Summarizer

Anthropic literally advertises long sessions, 1M context, high reasoning etc. And then their vibe-coders tell us that we are to blame for using the product exactly as advertised: https://x.com/lydiahallie/status/2039800718371307603 while silently changing how the product works. Please stop defending hapless innocent corporations.

While I hate all the gaslighting Anthropic seems to do recently (and the fact that their harness broke the code quality, while they forbid use of third party harnesses), making decisions for users is what UX is. See also the difference between eg. MacOS (with large M, the older good versions) and waiting for "Year of linux on desktop". I don't think the issue is making decisions for users, but trying to switch off the soup tap in the all-you-can-eat soup bar. Or, wrong business model setting wrong incentives to both sides.

> Engaging so directly with a highly critical audience is a minefield that you're navigating well. They spent two months literally gaslighting this "critical audience" that this could not be happening and literally blaming users for using their vibe-coded slop exactly as advertised. All the while all the official channels refused to acknowledge any problems. Now the dissatisfaction and subscription cancellations have reached a point where they finally had to do something.

Examples of gaslighting on April 15th (the first 2 issues were "fixed" by April 10th according to the story): https://x.com/bcherny/status/2044291036860874901 https://x.com/bcherny/status/2044299431294759355 No mention of anything like "hey, we just fixed two big issues, one that lasted over a month." Just casual replies to everybody like nothing is wrong and "oh there's an issue? just let us know we had no idea!"

Don't forget "our investigation concluded you are to blame for using the product exactly as advertised" https://x.com/lydiahallie/status/2039800718371307603 including gems like "Sonnet 4.6 is the better default on Pro. Opus burns roughly twice as fast. Switch at session start"

Instead of showing actual usage, costs and cache status you spent two months denying the issue even exists, making the product silently worse, and now you're "iterating on this"

To add to this. The new indicator is "New task? /clear to save <X> tokens" even though it affects all tasks, not just new ones. Mislead, gaslight, misdirect is the name of the game

> I think thats a bad idea. It seems like expecting to have a prompt open like this, accumulating context puts a load on the back end Let's see what Boris Cherny himself and other Anthropic vibe-coders say about this: https://x.com/bcherny/status/2044847849662505288 Opus 4.7 loves doing complex, long-running tasks like deep research, refactoring code, building complex features, iterating until it hits a performance benchmark. https://x.com/bcherny/status/2007179858435281082 For very long-running tasks, I will either (a) prompt Claude to verify its work with a background agent when it's done... so Claude can cook without being blocked on me. https://x.com/trq212/status/2033097354560393727 Opus 4.6 is incredibly reliable at long running tasks https://x.com/trq212/status/2032518424375734646 The long context window means fewer compactions and longer-running sessions. I've found myself starting new sessions much less frequently with 1 million context. https://x.com/trq212/status/2032245598754324968 I used to be a religious /clear user, but doing much less now, imo 4.6 is quite good across long context windows --- I could go on

So is it for latency or is it for cost? Why did you lie 11 days ago, 3 days after the fix went in, about the cause of excess token usage?

You need to seriously look at your corporate communications and hire some adults to standarise your messaging, comms and signals. The volatility behind your doors is obvious to us and you'd impress us much more if you slowed down, took a moment to think about your customers and sent a consistent message. You lost huge trust with the A/B sham test. You lost trust with enshittification of the tokenizer on 4.6 to 4.7. Why not just say "hey, due to huge input prices in energy, GPU demand and compute constraints we've had to increase Pro from $20 to $30." You might lose 5% of customers. But the shady A/B thing and dodgy tokenizer increasing burn rate tells everyone inc. enterprise that you don't care about honesty and integrity in your product. I hope this feedback helps because you still stand to make an awesome product. Just show a little more professionalism.

I agree that it’s plausible, and I hope they learn. But trust is earned, and Anthropic’s public responses this past month were dismissive and unhelpful. Every one of these changes had the same goal: trading the intelligence users rely on for cheaper or faster outputs. Users adapt to how a model behaves, so sudden shifts without transparency are disorienting. The timing also undercuts their narrative. The fixes landed right before another change with the same underlying intent rolled out. That looks more like they were just reacting to experiments rather than understanding the underlying user pain. When people pay hundreds or thousands a month, they expect reliability and clear communication, ideally opt-in. Competitors are right there, and unreliability pushes users straight to them. All of this points to their priorities not being aligned with their users’.

The explanations are all fine. But they come after the team gaslit everyone, telling us it was a skill issue.

Some of the flak is that issues are often only acknowledged once a fix is in place, and the partial fixes are presented as if they solve the whole problem. The near-instant transition from "there is no problem" to "we already fixed the problem so stop complaining" is basically gaslighting. (Admittedly the second sentiment comes more from the community, but they get that attitude after taking the "we fixed all the problems" posts at face value.)

And they are often dismissed at first as perception/subjective bias, getting used to models being good and having higher expectations due to that, etc. users are blamed a lot before they are forced to admit that there is an actual problem.

They gaslit people for months saying it wasn't an issue publicly. That's the reason for the flak

And still are gaslighting: We take reports about degradation very seriously. We never intentionally degrade our models [...] On March 4, we changed Claude Code's default reasoning effort from high to medium Anthropic is the best company of its kind, but that is badly worded PR.

To my eye, gaslighting is a serious accusation. Wikipedia's first line matches how I think of it: "Gaslighting is the manipulation of someone into questioning their perception of reality." Did I miss something? I'm only looking at primary sources to start. Not Reddit. Not The Register. Official company communications. Did Anthropic tell users i.e. "you are wrong, your experience is not worse."? If so, that would reach the bar of gaslighting, as I understand it (and I'm not alone). If you have a different understanding, please share what it is so I understand what you mean.

It seems to me you dropped the "gaslighting" claim without owning it. I personally find this frustrating. I prefer when people own up to their mistakes. Like many people, to me, "gaslighting" is just not a term you throw around lightly. Then you shifted to "cop out". (This feels like the motte and bailey.) But I don't think "cop out" is a phrase that works either... Some terms:... The model is the thing that runs inference. Claude Code is not a model, it is harness. To summarize Anthropic's recent retrospective, their technical mistakes were about the harness. I'm not here to 'defend' Anthropic's mistakes. They messed up technically. And their communication could have been better. But they didn't gaslight. And on balance, I don't see net evidence that they've "copped out" (by which I mean mischaracterized what happened). I see more evidence of the opposite. I could be wrong about any of this, but I'm here to talk about it in the clearest, best way I can. If anyone wants to point to primary sources, I'll read them. I want more people to actually spend a few minutes and actually give the explanation offered by Anthropic a try. What if isolating the problems was hard to figure out? We all know hindsight is 20/20 and yet people still armchair quarterback. At the risk of sounding preachy, I'm here to say "people, we need to do better". Hacker News is a special place, but we lose it a little bit every time we don't in a quality effort.

Fair enough. If the comments in question were still editable, I would be happy to replace 'gaslighting' with 'being a bit slippery' or something less controversial. No worries about 'sounding preachy' ; it's a good thing people want to uphold the sobriety that makes HN special.

I know some people use the word "gaslighting" in connection with Anthropic. I've read some of those threads here, and some on Reddit, but I don't put much stock in them. To step back, hopefully reasonable people can start here: 1. Degraded service sucks. 2. Anthropic not saying i.e. "we're not seeing it" sucks. 3. Not getting a fix when you want it sucks. Try to understand what I mean when I say none of the above meet the following sense of gaslighting: "Gaslighting is the manipulation of someone into questioning their perception of reality." Emphasis on understand what I mean . This says it well: [1]. If you can point me to an official communication from Anthropic where they say "User <so and so> is not actually seeing degraded performance" when Anthropic knows otherwise that would clearly be gaslighting -- intent matters by my book. But if their instrumentation was bad and they were genuinely reporting what they could see, that doesn't cross into gaslighting by my book. But I have a tendency to think carefully about ethical definitions. Some people just grab a word off the shelf with a negative valence and run with it: I don't put much stock in what those people say. Words are cheap. Good ethical reasoning is hard and valuable. It's fine if you have a different definition of "gaslighting". Just remember that some of us have been actually gaslight by people , so we prefer to save the word for situations where the original definition applies. People like us are not opposed to being disappointed, upset, or angry at Anthropic, but we have certain epistemic standards that we don't toss out when an important tool fails to meet our expectations and the company behind it doesn't recognize it soon enough. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/tep32v/can...

I’ve never been one to complain about new models, and also didn’t experience most of the issues folks were citing about Claude Code over the last couple months. I’ve been using it since release, happy with almost each new update. Until Opus 4.7 - this is the first time I rolled back to a previous model. Personality-wise it’s the worst of AI, “it’s not x, it’s y”, strong short sentences, in general a bulshitty vibe, also gaslighting me that it fixed something even though it didn’t actually check. I’m not sure what’s up, maybe it’s tuned for harnesses like Claude Design (which is great btw) where there’s an independent judge to check it, but for now, Opus 4.6 it is.

have you perhaps installed Gaslighting instead of Gastown?

> Instead of fixing the UI they lowered the default reasoning effort parameter from high to medium? And they "traced this back" because they "take reports about degradation very seriously"? Extremely hard to give them the benefit of doubt here. They had droves of Claude devs vehemently defending and gaslighting users when this started happening

Glad there is finally some ownership. It is a pity that this was mostly because AMD embarrassed them on GitHub. Users have been reporting these issues for weeks, but were mostly ignored.

> 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 sounds fishy. It's easy to show users that Claude is making progress by either printing the reasoning tokens or printing some kind of progress report. Besides, "very long" is such a weasel phrase.

1. They changed the default in March from high to medium, however Claude Code still showed high (took 1 month 3 days to notice and remediate) 2. Old sessions had the thinking tokens stripped, resuming the session made Claude stupid (took 15 days to notice and remediate) 3. System prompt to make Claude less verbose reducing coding quality (4 days - better) All this to say... the experience of suspecting a model is getting worse while Anthropic publicly gaslights their user-base: "we never degrade model performance" is frustrating. Yes, models are complex and deploying them at scale given their usage uptick is hard. It's clear they are playing with too many independent variables simultaneously. However you are obligated to communicate honestly to your users to match expectations. Am I being A/B tested? When was the date of the last system prompt change? I don't need to know what changed, just that it did, etc. Doing this proactively would certainly match expectations for a fast-moving product like this.

Are you saying dropping cache after 1 hour is not intentionally degrading performance?

> Anthropic publicly gaslights their user-base: "we never degrade model performance" is frustrating. They're not gaslighting anyone here: they're very clear that the model itself, as in Opus 4.7, was not degraded in any way (i.e. if you take them at their word, they do not drop to lower quantisations of Claude during peak load). However, the infrastructure around it - Claude Code, etc - is very much subject to change, and I agree that they should manage these changes better and ensure that they are well-communicated.

Hi Boris, random observer here. Would you consider apologizing to the community for mistakenly closing tickets related to this and then wrongly keeping them closed when, internally, you realized they were legitimate? I think an apology for that incident would go a long way.

not many would believe in the sincerity of it anyway.

So we weren't going mad then!

My takeaway is that they knew they were changing a bunch of stuff while their reps were gaslighting us in the comments here. Why should we ever trust what they say again out trust that they won’t be rug-pulling again once this blows over?

Boris gaslighted us with all the quality related incidents for weeks not acknowledging these problems.

I agree but one can admit their situation instead of outrightly rejecting the claims. My own mistake is to have become so hopelessly dependent on them.

Gaslit for months, only to acknowledge.

So it turns out Anthropic was gaslighting everyone on twitter about this then? Swearing that nothing had changed and people were imagining the models got worse?

> they were challenging to distinguish from normal variation in user feedback at first translation: we ignored this and our various vibe coders were busy gaslighting everyone saying this could not be happening

Honestly, it’s kind of sad that Anthropic is winning this AI race. They are the most anti–open source company, and we should try to avoid them as much as possible. They are all doing it because OpenAI is snatching their customers. And their employees have been gaslighting people [1] for ages. I hope open-source models will provide fierce competition so we do not have to rely on an Anthropic monopoly. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/claude/comments/1satc4f/the_biggest...