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#claude#code#model#more#models#don#anthropic#opus#same#using

Discussion (262 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

wg0•42 minutes ago
I write detailed specs. Multifile with example code. In markdown.

Then hand over to Claude Sonnet.

With hard requirements listed, I found out that the generated code missed requirements, had duplicate code or even unnecessary code wrangling data (mapping objects into new objects of narrower types when won't be needed) along with tests that fake and work around to pass.

So turns out that I'm not writing code but I'm reading lots of code.

The fact that I know first hand prior to Gen AI is that writing code is way easier. It is reading the code, understanding it and making a mental model that's way more labour intensive.

Therefore I need more time and effort with Gen AI than I needed before because I need to read a lot of code, understand it and ensure it adheres to what mental model I have.

Hence Gen AI at this price point which Anthropic offers is a net negative for me because I am not vibe coding, I'm building real software that real humans depend upon and my users deserve better attention and focus from me hence I'll be cancelling my subscription shortly.

hintymad•7 minutes ago
> With hard requirements listed, I found out that the generated code missed requirements,

This is hardly a surprise, no? No matter how much training we run, we are still producing a generative model. And a generative model doesn't understand your requirements and crosses them off. It predicts the next most likely token from a given prompt. If the most statistically plausible way to finish a function looks like a version that ignores your third requirement, the model will happily follow through. There's really no rules in your requirements doc. They are just the conditional events X in a glorified P(Y|X). I'd venture to guess that sometimes missing a requirement may increase the probability of the generated tokens, so the model will happily allow the miss. Actually, "allow" is too strong a word. The model does not allow shit. It just generates.

Aurornis•20 minutes ago
Writing detailed specs and then giving them to an AI is not the optimal way to work with AI.

That's vibecoding with an extra documentation step.

Also, Sonnet is not the model you'd want to use if you want to minimize cleanup. Opus or GPT-5.5 are the only ways to even attempt this, but even those won't vibecode everything perfectly for you. This is the reality of AI, but at least try to use the right model for the job.

> Therefore I need more time and effort with Gen AI than I needed before

Stop trying to use it as all-or-nothing. You can still make the decisions, call the shots, write code where AI doesn't help and then use AI to speed up parts where it does help.

That's how most non-junior engineers settle into using AI.

Ignore all of the LinkedIn and social media hype about prompting apps into existence.

wg0•6 minutes ago
> Writing detailed specs and then giving them to an AI is not the optimal way to work with AI.

It is NOT the way to work with humans basically because most software engineers I worked with in my career were incredibly smart and were damn good at identifying edge cases and weird scenarios even when they were not told and the domain wasn't theirs to begin with. You didn't need to write lengthy several page long Jira tickets. Just a brief paragraph and that's it.

With AI, you need to spell everything out in detail. But that's NO guarantee either because these models are NOT deterministic in their output. Same prompt different output each time. That's why every chat box has that "Regenerate" button. So your output with even a correct and detailed prompt might not lead to correct output. You're just literally rolling a dice with a random number generator.

Lastly - no matter how smart and expensive the model is, the underlying working principles are the same as GPT-2. Same transformers with RL on top, same random seed, same list of probabilities of tokens and same temperature to select randomly one token to complete the output and feedback in again for the next token.

rafram•13 minutes ago
> Opus or GPT-5.5 are the only ways to even attempt this.

It’s pretty funny to claim that a model released 22 hours ago is the bare minimum requirement for AI-assisted programming. Of course the newest models are best at writing code, but GPT-* and Claude have written pretty decent systems for six months or so, and they’ve been good at individual snippets/edits for years.

Aurornis•9 minutes ago
> It’s pretty funny to claim that a model released 22 hours ago is the bare minimum requirement for AI-assisted programming.

Not what I said.

The OP was trying to write specs and have an AI turn it into an app, then getting frustrated with the amount of cleanup.

If you want the AI to write code for you and minimize your cleanup work, you have to use the latest models available.

They won't be perfect, but they're going to produce better results than using second-tier models.

munk-a•14 minutes ago
> Stop trying to use it as all-or-nothing. You can still make the decisions, call the shots, write code where AI doesn't help and then use AI to speed up parts where it does help.

You're assuming that finding the places where AI needs help isn't already a larger task than just writing it yourself. AI can be helpful in development in very limited scenarios but the main thrust of the comment above yours is that it takes longer to read and understand code than to write it and AI tooling is currently focused on writing code.

We're optimizing the easy part at the expense of the difficult part - in many cases it simply isn't worth the trouble (cases where it is helpful, imo, exist when AI is helping with code comprehension but not new code production).

Aurornis•11 minutes ago
> You're assuming that finding the places where AI needs help isn't already a larger task than just writing it yourself.

Not assuming anything, I'm well versed in how to do this.

Anyone who defers to having AI write massive blocks of code they don't understand is going to run into this.

You have to understand what you want and guide the AI to write it.

The AI types faster than me. I can have the idea and understand and then tell the LLM to rearrange the code or do the boring work faster than I can type it.

mandeepj•16 minutes ago
Sure, Opus is next level than Sonnet, but it still doesn't free OP from these handcuffs - It is reading the code, understanding it and making a mental model that's way more labour intensive.
Aurornis•13 minutes ago
The OP's problem was treating the situation as two extremes: Either write everything myself, or defer entirely to the AI and be forced to read it later.

I was trying to explain that this isn't how successful engineers use AI. There is a way to understand the code and what the AI is doing as you're working with it.

Writing a spec, submitting it to the AI (a second-tier model at that) and then being disappointed when it didn't do exactly what you wanted in a perfect way is a tired argument.

WesolyKubeczek•13 minutes ago
But when you write code by hand, you at least are there as it’s happening, which makes reading and understanding way easier.
elAhmo•15 minutes ago
Funny hearing you’re saying only GPT 5.5 (and Opus) can do this, having in mind that it came out last night.
Aurornis•12 minutes ago
To be clear, I'm not saying that they can do this.

I'm saying that if you're trying to have AI write code for you and you want to do as little cleanup as possible, you have to use the best model available.

gwerbin•23 minutes ago
Or just don't use AI to write code. Use it as a code reviewer assistant along with your usual test-lint development cycle. Use it to help evaluate 3rd party libraries faster. Use it to research new topics. Use it to help draft RFCs and design documents. Use it as a chat buddy when working on hard problems.

I think the AI companies all stink to high heaven and the whole thing being built on copyright infringement still makes me squirm. But the latest models are stupidly smart in some cases. It's starting to feel like I really do have a sci-fi AI assistant that I can just reach for whenever I need it, either to support hard thinking or to speed up or entirely avoid drudgery and toil.

You don't have to buy into the stupid vibecoding hype to get productivity value out of the technology.

You of course don't have to use it at all. And you don't owe your money to any particular company. Heck for non-code tasks the local-capable models are great. But you can't just look at vibecoding and dismiss the entire category of technology.

scuderiaseb•22 minutes ago
I must be doing something very different from everyone else, but I write what I want and how I want it and Opus 4.7 plans it for me, then I carefully review. Often times I need to validate and check things, sometimes I’ve revised the plan multiple times. Then implementation which I still use Opus for because I get a warning that my current model holds the cache so Sonnet shouldn’t implement. And honestly, I’m mostly within my Pro subscription, granted I also have ChatGPT Plus but I’ve mostly only used that as the chat/quick reference model. But yeah takes some time to read and understand everything, a lot of the time I make manual edits too.
wg0•12 minutes ago
>Then implementation which I still use Opus for because I get a warning that my current model holds the cache so Sonnet shouldn’t implement.

This is based on the premise that given detailed plan, the model will exactly produce the same thing because the model is deterministic in nature which is NOT the case. These models are NOT deterministic no matter how detailed plan you feed it in. If you doubt, give the model same plan twice and see something different churned out each time.

> And honestly, I’m mostly within my Pro subscription, granted I also have ChatGPT Plus but I’ve mostly only used that as the chat/quick reference model. But yeah takes some time to read and understand everything, a lot of the time I make manual edits too.

I do not know how you can do it on a Pro plan with Claude Opus 4.7 which is 7.5x more in terms of limit consumption and any small to medium size codebase would easily consume your limits in just the planning phase up to 50% in a single prompt on a Pro plan (the $20/month one that they are planning to eliminate)

_puk•11 minutes ago
Rather than vibe, write your thoughts and get the model to challenge you / flesh it out is my preferred approach.

Get it to write a context capsule of everything we've discussed.

Chuck that in another model and chat around it, flesh out the missing context from the capsule. Do that a couple of times.

Now I have an artifact I can use to one-shot a hell of a lot of things.

This is amazing for 0-1.

For brown field development, add in a step to verify against the current code base, capture the gotchas and bounds, and again I've got something an agent has a damn good chance of one-shotting.

rectang•about 2 hours ago
I feel like I'm using Claude Opus pretty effectively and I'm honestly not running up against limits in my mid-tier subscriptions. My workflow is more "copilot" than "autopilot", in that I craft prompts for contained tasks and review nearly everything, so it's pretty light compared to people doing vibe coding.

The market-leading technology is pretty close to "good enough" for how I'm using it. I look forward to the day when LLM-assisted coding is commoditized. I could really go for an open source model based on properly licensed code.

raincole•about 1 hour ago
> the day when LLM-assisted coding is commoditized

Like yesterday? LLM-assisted coding is $100/mo. It looks very commoditized when most houses in developed world pay more for electricity than that.

My definition of LLM-assisted coding is that you fully understand every change and every single line of the code. Otherwise it's vibe coding. And I believe if one is honest to this principle, it's very hard to deplete the quota of the $100 tier.

windexh8er•15 minutes ago
> Like yesterday? LLM-assisted coding is $100/mo. It looks very commoditized when most houses in developed world pay more for electricity than that.

But, it's not $100/mo. I think the best showcase of where AI is at is on the generative video side. Look at players like Higgsfield. Check out their pricing and then go look at Reddit for actual experiences. With video generation the results are very easy to see. With code generation the results are less clear for many users. Especially when things "just work".

Again, it's not $100/month for Anthropic to serve most uses. These costs are still being subsidized and as more expensive plans roll out with access to "better" models and "more* tokens and context the true cost per user is slowly starting to be exposed. I routinely hit limits with Anthropic that I hadn't been for the same (and even less) utilization. I dumped the Pro Max account recently because the value wasn't there anymore. I am convinced that Opus 3 was Anthropic's pinnacle at this point and while the SotA models of today are good they're tuned to push people towards paying for overages at a significantly faster consumption rate than a right sized plan for usage.

The reality is that nobody can afford to continue to offer these models at the current price points and be profitable at any time in the near future. And it's becoming more and more clear that Google is in a great position to let Anthropic and OAI duke it out with other people's money while they have the cash, infrastructure and reach to play the waiting game of keeping up but not having to worry about all of the constraints their competitors do.

But I'd argue that nothing has been commoditized as we have no clue what LLMs cost at scale and it seems that nobody wants to talk about that publicly.

sidrag22•28 minutes ago
> fully understand every change and every single line of the code.

im probably just not being charitable enough to what you mean, but thats an absurd bar that almost nobody conforms to even if its fully handwritten. nothing would get done if they did. But again, my emphasis is on that im probably just not being charitable to what you mean.

Maxatar•10 minutes ago
You're most likely being pedantic, like when someone says they understand every single line of this code:

    x = 0
    for i in range(1, 10):
      x += i
    print(x)
They don't mean they understand silicon substrate of the microprocessor executing microcode or the CMOS sense amplifiers reading the SRAM cells caching the loop variable.

They just mean they can more or less follow along with what the code is doing. You don't need to be very charitable in order to understand what he genuinely meant, and understanding code that one writes is how many (but not all) professional software developers who didn't just copy and paste stuff from Stackoverflow used to carry out their work.

satvikpendem•16 minutes ago
How is that an absurd bar? If you're handwriting code, you'd need to know what you actually want to write in the first place, hence you understand all the code you write. Therefore the code the AI produces should also be understood by you. Anything else than that is indeed vibe coding.
thomasmg•23 minutes ago
Well that is how it mostly worked until recently... unless if the developer copied and pasted from stackoverflow without understanding much. Which did happen.
sbarre•14 minutes ago
Could they have meant "every line of code being committed by the LLM" within the current scope of work?

That's how I read it, and I would agree with that.

andrewjvb•22 minutes ago
It's a good point. To me this really comes down to the economics of the software being written.

If it's low-stakes, then the required depth to accept the code is also low.

Retr0id•about 2 hours ago
I also use it this way and I'm overall pretty happy with it, but it feels like they really want us to use it in "autopilot" mode. It's like they have two conflicting priorities of "make people use more tokens so we can bill them more" and "people are using more tokens than expected, our pricing structure is no longer sustainable"

(but I guess they're not really conflicting, if the "solution" involves upgrading to a higher plan)

fluidcruft•about 2 hours ago
I feel like they are making it harder to use it this way. Encouraging autonomous is one thing, but it really feels more like they are handicapping engaged use. I suspect it reflects their own development practices and needs.
freedomben•about 2 hours ago
This is something I've thought of as well. The way the caps are implemented, it really disincentivizes engaged use. The 5-hour window especially is very awkward and disruptive. The net result is that I have to somewhat plan my day around when the 5-hour window will affect it. That by itself is a powerful disincentive from using Claude. It has also caused me to use different tools for things I previously would have used Claude for. For example, detailed plans I use codex now rather than Claude, because I hit the limit way too fast when doing documentation work. It certainly doesn't hurt that codex seems to be better at it, but I wouldn't even have a codex subscription if it wasn't for claude's usage limits
dandaka•about 1 hour ago
autopilot (yolo mode) is amazing and feels great, truly delegate instead of hand-holding on every step
dutchCourage•44 minutes ago
Do you have any good resources on how to work like that? I made the move from "auto complete on steroids" to "agents write most of my code". But I can't imagine running agents unchecked (and in parallel!) for any significant amount of time.
naravara•about 1 hour ago
I think the culty element of AI development is really blinding a lot of these companies to what their tools are actually useful for. They’re genuinely great productivity enhancers, but the boosters are constantly going on about how it’s going to replace all your employees and it’s just. . .not good for that! And I don’t mean “not yet” I mean I don’t see it ever getting there barring some major breakthrough on the order of inventing a room-temp superconductor.
dasil003•about 1 hour ago
I agree with you, the "replacing people" narrative is not only wrong, it's inflammatory and brand suicide for these AI companies who don't seem to realize (or just don't care) the kind of buzz saw of public opinion they're walking straight towards.

That said, looking at the way things work in big companies, AI has definitely made it so one senior engineer with decent opinions can outperform a mediocre PM plus four engineers who just do what they're told.

goalieca•about 1 hour ago
Similar with the copilot and not autopilot usage. I find its the best of them all. Mostly i just use it as an occasionnal search engine. I've never found LLMs to be efficient to actually do work. I do miss the day when tech docs were usable. Claude seems like a crutch for gaps in developer experience more than anything.
dboreham•about 1 hour ago
Same. Never hit a limit. Use it heavily for real work. Never even thought of firing off an LLM for hours of...something. Seems like a recipe for wasting my time figuring out what it did and why.
taytus•about 2 hours ago
I'd recommend Kimi k2.6 for your use. It is an excellent model at a fraction of the cost, and you can use Claude Code with it.

I did a 1:1 map of all my Claude Code skills, and it feels like I never left Opus.

Super happy with the results.

wolttam•about 2 hours ago
I was saying the same until DeepSeek v4 this morning... sorry, Kimi. The competition is intense!
Aldipower•24 minutes ago
Fascinated, a bummer that DeepSeek does not offer a DPA or opt-out for training. This renders it unusable for my use cases unfortunately. At least z.ai GLM has a somewhat DPA in Singapore.
folmar•20 minutes ago
If you don't use a lot of quota the cheapest monthly Claude Code is $20, Kimi Code is $19, i.e. the cost difference is minuscule.

Kimi wants my phone number on signup so a no-go for me.

ramoz•about 2 hours ago
What provider do you use for Kimi
skippyboxedhero•5 minutes ago
The provider is a massive issue. People moving off Claude tend to assume this is solved.

Claude's uptime is terrible. The uptime of most other providers is even worse...and you get all the quantization, don't know what model you are actually getting, etc.

taytus•about 1 hour ago
Straight from them, but I know other providers like io.net can be faster but I like to directly support the project.
llm_nerd•about 2 hours ago
I have Max 5x and use only Claude Opus on xhigh mode. I don't use agents, or even MCPs, and stick to Claude Code.

I find it incredibly difficult to saturate my usage. I'm ending the average week at 30-ish percentage, despite this thing doing an enormous amount of work for (with?) me.

Now I will say that with pro I was constantly hitting the limit -- like comically so, and single requests would push me over 100% for the session and into paying for extra usage -- and max 5x feels like far more than 5x the usage, but who knows. Anthropic is extremely squirrely about things like surge rates, and so on.

I'm super skeptical of the influx of "DAE think Opus sucks now. Let's all move to Codex!" nonsense that has flooded HN. A part of it is the ex-girlfriend thing where people are angry about something and try to force-multiply their disagreement, but some of it legitimately smells like astroturfing. Like OpenAI got done pay $100M for some unknown podcaster and start hiring people to write this stuff online.

pixelpoet•33 minutes ago
I was in the same boat until last few days, where just a handful queries were enough to saturate my 5h session in about 30 mins.

Recently I've gotten Qwen 3.6 27b working locally and it's pretty great, but still doesn't match Opus; I've gotten check out that new Deepseek model sometime.

NewsaHackO•about 1 hour ago
Yea, I never got how people are even able to hit the weekly limits so consistently. Maybe it's because they use it for work? But in that case, you would expect the employer to cover it so idk.

>I'm super skeptical of the influx of "DAE think Opus sucks now. Let's all move to Codex!" nonsense that has flooded HN. A part of it is the ex-girlfriend thing where people are angry about something and try to force-multiply their disagreement, but some of it legitimately smells like astroturfing. Like OpenAI got done pay $100M for some unknown podcaster and start hiring people to write this stuff online.

A lot of people are angry about the whole openclaw situation. They are especially bitter that when they attempted to justify exfiltrating the OAuth token to use for openclaw, nobody agreed with them that they had the right to do so, and sided with Claude that different limits for first-party use is standard. So they create threads like this, and complain about some opaque reason why Anthropic is finished (while still keeping their subscription, of course).

RealStupidity•about 1 hour ago
If only OpenAI spent a significant amount of money on some kind of generative software that was predominantly trained on internet comments that'd be able to do all the astroturfing for them...
dwedge•44 minutes ago
This kind of "if only" sarcastic comment belongs on reddit from 5 years ago
cyanydeez•about 2 hours ago
Honestly, it sounds like, assuming you have no ethical qualms, you could get by with a Mac or AMD 395+ and the newest models, specifically QWEN3.5-Coder-Next. It does exactly as you describe. It maxes out around 85k context, which if you do a good job providing guard rails, etc, is the length of a small-medium project.

It does seem like the sweet spot between WallE and the destroyed earth in WallE.

ethicalqualms•about 2 hours ago
Sorry, out of the loop. Which ethical qualms are you referring to?
kbelder•about 2 hours ago
Using a Mac, obviously.
folkrav•about 1 hour ago
My guess - China.
janwillemb•about 2 hours ago
This is what worries me. People become dependent on these GenAI products that are proprietary, not transparant, and need a subscription. People build on it like it is a solid foundation. But all of a sudden the owner just pulls the foundation from under your building.
SwellJoe•about 1 hour ago
At least some of the investors in this tech are hoping for a monopoly position. They'd like to outspend the competition to get an insurmountable lead, at which point they can set their price.

But, so far, competition remains fierce. Anthropic still has the best tools for writing code. That lead is smaller than it's ever been, though. But, honestly, Opus 4.5 is when it got Good Enough. If Anthropic suddenly increased prices beyond what I'm willing to pay, any model that gives me Opus 4.5 or better performance is good enough for the vast majority of the work I do with agents. And, there are a bunch of models at that level, now maybe including some discount Chinese models. Certainly Gemini Pro 3.1 is on par with Opus 4.5. Current Codex is better than Opus 4.5 and close to Opus 4.7 (though I won't use OpenAI because I don't trust them to be the dominant player in AI).

I often switch agents/models on the same project because I like tinkering with self-hosted and I like to keep an eye on the most efficient way to work...which models wastes less of my time on silly stuff. Switching is literally nothing; I run `gemini` or `copilot` or `hermes` instead of `claude`. There's simply no deep dependency on a specific model or agent. They're all trying to find ways to make unique features for people to build a dependence on, of course, but the top models are all so fucking smart you can just tell them to do whatever thing it is that you need done. That feature could probably be a skill, whatever it is, and the model can probably write the skill. Or, even better, it could be actual software, also written by the model, rather than a set of instructions for the model to interpret based on the current random seed.

Currently, the only consistent moat is making the best model. Anthropic makes the best model and tools for coding, but that's a pretty shallow moat...I could live with several other models for coding. I'll gladly pay a premium for the best model and tools for coding, but I also won't be devastated if I suddenly don't have Claude Code tomorrow. Even open models I can host myself are getting very close to Good Enough.

jjfoooo4•about 1 hour ago
But these products are all drop in replacements for each other. I've recently favored Codex more than CC, just because rate limits got mildly annoying. I really didn't have to change anything about my workflow in doing that.
Capricorn2481•about 1 hour ago
> But these products are all drop in replacements for each other

For now. That doesn't really change the risk, that just means they are all hyper competitive right this moment, and so they are comparable. If one of them becomes king of the hill, nothing stops them from silently degrading or jacking prices.

The only shield is to not be dependent in the first place. That means keeping your skills sharp and being willing to pass on your knowledge to juniors, so they aren't dependent on these things.

Of course, many people are building their business on huge AI scaffolding. There's nothing they can do.

conrs•about 1 hour ago
I'm curious - why for now? This stuff is practically commoditized. Trying to think of anything that ever successfully got back into proprietary land from there.
GaryBluto•about 2 hours ago
Luckily local AI is becoming more feasible every day.
Someone1234•about 2 hours ago
It feels more and more like OpenAI/Anthoropic aren't the future but Qwen, Kimi, or Deepseek are. You can run them locally, but that isn't really the point, it is about democratization of service providers. You can run any of them on a dozen providers with different trade-offs/offerings OR locally.

They won't ever be SOTA due to money, but "last year's SOTA" when it costs 1/4 or less, may be good enough. More quantity, more flexibility, at lower edge quality. It can make sense. A 7% dumber agent TEAM Vs. a single objectively superior super-agent.

That's the most exciting thing going on in that space. New workflows opening up not due to intelligence improvements but cost improvements for "good enough" intelligence.

echelon•about 2 hours ago
Open Source isn't even within 50% of what the SOTA models are. Benchmarks are toys, real world use is vastly different, and that's where they seriously lag.

Why should anyone waste time on poorer results? I'd rather pay my $200/mo because my time matters. I'm not a poor college student anymore, and I need more return on my time.

I'm not shitting on open weights here - I want open source to win. I just don't see how that's possible.

It's like Photoshop vs. Gimp. Not only is the Gimp UX awful, but it didn't even offer (maybe still doesn't?) full bit depth support. For a hacker with free time, that's fine. But if my primary job function is to transform graphics in exchange for money, I'm paying for the better tool. Gimp is entirely a no-go in a professional setting.

Or it's like Google Docs / Microsoft Office vs. LibreOffice. LibreOffice is still pretty trash compared to the big tools. It's not just that Google and Microsoft have more money, but their products are involved in larger scale feedback loops that refine the product much more quickly.

But with weights it's even worse than bad UX. These open weights models just aren't as smart. They're not getting RLHF'd on real world data. The developers of these open weights models can game benchmarks, but the actual intelligence for real world problems is lacking. And that's unfortunately the part that actually matters.

Again, to be clear: I hate this. I want open. I just don't see how it will ever be able to catch up to full-featured products.

fourside•about 2 hours ago
Maybe for folks who are deep into this, but it’s not exactly accessible. I tried reading up on it a couple of months ago, but parsing through what hardware I needed, the model and how to configure it (model size vs quantization), how I’d get access to the hardware (which for decent results in coding, new hardware runs $4k-$10k last I checked)—it had a non trivial barrier of entry. I was trying to do this over a long weekend and ran out of time. I’ll have to look into it again because having the local option would be great.

Edit: the replies to my comment are great examples of what I’m talking about when I say it’s hard to determine what hardware I’d need :).

jonaustin•about 1 hour ago
Just get a decent macbook, use LM Studio or OMLX and the latest qwen model you can fit in unified ram.

Hooking up Claude Code to it is trivial with omlx.

https://github.com/jundot/omlx

root_axis•about 2 hours ago
> new hardware runs $4k-$10k last I checked

Starting closer to 40k if you want something that's practical. 10k can't run anything worthwhile for SDLC at useful speeds.

politelemon•about 2 hours ago
Feasibility on commodity hardware would be the true watermark. Running high end computers is the only way to get decent results at the moment, but if we can run inference on CPUs, NPUs, and GPUs on everyday hardware, the moat should disappear.
zozbot234•about 1 hour ago
You can already run inference on ordinary hardware but if you want workable throughput you're limited to small models, and these have very poor world-knowledge.
nozzlegear•about 2 hours ago
I've been using local AI via LM Studio ever since I canceled my Claude subscription. It's obviously slower than Claude on my M1 Studio[†], but like someone else said, I use AI more like a copilot than an autopilot. I'm pretty enthused that I can give it a small task and let it churn through it for a few minutes, while I work on something alongside – all for free with no goddamned arbitrary limits.

[†] The latest Qwen 3.6 whatever has been a noticeable improvement, and I'm not even at the point where I tweak settings like sampling, temperature, etc. No idea what that stuff does, I just use the staff picks in LM Studio and customize the system prompts.

aleqs•about 2 hours ago
Indeed, I feel like we are in the early computer equivalent phase of AI, where giant expensive hardware is still required for frontier models. In 5 years I bet there will be fully open models we'll be able to run on a few $1000 of consumer hardware with equivalent performance to opus 4.7/4.6.
whattheheckheck•about 2 hours ago
You'll never have the power of what they have though. Cloud capital is insane.

So you can run 1 agent locally on $1k to $3k hardware

They can run a fleet of thousands

andyfilms1•about 2 hours ago
Sure, but local AI is still a black box. They can be influenced by training data selection, poisoning, hidden system prompts, etc. That recent Wordpress supply chain hack goes to show that the rug can still be pulled even if the software is FOSS.
ModernMech•about 2 hours ago
I love how it's just a tacit understanding that these companies' entire MO is to carve out a territory, get everyone hooked on the good stuff and then jack up the price when they're addicted and captured -- literally the business plan of crack dealers, and it's just business as usual in the tech industry.
strbean•about 2 hours ago
I was recently introduced to the term "vcware", ala shareware or vaporware, to describe these products. "Don't use that, it's vcware, enshitification is coming soon."
baq•about 2 hours ago
root_axis•about 2 hours ago
Not really. The hardware requirements remain indefinitely out of reach.

Yes, it's possible to run tiny quantized models, but you're working with extremely small context windows and tons of hallucinations. It's fun to play with them, but they're not at all practical.

ac29•about 1 hour ago
The memory requirements aren't that intense. You can run useful (not frontier) models on a $2-5K machine at reasonable speeds. The capabilities of Qwen3.6 27B or 35B-A3B are dramatically better than what was available even a few months ago.

Practical? Maybe not (unless you highly value privacy) because you can get better models and better performance with cheap API access or even cheaper subscriptions. As you said, this may indefinitely be the case.

gip•about 2 hours ago
True. That is why it is key important to have open source and sovereign models that will be accessible to all and always on / local.

Competition (OpenAI vs Anthropic is fun to watch) and open source will get us there soon I think.

blueone•about 1 hour ago
Anthropic sells due to unrelenting pressure and unachievable demand > new owner cuts costs > models become worse > new owner sells > the capitalistic cycle wins > we, the people, suffer
tetha•about 2 hours ago
The owner rug-pulls, or Broadcom buys the owner and starts squeezing.
agumonkey•about 1 hour ago
Some people are so dependent on it they can't even say it without twisting words to hide the fact that they're now stuck at zero
sdevonoes•about 2 hours ago
The sooner you cancel the sooner you become independent of them
derektank•5 minutes ago
You could say the same thing about your mobile phone bill. Most people still consider the benefits of roaming access to the internet greater than the downsides of being dependent on it.
fortyseven•39 minutes ago
This is why, despite enjoying all of this, I really want to focus on locally hosted models. If we don't host the technology ourselves, we're setting ourselves up for a hard fall down the line.

Until very recently, local models been little more than brittle toys in my experience, if you're trying to use them for coding.

But lately I've been running Pi (minimal coding agent harness) with Gemma4 and Qwen3.6 and I've been blown away by how capable and fast they are compared to other models of their size. (I'm using the biggest that can fit into 24gb, not the smaller ones.) In fact, I don't really need to reach for Claude and friends much of the time (for my use cases at least).

wilbur_whateley•about 2 hours ago
Claude with Sonnet medium effort just used 100% of my session limit, some extra dollars, thought for 53 minutes, and said:

API Error: Claude's response exceeded the 32000 output token maximum. To configure this behavior, set the CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS environment variable.

amarcheschi•about 2 hours ago
And on the seventh day, API Error: Claude's response exceeded the 32000 output token maximum
Oras•28 minutes ago
More on the 7th minute if you’re using opus
couchdb_ouchdb•about 1 hour ago
I don't think i'd let it think more than 5 minutes without killing the process.
deckar01•12 minutes ago
They changed it do all of the changes in a virtual cloud environment, then dump the final result at the end of the response. Before it would stream changes, so if it made a minimal fix, then decided to go off on a tangent you could stop it quickly. Now you have to wait 5+ minutes to get a single line of code out of it just to find out it also refactored everything and burned a stack of tokens. No amount of prompting seems to force it to make incremental changes locally.
jansenmac•about 2 hours ago
Just copy and past the error back to Claude and you will be able to continue. I have seen this many times over the past few months. I thought it was related to AWS bedrock that I have been using - but probably not.
jasonlotito•about 2 hours ago
Just curious, what version of Max are you on: 5x or 20x?
giancarlostoro•about 2 hours ago
You're using it within their high usage rate window. I hope you're aware of this, if you use it out of the high usage time window it's supposed to use less, but it does seem a little odd that Sonnet uses so much, even on Medium.
drunken_thor•about 2 hours ago
Ah so we are only supposed to use this work tool outside of work hours?
isjcjwjdkwjxk•about 2 hours ago
“Work tool”

Please. This is a toy. A novel little tech-toy. If you depend on it now for doing your job then, frankly, you deserve to have your rug pulled now and then.

ModernMech•about 2 hours ago
No, you're supposed to make all your hours work hours. This is the way of AI.
joozio•3 minutes ago
Funny. I thought I was the only one. Then I found more people and now you wrote about that. Just this week I also wrote about Claude Opus 4.7 and how I came back to Codex after that: https://thoughts.jock.pl/p/opus-4-7-codex-comeback-2026
wood_spirit•about 1 hour ago
Me and so many coworkers have been struggling with a big cognitive decline in Claude over the last two months. 4.5 was useful and 4.6 was great. I had my own little benchmark and 4.5 could just about keep track of a two way pointer merge loop whereas 4.6 managed a 3 way and the 1M context managed k-way. And this ability to track braids directly helped it understand real production code and make changes and be useful etc.

but then two months ago 4.6 started getting forgetful and making very dumb decisions and so on. Everyone started comparing notes and realising it wasn’t “just them”. And 4.7 isn’t much better and the last few weeks we keep having to battle the auto level of effort downgrade and so on. So much friction as you think “that was dumb” and have to go check the settings again and see there has been some silent downgrade.

We all miss the early days of 4.6, which just show you can have a good useful model. LLMs can be really powerful but in delivering it to the mass market Anthropic throttle and downgrade it to not useful.

My thinking is that soon deepseek reaches the more-than-good-enough 4.6+ level and everyone can get off the Claude pay-more-for-less trajectory. We don’t need much more than we’ve already had a glimpse of and now know is possible. We just need it in our control and provisioned not metered so we can depend upon it.

hungryhobbit•about 1 hour ago
This was a real issue, and Anthropic recently awknowledged it:

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem

Of course, it sucks when companies screw up ... but at the same time, they "paid everyone back" by removing limits for awhile, and (more importantly to me) they were transparent about the whole thing.

I have a hard time seeing any other major AI provider being this transparent, so while I'm annoyed at Claude ... I respect how they handled it.

wood_spirit•about 1 hour ago
Yes that was one issue. It’s not the general degradation I have been talking about though, which is ongoing.

I recall reading similar tales of woe with other providers here on HN. I think the gradual dialling back of capability as capacity becomes strained as users pile on is part of the MO of all the big AI companies.

felixgallo•43 minutes ago
the 'general degradation' is a myth. Check out https://isitnerfed.org/.
isoprophlex•about 1 hour ago
did you set your 4.7 to xhigh or max effort? anything else is basically not worth your time...
anonyfox•about 2 hours ago
My max20 sub is sitting unused since april mostly now, codex with 5.4 (and now 5.5) even with fast mode (= double token costs) is night and day. Opus is doing convincing failures and either forgets half the important details or decides to do "pragmatic" (read: technical debt bandaids or worse) silently and claims success even with everything crashing and burning after the changes. and point out the errors it will make even more messes. Opus works really well for oneshotting greenfield scopes, but iterating on it later or doing complex integrations its just unusable and even harmfully bad.

GPT 5.4+ takes its time and considers even edgecases unprovoked that in fact are correct and saves me subsequent error hunting turns and finally delivers. Plus no "this doesn't look like malware" or "actually wait" thinking loops for minutes over a oneliner script change.

fluidcruft•about 2 hours ago
My mental model for LLM is I don't expect them to chew gum and walk at the same time. Cleaning code up is a different task from building new functionality.

GLM always feels like it's doing things smarter, until you actually review the code. So you still need the build/prune cycle. That's my experience anyway.

jorjon•about 1 hour ago
Can I get that max20 if you are not using it?
drunken_thor•about 2 hours ago
AI services are only minorly incentivized to reduce token usage. They want high token usage, it makes you pay more. They are going to continually test where the limit is, what is the max token usage before you get angry. All AI companies will continue to trade places for token use and cost as cost increases. We are in tepid water pretending it is a bath pretending we aren’t about to be boiled frogs.
jedberg•about 2 hours ago
People said this about AWS too. "Why would they save you money??". It turns out that every time they reduce prices, they make more money, because more people use their services.

AI companies have the same incentive. Make it cheaper and people will use it more, making you more money (assuming your price is still above cost). And of course they have every reason to reduce their on costs.

zormino•44 minutes ago
jevons paradox
GodelNumbering•35 minutes ago
I am betting on the fact that people will get increasingly frustrated at closed agent lock-ins. I built (cline fork) and open-sourced https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac with the sole focus on token efficiency expecting that the closed-lock-in vendors will do enough to frustrate their users over time. Looking for contributors
nananana9•22 minutes ago
Up to a point. There is incentive when they get to the point where they literally can't serve their userbase and customers start leaving.
minimaxir•about 2 hours ago
To an extent. That economic incentive stops making sense when a) capacity is an actual constraint and b) Anthropic is not a monopoly and is subject to pressure from competitors who are more user-friendly.
y42•about 2 hours ago
That's what I am thinking, too. It sound's like a conspiracy theory, but at the end Anthropic et al benefits from models that don't finish their jobs. I recently read about this "over editing phenomenon". The machine is never done. It doesn't want to.

It's like dating apps. They don't want you to find a good match, because then you cancel the subscription.

biglyburrito•about 1 hour ago
Which works fine, right up until China releases a new DeepSeek model that's 85% as capable as an Anthropic or OpenAI premium model but costs a fraction of what either of those US companies are charging.

Speaking of which:

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/24/deepseek-v4-llm-preview-open...

zzzeek•about 2 hours ago
Well that's why threads like this are important to upvote. On hacker news , they're angry !
zkmon•about 2 hours ago
Yesterday was a realization point for me. I gave a simple extraction task to Claude code with a local LLM and it "whirred" and "purred" for 10 minutes. Then I submitted the same data and prompt directly to model via llama_cpp chat UI and the model single-shotted it in under a minute. So obviously something wrong with coding agent or the way it is talking to LLM.

Now I'm looking for an extremely simple open-source coding agent. Nanocoder doesn't seem install on my Mac and it brings node-modules bloat, so no. Opencode seems not quite open-source. For now, I'm doing the work of coding agent and using llama_cpp web UI. Chugging it along fine.

syhol•about 2 hours ago
https://pi.dev/ seems popular, whats not open source about opencode? The repo has an MIT License.
zkmon•about 1 hour ago
Maybe it's just my feeling. It asks to update/upgrade continuously.
tfrancisl•about 2 hours ago
Some people believe only copyleft licenses are open source. They're right on principle, wrong in (legal) practice.
steveklabnik•about 1 hour ago
They're not even right on principle: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

Even the FSF recognizes that non-copyleft licenses still follow the Freedoms, and therefore are still Free Software.

fortyseven•34 minutes ago
Been LOVING Pi so far!
SyneRyder•about 1 hour ago
Probably a silly idea, but I'll throw it into the mix - have your current AI build one for you. You can have exactly the coding agent you want, especially if you're looking for "extremely simple".

I got annoyed enough with Anthropic's weird behavior this week to actually try this, and got something workable up & running in a few days. My case was unique: there's no Claude Code for BeOS, or my older / ancient Macs, so it was easier to bootstrap & stitch something together if I really wanted an agentic coding agent on those platforms. You'll learn a lot about how models actually work in the process too, and how much crazy ridiculous bandaid patching is happening Claude Code. Though you might also appreciate some of the difficulties that the agent / harnesses have to solve too. (And to be clear, I'm still using CC when I'm on a platform that supports it.)

As for the llama_cpp vs Claude Code delays - I've run into that too. My theory is API is prioritized over Claude Code subscription traffic. API certainly feels way faster. But you're also paying significantly more.

appcustodian2•about 2 hours ago
Just in case it didn't occur to you already, you can just build whatever coding agent you want. They're pretty simple
btbuildem•about 1 hour ago
You can run CC with local models, it's pretty straightforward. I've done this with vLLM + a thin shim to change the endpoint syntax.
enraged_camel•about 2 hours ago
I use both Cursor and Claude Code, and yes, the latter is noticeably slower with the same model at the same settings.

However, it's hard to justify Cursor's cost. My bill was $1,500/mo at one point, which is what encouraged me to give CC a try.

banditelol•about 2 hours ago
what model you used with llama_cpp?
zkmon•about 1 hour ago
Qwen3.6-35B quant-4 gguf
jedisct1•about 2 hours ago
Swival is not bloated and was specifically made for local agents: https://swival.dev
pferdone•about 2 hours ago
pi.dev as well
areoform•about 1 hour ago
I've noticed that sometimes the same Claude model will make logical errors sometimes but not other times. Claude's performance is highly temporal. There's even a graph! https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/

I haven't seen anyone mention this publicly, but I've noticed that the same model will give wildly different results depending on the quantization. 4-bit is not the same as 8-bit and so on in compute requirements and output quality. https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-guide-...

I'm aware that frontier models don't work in the same way, but I've often wondered if there's a fidelity dial somewhere that's being used to change the amount of memory / resources each model takes during peak hours v. off hours. Does anyone know if that's the case?

8organicbits•about 1 hour ago
I'm not sure that graph shows a time-based correlation. The 60% line stays inside the 95% confidence interval. Is that not just a measurement of noise?
PeterStuer•23 minutes ago
I'm on max x5. No limit problems, but I am definetly feeling the decline. Early stopping and being hellbent on taking shortcuts being the main culprits, closely followed by over optimistic (stale) caching (audit your hooks!).

All mostly mitigatable by rigorous audits and steering, but man, it should not have to be.

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binaryturtle•about 2 hours ago
I have a simple rule: I won't pay for that stuff. First they steal all my work to feed into those models, afterwards I shall pay for it? No way!

I use AI, but only what is free-of-charge, and if that doesn't cut it, I just do it like in the good old times, by using my own brain.

cbg0•about 2 hours ago
I've been a fan since the launch of the first Sonnet model and big props for standing up to the government, but you can sure lose that good faith fast when you piss off your paying customers with bad communication, shaky model quality and lowered usage limits.
siliconc0w•about 2 hours ago
Shameless self plug but also worried about the silent quality regressions, I started building a tool to track coding agent performance over time.. https://github.com/s1liconcow/repogauge

Here is a sample report that tries out the cheaper models + the newest Kimi2.6 model against the 5.4 'gold' testcases from the repo: https://repogauge.org/sample_report.

conception•about 2 hours ago
This is cool - just wanted to note https://marginlab.ai is one that has been around for a while.
aleksiy123•about 1 hour ago
are there any tools anyone knows to collect this kind of telemetry while using the tools instead of offline evals.

running evals seems like it may be a bit too expensive as a solo dev.

lawrence1•35 minutes ago
The timeline doesn't make any sense. How can you subscribe a couple weeks ago and the problem start 3 weeks ago and yet things also went well for the first few weeks. was this written by GPT 5.5?
wg0•21 minutes ago
The author is not a native English speaker it seems.

They might mean "few weeks ago" and the phrase "couple of weeks ago" might not be exactly as "Vor ein paar Wochen" in their mind rather could be as "few weeks ago."

Rest of the prose in the article seems to support the assumption.

The post is handwritten with no LLMs involved.

stan_kirdey•about 1 hour ago
I also cancelled my subscription.The $20 Pro plan has become completely unusable for any real work. What is especially frustrating is that Claude Chat and Claude Code now share the exact same usage limits — it makes zero sense from a product standpoint when the workflows are so different. Even the $200 Max plan got heavily nerfed. What used to easily last me a full week (or more) of solid daily use now burns out in just a few days. Combined with the quality drop and unpredictable token consumption, it simply stopped being worth it.
lanthissa•about 2 hours ago
for all the drama, its pretty clear both openai, google, and anthropic have had to degrade some of their products because of a lack of supply.

There's really no immediate solution to this other than letting the price float or limiting users as capacity is built out this gets better.

petterroea•about 2 hours ago
Looking at Anthropic's new products I think they understand they don't really have a cutting edge other than the brand.

I tried Kimi 2.6 and it's almost comparable to Opus. Anthropic lost the ball. I hope this is a sign the we are moving towards a future where model usage is a commodity with heavy competition on price/performance

jetbalsa•14 minutes ago
I've been mostly using Kimi has a hacker of sorts, putting it places I want to attach AI directly as their API for their plans are not completely user hostile. Need to do OCR for scanning Magic the Gathering Cards. Sure!, have it attached to X4: Foundations as a AI manager for some stuff. sounds fun. Can't really do that with claude
mmonaghan•12 minutes ago
Kimi nowhere close to opus on extended use but definitely highly competitive with sonnet. I will probably end up using kimi for personal stuff when I find some time to get it running or get a non-anthropic/openai harness set up on my personal machine.
alex-onecard•about 1 hour ago
How are you using kimi 2.6? I am considering their coding plan to replace my claude max 5x but I am worried about privacy and security.
ac29•37 minutes ago
I'm using it via OpenCode Go, which claims to only use Zero Data Retention providers.

How much you trust any particular provider's claim to not retain data is subjective though.

algoth1•about 2 hours ago
Doesn't "poor support" implies that there is some sort of support? Shouldnt it be "no support"
ipaddr•about 2 hours ago
You get to talk to an AI agent
bauerd•about 2 hours ago
They can't afford to care about individual customers because enterprise demand exploded and they're short on compute
stldev•about 2 hours ago
Same, after being a long-time proponent too.

First was the CC adaptive thinking change, then 4.7. Even with `/effort max` and keeping under 20% of 1M context, the quality degradation is obvious.

I don't understand their strategy here.

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mattas•29 minutes ago
I've see a post like this every week for the last 2 years. Are these models actually getting worse? Or do folks start noticing the cracks as they use them more and more?
mrinterweb•about 2 hours ago
My recent frustration with Claude has been it feels like I'm waiting on responses more. I don't have historical latency to compare this with, but I feel like it has been getting slower. I may be wrong, and maybe its just spending more time thinking than it used to. My guess is Anthropic is having capacity issues. I hope I'm wrong because I don't want to switch.
janalsncm•about 1 hour ago
There was a really good point in this podcast episode about the speed of LLMs. They are so slow that all of the progress messages and token streaming are necessary. But the core problem is that the technology is so darn slow.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-episode-is-a-cogn...

As someone who both uses and builds this technology I think this is a core UX issue we’re going to be improving for a while. At times it really feels like a choose 2+ of: slow, bad, and expensive.

torstenvl•about 1 hour ago
I feel like almost everyone using AI for support systems is utterly failing at the same incredibly obvious place.

The first job of any support system—both in terms of importance and chronologically—is triage. This is not a research issue and it's not an interaction issue. It's at root a classification problem and should be trained and implemented as such.

There are three broad categories of interaction: cranks, grandmas, and wtfs.

Cranks are the people opening a support chat to tell you they have vital missing information about the Kennedy Assassintion or they want your help suing the government for their exposure to Agent Orange when they were stationed at Minot. "Unfortunately I can't help with that. We are a website that sells wholesale frozen lemonade. Good luck!"

Grandma questions are the people who can't navigate your website. (This isn't meant to be derogatory, just vivid; I have grandma questions often enough myself.) They need to be pointed toward some resource: a help page, a kb article, a settings page, whatever.

WTFs are everything else. Every weird undocumented behavior, every emergent circumstance, every invalid state, etc. These are your best customers and they should be escalated to a real human, preferably a smart one, as soon as realistically possible. They're your best customers because (a) they are investing time into fixing something that actually went wrong; (b) they will walk you through it in greater detail than a bug report, live, and help you figure it out; and (c) they are invested, which means you have an opportunity for real loyalty and word-of-mouth gains.

What most AI systems (whether LLMs or scripts) do wrong is that they treat WTFs like they're grandmas. They re spending significant money on building these systems just to destroy the value they get from the most intelligent and passionate people in their customer base doing in-depth production QC/QA.

dboreham•44 minutes ago
This rings true. However I have used one AI automated support chat that didn't behave that way. I wish I could remember the vendor but I do remember being blown away when it said something like "that sounds like a real problem would you like me to open a support ticket for this?". Which it then did and subsequently a human addressed my issue.
elevaet•42 minutes ago
I've been very happy using Codex in the VScode extension. Very high quality coding and generous token limits. I've been running Claude in the CLI over the last couple of months to compare and overall I prefer Codex, but would be happy with either.
pram•about 2 hours ago
I’ve noticed most of the complaints are about the Pro plan. Anecdotally I pay for the $200 Max plan and haven’t noticed anything radically different re: tokens or thinking time (availability is still a crapshoot)

I am certainly not saying people should “spend more money,” more like the Claude Code access in the Pro plan seems kind of like false advertising. Since it’s technically usable, but not really.

swiftcoder•about 2 hours ago
> I am certainly not saying people should “spend more money,” more like the Claude Code access in the Pro plan seems kind of like false advertising

Its particularly noticeable when for a long time you could work an 8 hour day in codex on ChatGPT´s $20/month plan (though they too started tightening the screws a couple of weeks back)

thebitguru•about 2 hours ago
My guess is that the higher plans will be next, especially as more people upgrade to those and maximize their usage.
nikolay•about 2 hours ago
I can agree. ChatGPT 5.5 made this a no-brainer choice. Anthropic are idiots removing Claude Code from the Pro plan. They need to ask Claude if what they did was a natural intelligence bug! Greed kills companies, too!
Capricorn2481•about 1 hour ago
> I can agree. ChatGPT 5.5 made this a no-brainer choice

The new model that came out less than 24 hours ago made this obvious? This feels like when a new video game comes out and there's 1,000 steam reviews glazing it in the first hours of release. Don't you think you should use it for longer than a day before declaring it a game changer?

nikolay•15 minutes ago
Plus, I don't like Anthropic allowing "chosen people" to access models - OpenAI would offer anything to anybody who's willing to pay for it, and that's a real business. Anthropic claims some moral superiority, but their model is used to kill civilians in Iran and to spy on all of us, so I don't buy their BS!
nikolay•18 minutes ago
Yes, even 5.4 was better.
lawrence1•36 minutes ago
The timeline of the first few sentences doesn't add up. how can you subscribe 2 weeks ago when the problem started 3 weeks ago.
binyu•about 1 hour ago
I feel like Anthropic is forcing their new model (Opus 4.7) to do much less guess work when making architectural choices, instead it prefers to defer back decisions to the user. This is likely done to mine sessions for Reinforcement-Learning signals which is then used to make their future models even smarter.
hungryhobbit•about 1 hour ago
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem

On March 4, we changed Claude Code's default reasoning effort from high to medium to reduce the very long latency—enough to make the UI appear frozen—some users were seeing in high mode. This was the wrong tradeoff. We reverted this change on April 7 after users told us they'd prefer to default to higher intelligence and opt into lower effort for simple tasks. This impacted Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6.

On March 26, we shipped a change to clear Claude's older thinking from sessions that had been idle for over an hour, to reduce latency when users resumed those sessions. A bug caused this to keep happening every turn for the rest of the session instead of just once, which made Claude seem forgetful and repetitive. We fixed it on April 10. This affected Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6.

On April 16, we added a system prompt instruction to reduce verbosity. In combination with other prompt changes, it hurt coding quality and was reverted on April 20. This impacted Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6, and Opus 4.7.

binyu•about 1 hour ago
How does this address the point I moved specifically?
vintagedave•about 2 hours ago
They won't even reset usage for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47892445

And by crikey do I empathise with the poor support in this article. Nothing has soured me on Anthropic more than their attitude.

Great AI engineers. Questionable command line engineers (but highly successful.) Downright awful to their customers.

throwaway2027•about 2 hours ago
Same. I think one of the issues is that Claude reached a treshold where I could just rely on it being good and having to manually fix it up less and less and other models hadn't reached that point yet so I was aware of that and knew I had to fix things up or do a second pass or more. Other providers also move you to a worse model after you run out which is key in setting expectation as well. Developers knew that that was the trade-off.

I think even with the worse limits people still hated it but when you start to either on purpose or inadvertently make the model dumber that's when there's really no purpose to keep using Claude anymore.

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yalogin•about 1 hour ago
If someone wants to move off Claude what are the alternatives? More importantly can another system pick up from where Claude left off or is there some internal knowledge Claude keeps in their configuration that I need to extract before canceling?
janalsncm•about 1 hour ago
Opencode is a great cli for driving a coding agents.

Like 3 weeks ago Qwen3-coder was the best coding LLM to run locally. I haven’t spent time since to figure out if anything is better.

You can also power Opencode with OpenRouter which lets you pay for any LLM Ă  la carte.

y42•41 minutes ago
I am trying Qwen3.5-9B-Claude-4.6 since a couple of days now locally coming from OMLX. Either via Hermes or Continue in VS Code. It's oka'ish, even performance-wise.

[1] https://huggingface.co/Jackrong/Qwen3.5-9B-Claude-4.6-Opus-R...

vondur•about 2 hours ago
Wait, weren't there posts in the not too distant past where everyone was signing the praises for Claude and wondering how OpenAI will catch up?
swader999•about 1 hour ago
Yep. I think the sentiment here isn't lagging too much in terms of the day to day experience of what is being offered. Kind of makes HN very useful in this regard.
cyanydeez•about 2 hours ago
Wait, are SaaS's fundamentally shifting business models searching to maximize the value of a product at the expense of a customer over time?

Strange how things can change!

Capricorn2481•about 1 hour ago
We've seen this sentiment shift on HN like 20 times in the past year, too often for it to be a real reflection of service quality. Feels more like people rooting for sports teams.

The services (OpenAI, Anthropic) are not wildly changing that much. People are just using LLMs more and getting frustrated because they were told it would change the world, and then they take it out on their current patron. Give it a month and we'll be hearing how far OpenAI has fallen behind.

isjcjwjdkwjxk•about 2 hours ago
Oh no, the unreliable product people pretend is the next coming of Jesus turned out to be thoroughly unreliable. Who coulda thunk it.
easythrees•about 2 hours ago
I have to say, this has been the opposite of my experience. If anything, I have moved over more work from ChatGPT to Claude.
kleene_op•about 2 hours ago
Same. I am getting crazy good value from Claude at work, on both scientific applications and deployment environments.

There is one caveat, and that is you have to give the model well thought out constraints to guide it properly, and absolutely take the time to read all the thinking it's doing and not be afraid to stop the process whenever things go sideway.

People who just let Claude roam free on their repository deserve everything they end up with.

shevy-java•14 minutes ago
Those AI using software developers begin to show signs of addiction:

From "yay, claude is awesome" to "damn, it sucks". This is like with withdrawal symptoms now.

My approach is much easier: I'll stay the oldschool way, avoid AI and come up with other solutions. I am definitely slower, but I reason that the quality FOR other humans will be better.

hybrid_study•about 1 hour ago
Sometimes it feels like Anthropic uses token processing as a throttling tool, to their advantage.
nickdothutton•about 2 hours ago
Switched to local models after quality dropped off a cliff and token consumption seemed to double. Having some success with Qwen+Crush and have been more productive.
tfrancisl•about 2 hours ago
Would love some more info on how you got any local model working with Crush. Love charmbracelet but the docs are all over the place on linking into arbitrary APIs.
porkloin•about 1 hour ago
assuming you have a locally running llama-server or llama-swap, just drop this into your crush.json with your setup details/local addresses etc:

Edit: i forgot HN doesn't do code fences. See https://pastebin.com/2rQg0r2L

Obviously the context window settings are going to depend on what you've got set on the llama-server/llama-swap side. Multiple models on the same server like I have in the config snippet above is mostly only relevant if you're using llama-swap.

TL;DR is you need to set up a provider for your local LLM server, then set at least one model on that server, then set the large and small models that crush actually uses to respond to prompts to use that provider/model combo. Pretty straightforward but agree that their docs could be better for local LLM setups in particular.

For me, I've got llama-swap running and set up on my tailnet as a [tailscale service](https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-services) so I'm able to use my local LLMs anywhere I would use a cloud-hosted one, and I just set the provider baseurl in crush.json to my tailscale service URL and it works great.

zendarr•about 2 hours ago
Seems like some of the token issues may be corrected now

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem

minimaxir•about 2 hours ago
These changes fixed some of the token issues, but the token bloat is an intrinsic problem to the model, and Anthropic's solution of defaulting to xhigh reasoning for Opus 4.7 just means you'll go through tokens faster anyways.
sgt•about 2 hours ago
I'm worried anything less than xhigh is insufficient though. What do you do?
giancarlostoro•about 2 hours ago
The problem is they changed people's default settings, and if you're like me, you keep a Claude Code session open for days, maybe weeks and even a month, and just come back to it and keep going. I wouldn't be surprised if there's hundreds if not thousands of people still on these broken configurations / models.

Dear Anthropic:

Please, for the love of all things holy, NEVER change someone's defaults without INFORMING the end user first, because you will wind up with people confused, upset, and leaving your service.

sfmike•about 2 hours ago
i ran prompts used up a ton of usage, and got no return just showed error.

Asked support hey i got nothing back i tried prompting several times used a ton of usage and it gave no response. I'd just like usage back. What I payed for I never got.

Just bot response we don't do refunds no exceptions. Even in the case they don't serve you what your plan should give you.

caycep•about 2 hours ago
If all Claude does is automate mundane code, why not just make a "meta library" of said common mundane code snippets?
twobitshifter•about 1 hour ago
maybe make it so that when you start typing it completes the snippet?
queuebert•about 2 hours ago
Like Stack Overflow?
caycep•about 2 hours ago
you still have to search stack overflow and sift, but I'm surprised someone doesn't just make a TLDR style or shortcuts-expanding product out of it that you can just pop in code for this use case or that. vs. the current product spending a few datacenter's worth of energy to give you the answer that's only correct x% of the time
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giancarlostoro•about 2 hours ago
I'm torn because I use it in my spare time, so I've missed some of these issues, I don't use it 9 to 5, but I've built some amazing things, when 1 Million tokens dropped, that was peak Claude Code for me, it was also when I suspect their issues started. I've built up some things I've been drafting in my head for ages but never had time for, and I can review the code and refine it until it looks good.

I'm debating trying out Codex, from some people I hear its "uncapped" from others I hear they reached limits in short spans of time.

There's also the really obnoxious "trust me bro" documentation update from OpenClaw where they claim Anthropic is allowing OpenClaw usage again, but no official statement?

Dear Anthropic:

I would love to build a custom harness that just uses my Claude Code subscription, I promise I wont leave it running 24/7, 365, can you please tell me how I can do this? I don't want to see some obscure tweet, make official blog posts or documentation pages to reflect policies.

Can I get whitelisted for "sane use" of my Claude Code subscription? I would love this. I am not dropping $2400 in credits for something I do for fun in my free time.

fluidcruft•about 2 hours ago
It sounds like we have very similar usage/projects. codex had been essentially uncapped (via combination of different x-factors between Plus and Pro and promotions) until very recently when they copied Anthropic's notes.

Plus is still very usable for me though. I have not tried Claude Pro in quite a while and if people are complaining about usage limits I know it's going to be a bad time for me. I had to move up from Claude Pro when the weekly limits were introduced because it was too annoying to schedule my life around 5hr windows.

I started using codex around December when I started to worry I was becoming too dependent on Claude and need to encourage competition. codex wasn't particularly competitive with Claude until 5.4 but has grown on me.

The only thing I really care about is that whatever I'm using "just works" and doesn't hurt limits and Claude code has been flaky as all hell on multiple fronts ever since everyone discovered it during the Pentagon flap. So I tend to reach for ChatGPT and codex at the moment because it will "just work" and there's a good chance Claude will not.

scottyah•about 2 hours ago
Don't forget, Openclaw was basically bought by OpenAI so there's only incentive to use it as a wedge to pry people off Anthropic.
dheera•about 2 hours ago
Claude Code now has an official telegram plugin and cron jobs and can do 80% of the things people used OpenClaw for if you just give it access to tools and run it with --dangerously-skip-permissions.
Der_Einzige•about 2 hours ago
The /loop command which is supposed to be the equivilant to heartbeat.md is EXTREMELY unreliable/shitty.
DeathArrow•about 2 hours ago
I use Claude Code with GLM, Kimi and MiniMax models. :)

I was worried about Anthropic models quality varying and about Anthropic jacking up prices.

I don't think Claude Code is the best agent orchestrator and harness in existence but it's most widely supported by plugins and skills.

droidjj•about 2 hours ago
Where are you getting inference from? I'm overwhelmed by the options at the moment.
DeathArrow•6 minutes ago
I am using Ollama Cloud and Moonshot Ai.
alex-onecard•about 1 hour ago
I am also curious. Considering the kimi coding plan but I'm worried about data privacy and security.
DeathArrow•4 minutes ago
I don't send much data to cloud, mostly code. And I don't believe in security by obscurity, if I need high security I do proper implementation.
hedgehog•about 2 hours ago
I used Opus via Copilot until December and then largely switched over to Claude Code. I'm not sure what the difference is but I haven't seen any of these issues in daily use.
ForOldHack•18 minutes ago
I have token issues three times a day, and I just upgraded to pro... and now this... now I cancel. my work flow was co-pilot to Gemini to Claude Code... and the bottle neck was always CC. Always. I am done. It should be pretty easy to replace CC.

AI used to be, the punched card replicator... its all replaceable.

moralestapia•18 minutes ago
The midwit curve of LLMs has OpenAI on both ends.
postepowanieadm•about 1 hour ago
Yeah, session limits are kinda show stoppers.
aleqs•about 2 hours ago
The usage metering is just so incredibly inconsistent, sometimes 4 parallel Opus sessions for 3 hours straight on max effort only uses up 70% of a session, other times 20 mins / 3 prompts in one session completely maxes it out. (Max x20 plan) Is this just a bug on anthropic side or is the usage metering just completely opaque and arbitrary?
unshavedyak•about 1 hour ago
It's something strange because i never have these issues. I often run two in parallel (though not all day), and generally have something running anytime i look at my laptop to advance the steps/tasks/etc. Usually i struggle to hit 50% on my Max20.

Heck two weeks ago i tried my hardest to hit my limit just to make use of my subscription (i sometimes feel like i'm wasting it), and i still only managed to get to 80% for the week.

I generally prune my context frequently though, each new plan is a prune for example, because i don't trust large context windows and degradation. My CLAUDE.md's are also somewhat trim for this same fear and i don't use any plugins, and only a couple MCPs (LSP).

No idea why everyone seems to be having such wildly different experiences on token usage.

r00t-•about 1 hour ago
Same, it's a mess.
SwellJoe•about 1 hour ago
I don't get it. I use Claude Code every day, what I would consider pretty heavy usage...at least as heavy as I can use it while actually paying attention to what it's producing and guiding it effectively into producing good software. I literally never run into usage limits on the $100 plan, even when the bugs related to caching, etc. were happening that led to inflated token usage.

WTF are y'all doing that chews tokens so fast? I mean, sure, I could spin up Gas Town and Beads and produce infinite busy work for the agents, but that won't make useful software, because the models don't want anything. They don't know what to build without pretty constant guidance. Left to their own devices, they do busy work. The folks who "set and forget" on AI development are producing a whole lot of code to do nothing that needed doing. And, a lot of those folks are proud of their useless million lines of code.

I'm not trying to burn as many tokens as a possible, I'm trying to build good software. If you're paying attention to what you're building, there's so many points where a human is in the loop that it's unusual to run up against token limits.

Anyway, I assume that at some point they have to make enough money to pay the bills. Everything has been subsidized by investors for quite some time, and while the cost per token is going down with efficiency gains in the models/harnesses and with newer compute hardware tuned for these workloads, I think we're all still enjoying subsidized compute at the moment. I don't think Anthropic is making much profit on their plans, especially with folks who somehow run right at the edge of their token limit 24/7. And, I would guess OpenAI is running an even lossier balance sheet (they've raised more money and their prices are lower).

I dunno. I hear a lot of complaining about Claude, but it's been pretty much fine for me throughout 4.5, 4.6 and 4.7. It got Good Enough at 4.5, and it's never been less than Good Enough since. And, when I've tried alternatives, they usually proved to be not quite Good Enough for some reason, sometimes non-technical reasons (I won't use OpenAI, anymore, because I don't trust OpenAI, and Gemini is just not as good at coding as Claude).

antics9•about 1 hour ago
From the comments here it seems like people are stress prompting their builds instead of planning and reviewing.

If one model seems to be a bit off during a session I just switch to another (Opencode) and plan and review from there.

dboreham•42 minutes ago
Same here. I've asked this question before. Haven't received an answer yet.
bad_haircut72•about 2 hours ago
Waiting 60s every time I send a msg really kills the ux of claude
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zh_code•about 2 hours ago
I just cancelled my Max20 plan yesterday.
docheinestages•40 minutes ago
Me too.
estimator7292•about 1 hour ago
I just noticed today that it doesn't warn about approaching limits and just blows straight into billing extra tokens.

I'm pretty sure it used to warn when you got close to your 5hr limit, but no, it happily billed extra usage. Granted only about $10 today, but over the span of like 45 minutes. Not super pleased.

gizmodo59•about 1 hour ago
Codex is becoming such a good product. I have the 100$ pro lite. I have Claude still but 20$. I rarely use it. Let’s see if they give generous limits and more importantly a model that’s better than 5.5. The mythos fear mongering did not give me a good impression that they care about the average developer.
queuebert•about 2 hours ago
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I think choosing which companies to support during this period of pre-alignment is one way to vote which direction this all goes. I'm happy to accept a slightly worse coding agent if it means I don't get exterminated someday.
danjl•about 2 hours ago
This sounds just like all my neighbors complaining about their internet provider.
drivebyhooting•about 2 hours ago
Imagine vibe coding your core consumer application and associated backend…

Oh wait, I don’t have to imagine. That’s what Anthropic does. A nice preview for what is in store for those who chose to turn off their brains and turn on their AI agents.

varispeed•about 2 hours ago
It also seems to me they route prompts to cheaper dumber models that present themselves as e.g. Opus 4.7. Perhaps that's what is "adaptive reasoning" aka we'll route your request to something like Qwen saying it's Opus. Sometimes I get a good model, so I found I'll ask a difficult question first and if answer is dumb, I terminate the session and start again and only then go with the real prompt. But there is no guarantee model will be downgraded mid session. I wish they just charged real price and stopped these shenanigans. It wastes so much time.
dswalter•about 2 hours ago
You're describing a Taravangian prompt situation (a character in a book series who wakes up with a different/random intelligence level each day and has a series of tests for himself to determine which kind of decisions he's capable of that day). https://coppermind.net/wiki/Taravangian
GrumpyGoblin•about 2 hours ago
Cool
scuff3d•about 2 hours ago
Welcome to the future. Anthropic is currently speed running it but this is what all LLM tools are going to look like in the next few years, once they turn the enshitification corner.
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whalesalad•about 1 hour ago
I've spent thousands of dollars on API tokens in the last few months. Out of my own pocket, as an indie contractor. I used the API specifically instead of Pro/Max/Plus/Silver/Gold/Platinum/Diamond to avoid all of the mess there regarding usage resets and potential hidden routing to worse models. It worked great for months, I got a ton of shit done, shipped a bunch of features. I really began to rely on the tech. I was not happy about the cost, but the value proposition was there.

Then within the last few months everything changed and went to shit. My trust was lost. Behavior became completely inconsistent.

During the height of Claude's mental retardation (now finally acknowledged by the creators) I had an incident where CC ran a query against an unpartitioned/massive BQ table that resulted in $5,000 in extra spend because it scanned a table which should have been daily partitioned 30 times. 27 TB per scan. I recall going over and over the setup and exhaustively refining confidence. After I realized this blunder, I referred to it in the same CC session, "jesus fucking christ, I flagged this issue earlier" -- it responded, "you did. you called out the string types and full table scans and I said "let's do it later." That was wrong. I should have prioritized it when you raised it". Now obviously this is MY fault. I fucked up here, because I am the operator, and the buck stops with me. But this incident really galvinized that the Claude I had come to vibe with so well over the last N months was entirely gone.

We all knew it was making making mistakes, becoming fully retarded. We all felt and flagged this. When Anthropic came out and said, "yeah ... you guys are using it wrong, its a skill issue" I knew this honeymoon was over. Then recently when they finally came out and ack'd more of the issues (while somehow still glossing over how bad they fucked up?) it was the final nail. I'm done spending $ on Anthropic ecosystem. I signed up for OpenAI pro $200/mo and will continue working on my own local inference in the meantime.

whalesalad•about 1 hour ago
The thing that irks me the most is that I was paying full price. Literally spreading my cheeks wide open and saying, "here ya go Anthropic, all yours." and for actually close to a year it was great. Looking back I see I began using it in March of 2025. Thats roughly a year of integrating it into my day to day, pairing with it constantly, and as I said shipping really well engineered meaningful work.

They could have just kept doing this - literally printing money. Literally: do absolutely nothing, go on vacation, profit $$$. So why did so much change? I think that the issue is they were trying to optimize CC for the monthly plan folks, the ones who are likely losing the company money, but API users became collateral damage.

system2•about 2 hours ago
Same here. The single prompt burnt all my tokens in 3 minutes for the day. What happened to Claude in the last 2 months? I was happy with what they were providing and was happy to pay whatever for it. Why did they mess with it? Why are they destroying the tool we all loved?

I hate enshittification and I hate seeing this happening to Claude Code right now.

rvz•about 2 hours ago
The great de-skilling programme continues in Anthropic's casino. They completely want you dependent on gambling tokens on their slot machines with extortionate prices, fees and limits.

Anthropic can't even scale their own infrastructure operations, because it does not exist and they do not have the compute; even when they are losing tens of billions and can nerf models when they feel like it.

Once again, local models are the answer and Anthropic continues to get you addicted to their casino instead of running your own cheaper slot machine, which you save your money.

Every time you go to Anthropic's casino, the house always wins.

jwaldrip•about 2 hours ago
I would love to just say that if you are using claude code, you should no be on pro. I feel like all the people complaining are complaining that an agent cant handle the work of a developer for $20/m. Get on at least max 5, its a world of a difference.
subscribed•4 minutes ago
I'm not a vibe coder or software manufacturer.

I juts need a convenient commandline tool to sometimes analyse the repo and answer a few questions about it.

Am I unworthy of using CC then? Until now I thought Pro entitles me to doing so.

LOL, the elitism is through the roof.

Larrikin•about 2 hours ago
It's impossible to justify the jump in the expense unless you are directly working on something that makes you money. Messing around on a hobby project, doing some quick research, and getting personalized notifications was a no brainer for 200 a year.

The product keeps getting worse so I will definitely evaluate options and possibly switch if management keeps screwing up the product.

terrut•about 2 hours ago
I found the perfect sweet spot for my hobby development. I pay 7 euros for Gemini plus and use it for creating the architecture and technical specs. Those are fed to Sonnet on Pro that just implements the instructions. This gives plenty of space to do long sessions several times a week.
willio58•about 2 hours ago
True that.

Max 5, sonnet for 95% of things. I never run out of tokens in a week and I use it for ~5-6 hours a day.

y42•about 2 hours ago
I dare to call meself a senior dev, so I don't need a replacement, I need a tool.
kin•36 minutes ago
For some reason you are being downvoted but I wanted to echo your sentiment. As someone who tries to switch things up for every next task, the productivity of Claude Max is worth every penny.

And I actually read the output to fix what I don't like and ever since Opus 4.5, I've had to less and less. 4.6 had issues at the beginning but that's because you have to manually make sure you change the effort level.