need you HA to keep routing the user to the same hardware.

the hardware VM model is almost identical. Each session can go anywhere to start but a live session cant just be routed anywhere without penalty.

computerex•about 14 hours ago
Good job anthropic. You had a clear lead with all devs singing the praises of Opus. Way to lose all that by Enshittifying the experience.
mrdw•about 22 hours ago
I noticed another limitation: "An image in the conversation exceeds the dimension limit for many-image requests (2000px). Start a new session with fewer images."

So I can't continue my claude code session I started yesterday.

sunnybeetroot•about 14 hours ago
Double tap ESC and revert the conversation.
beering•about 15 hours ago
makes sense, “a picture is worth a thousand tokens” as they say. They probably lowered the limit due to capacity issues.
ares623•1 day ago
AGI finding bugs again. Actual Guys/Gals Instead.
yobid20•about 15 hours ago
i thought it was always 5 minutes? ive been telling people 5 minutes for months so i dont think this is anything new?
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WhereIsTheTruth•about 24 hours ago
Changing "regression" to "Anthropic silently downgraded" sensationalizes the story

Why the FUD?

I notice some interesting public opinion weather change since Anthropic passed OpenAI wrt revenue

subscribed•about 22 hours ago
From the response in the linked issue:

>> Was there a change? Yes — March 6, intentional, part of ongoing cache optimization. You pinpointed the date correctly.

The entire issue lays out how and why it's a silent downgrade. Also silent because it just happened, without announcing.

I don't understand how is this FUD?

coffinbirth•1 day ago
Am I the only one who sees striking parallels between being a Claude Code customer and Cuckoldry (as in biology)?

I mean, you are investing a lot (infrastructure and capital) into something that is essentially not yours. You claim credit for the offspring (the solution) simply because it resides in your workspace. You accept foreign code to make your project appear more successful and populated than you could manage alone. Your over-reliance on a surrogate for the heavy lifting leads to the loss of your own survival skills (coding and debugging). Last but not least, you handle the grunt work of territory defense (clients and environments) while the AI performs the actual act of creation (Displaced Agency).

the_gipsy•1 day ago
What you're looking for is "vendor lock-in".
PunchyHamster•1 day ago
No, but it's very funny, I'm gonna call people that offshore their thinking to LLM "AI cucks" now
taf2•about 17 hours ago
I don't understand who's still using anthropic? The model produces more bugs and agrees to solutions that are clearly wrong at a much higher rate then codex. Codex produces significantly better code with fewer bugs and far less oversight. with /fast on codex it's not even slower then claude and consider it implements working code more reliably you have to use it less anyway. Beside anthropic appears to be more focused on fear mongering and other types of FUD and is a more closed solution I do not understand why so many people still appear to care what anthropic does and have not already moved on? </rant>
eaf7e281•about 21 hours ago
I think they changed the quantification to save computer power for their new model. This might be why the benchmark scores look good, but the real world performance is much worse. I'm wondering if they're testing the model internally and didn't find anything wrong with the new parameter.

I canceled my subscription and switched to a codex, but it's not as good. I'm tired of Anthropic changing things all the time. I use Claude because it doesn't redirect you to a different model like OpenAI does. But now it seems like both companies are doing the same thing in different way.

throwaway2027•about 21 hours ago
Claude is worse, they don't tell you when your experience has degraded and don't even let you use worse models if you run out any.
eaf7e281•about 13 hours ago
i mean, openai does same, even worse, they change the model, like gpt 5.4 to -mini

anthropic for now, at least just seems to change quantization of the model

siscia•about 19 hours ago
Lately I am finding myself doing more and more of what I called "ambient coding" so that I am not directly using anymore all of those coding harnesses.

https://redbeardlab.gitbook.io/acem/essays/ambient-developme...

I basically wrote a small GitHub app and I simply create a GitHub issue, the bot read it, run an LLM loop and come up with a PR (or a design)

Then I simply approve the pr (or the design)

I find it much calmer and much more productive