Summarizer

How do you do "due diligence" on an API that frequently makes undocumented changes and only publishes acknowledgement of change after users complain? You're also talking about internal technical implementations of a chat bot. 99.99% of users won't even understand the words that are being used.

> users should be curious and actively attempting to understand how it works Have you ever talked with users? > this is an endless job Indeed. If we spend all our time learning what changed with all our tooling when it changes without proper documentation then we spend all our working lives keeping up instead of doing our actual jobs.

These controversies erupt regularly, and I hope that you will see a common thing with most of them: you make a decision for your users without informing them. Please fight this hubris. Your users matter. Many of us use your tools for everyday work and do not appreciate having the rug pulled from under them on a regular basis, much less so in an underhanded and undisclosed way. I don't mind the bugs, these will happen. What I do not appreciate is secretly changing things that are likely to decrease performance.

A company that needs to anchor every single thing with the users will create a stale product.

That is not what I wrote. The phrases "without informing them", "in an underhanded and undisclosed way" and "secretly changing things" were important. I'm all for product evolution, but users should be informed when the product is changed, especially when the change can be for the worse (like dumbing down the model).

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.

I think it’s crazy that they do this, especially without any notice. I would not have renewed my subscription if I knew that they started doing this. Especially in the analysis part of my work I don‘t care about the actual text output itself most of the time but try to make the model „understand“ the topic. In the first phase the actual text output itself is worthless it just serves as an indicator that the context was processed correctly and the future actual analysis work can depend on it. And they‘re… just throwing most the relevant stuff out all out without any notice when I resume my session after a few days? This is insane, Claude literally became useless to me and I didn’t even know it until now, wasting a lot of my time building up good session context. There would be nothing lost if they said „If you click yes, we will prune your old thinking making Claude faster and saving you tons of tokens“. Most people would say yes probably so why not ask them… make it an env variable (that is announced not a secretly introduced one to opt out of something new!) or at least write it in a change log if they really don’t want to allow people to use it like before, so there‘d be chance to cancel the subscription in time instead of wasting tons of time on work patterns that not longer work

Pointing at their terms of service will definitely be the instantly summoned defense (as would most modern companies) but the fact that SaaS can so suddenly shift the quality of product being delivered for their subscription without clear notification or explicitly re-enrollment is definitely a legal oversight right now and Italy actually did recently clamp down on Netflix doing this[1]. It's hard to define what user expectations of a continuous product are and how companies may have violated it - and for a long time social constructs kept this pretty in check. As obviously inactive and forgotten about subscriptions have become a more significant revenue source for services that agreement has been eroded, though, and the legal system has yet to catch up. 1. Specifically, this suite was about price increases without clear consideration for both parties - but the same justifications apply to service restrictions without corresponding price decreases. https://fortune.com/2026/04/20/italian-court-netflix-refunds...

This violates the principle of least surprise, with nothing to indicate Claude got lobotomized while it napped when so many use prior sessions as "primed context" (even if people don't know that's what they were doing or know why it works). The purpose of spending 10 to 50 prompts getting Claude to fill the context for you is it effectively "fine tunes" that session into a place your work product or questions are handled well. // If this notion of sufficient context as fine tune seems surprising, the research is out there.) Approaches tried need to deal with both of these: 1) Silent context degradation breaks the Pro-tool contract. I pay compute so I don't pay in my time; if you want to surface the cost, surface it (UI + price tag or choice), don't silently erode quality of outcomes. 2) The workaround (external context files re-primed on return) eats the exact same cache miss, so the "savings" are illusory — you just pushed the cost onto the user's time. If my own time's cheap enough that's the right trade off, I shouldn't be using your machine.

Really good to know. That should have made it into their update letter in point (2). Empowering the user to choose is the right call.

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"

So you made this change completely invisible to the user, without the user being able to choose between the two behaviors, and without even documenting it in the (extremely verbose) changelog [1]? I can't find it, the Docs Assistant can't find it (well, it "I found it!" three times being fed your reply with a non-matching item). I frequently debug issues while keeping my carefully curated but long context active for days. Losing potentially very important context while in the middle of a debugging session resulting in less optimal answers, is costing me a lot more money than the cache misses would. In my eyes, Claude Code is mainly a context management tool . I build a foundation of apparent understanding of the problem domain, and then try to work towards a solution in a dialogue. Now you tell me Anthrophic has been silently breaking down that foundation without telling me, wasting potentially hours of my time. It's a clear reminder that these closed-source harnesses cannot be trusted (now or in the future), and I should find proper alternatives for Claude Code as soon as possible. [1] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/changelog

For idle sessions I would MUCH rather pay the cost in tokens than reduced quality. Frankly, it's shocking to me that you would make that trade-off for users without their knowledge or consent.

The entire reason I keep a long-lived session around is because the context is hard-won — in term of tokens and my time. Silently degrading intelligence ought to be something you never do, but especially not for use-cases like this. I’m looking back at my past few weeks of work and realizing that these few regressions literally wasted 10s of hours of my time, and hundreds of dollars in extra usage fees. I ran out of my entire weekly quota four days ago, and had to pause the personal project I was working on. I was running the exact same pipeline I’ve run repeatedly before, on the same models, and yet this time I somehow ate a week’s worth of quota in less than 24h. I spent $400 just to finish the pipeline pass that got stuck halfway through. I’m sorry to be harsh, but your engineering culture must change. There are some types of software you can yolo. This isn’t one of them. The downstream cost of stupid mistakes is way, way too high, and far too many entirely avoidable bugs — and poor design choices — are shipping to customers way too often.

> The entire reason I keep a long-lived session around is because the context is hard-won — in term of tokens and my time. Silently degrading intelligence ought to be something you never do, but especially not for use-cases like this. Hard agree, would like to see a response to this.

Is adding JPEG compression to your software “intentional degradation” of the software? I wouldn't say providing a selectable option to use a faster, cheaper version of something qualifies as “degradation”. It is certainly true that they did a poor job communicating this change to users (I did not know that the default was “high” before they introduced it, I assumed they had added an effort level both above and below whatever the only effort choice was there before). On the other hand, I was using Claude Code a fair bit on “medium” during that time period and it seemed to be performing just fine for me (and saving usage/time over “high”), so it doesn't seem clear that that was the wrong default, if only it had been explained better.

yes. if instagram started performing intensive JPEG compression that made photos choppy and unpleasant, I would consider that an intentional degredation of the software.

Is default enabling JPEG compression to your software's output because the compression saves you money “intentional degradation” of the software? I would say it does, and I'd loathe to use anything made by people who'd couch that change to defaults as "providing a selectable option to use a faster, cheaper version". Yuck.

They lost me a little before then - Claude Code's regressions were so very obvious and there's no sign they've learned their lesson in this article or in the comments of those who work on Claude Code on HN. They'll continue to tweak and generally mess around with a product people are using, altering the behaviour without notice in ways that can severely impact use, for months! GPT5.4 has been remarkably consistent and capable, as a replacement. I've cancelled my max plan.

I also think some of this stems from the default 1m context window. Performance starts to degrade when context size increases, and each token over (i think the level is) 400k counts more towards your usage limit. Defaulting to 1m context size, if people arent carefully managing context (which they shouldnt ever have to in an ideal world), they would notice somewhat degraded performance and increased token usage regardless.

>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 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.

Hey, Boris from the team here. We did both -- we did a number of UI iterations (eg. improving thinking loading states, making it more clear how many tokens are being downloaded, etc.). But we also reduced the default effort level after evals and dogfooding. The latter was not the right decision, so we rolled it back after finding that UX iterations were insufficient (people didn't understand to use /effort to increase intelligence, and often stuck with the default -- we should have anticipated this).

You didn’t anticipate most people stick with defaults?

We anticipated the default would be the best option for most people. We were wrong, so we reverted the default.

The A/B testing is by far the most objectionable thing from them so far in my opinion, if only because of how terrible it would be for something like that to be standard for subscriptions. I'd argue that it's not even A/B testing of pricing but silently giving a subset of users an entirely different product than they signed up for; it would be like if 2% of Netflix customers had full-screen ads pop up and cover the videos randomly throughout a show. Historically the only thing stopping companies from extraordinarily user-hostile decisions has been public outcry, but limiting it to a small subset of users seems like it's intentionally designed to try to limit the PR consequences.

This black box approach that large frontier labs have adopted is going to drive people away. To change fundamental behavior like this without notifying them, and only retroactively explaining what happened, is the reason they will move to self-hosting their own models. You can't build pipelines, workflows and products on a base that is just randomly shifting beneath you.

Last I tried 4.7, it was bad. Like ChatGPT bad: changed stuff it wasn’t supposed to, hallucinated code, forgot information, missed simple things, didn’t catch mistakes. And it burned through tokens like crazy. I’ll stay on 4.6 for awhile. Seems to be better. What’s frustrating, though you cannot rely on these tools. They are constantly tinkering and changing with things and there’s no option to opt out.

> they control the system prompt They control the default system prompt. You can change it if you want to. > They can pick the default reasoning effort Don't see how it's an obstacle in allowing third party wrappers. > They can decide what to keep and what to throw out That's actually a good point. However I still don't think it's an obstacle. If third party wrappers were bad, people simply wouldn't be using them.

Evidently, all these things you just dismissed matter, else all the changes I quoted from the original post wouldn’t have affected anyone, or half as many people, or half as much. Anthropic wouldn’t have had any complaints to investigate, the article promoting this entire thread wouldn’t exist, and we wouldn’t be having this very conversation. Defaults matter . A large share of people never change them (status quo bias, psychological inertia). Having control over them (and usage quotas) means Anthropic can control and fine-tune what this fixed subscription costs them. And evidently (re, the original article), they tried to do so.

> Defaults matter. A large share of people never change them (status quo bias, psychological inertia). Having control over them (and usage quotas) means Anthropic can control and fine-tune what this fixed subscription costs them. Allowing third party wrappers doesn't mean Claude Code would cease to exist. The opposite actually, Claude Code would be the default . People dissatisfied with Code would simply use other wrappers. I call it a win-win. Don't see how Anthropic would be on a lose here, they would still retain the ability to control the defaults.

The Claude Code experience is still pretty bad after upgrading. I often see Error: claude-opus-4-7[1m] is temporarily unavailable, so auto mode cannot determine the safety of Bash right now. Wait briefly and then try this action again. If it keeps failing, continue with other tasks that don't require this action and come back to it later. Note: reading files, searching code, and other read-only operations do not require the classifier and can still be used. The only solution is to switch out of auto mode, which now seems to be the default every time I exit plan mode. Very annoying.

> 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.

Sure, but it gives the impression of degraded model performance. Especially when the interface is still saying the model is operating on "high", the same as it did yesterday, yet it is in "medium" -- it just looks like the model got hobbled.

I don't think Anthropic has to inform their customers of every change they make, but they should have with this one.

How about just not change the harness abruptly in the first place? Make new system prompt changes "experimental" first so you can gather feedback.

They feel they're in a position to make important trade-off decisions on behalf of the user. "It's just slightly worse, I'll sneak this change in" is not something to be tolerated, whether it actually turns out to be much worse or not. Their adaptive thinking mess has caused a ton of work for me. I know a lot of people are saying Codex is actually better now. I don't agree but I'm switching to it because it's much more reliable.

Now we know why Anthropic banned the use of subscriptions with other agent harnesses: they partially rely on the Claude Code cli to control token usage through various settings. And it also tells us why we shouldn’t use their harness anyway: they constantly fiddle with it in ways that can seriously impact outcomes without even a warning.

If you think that you can just silently modify the model without any announcements and only react when it doesn't go through unnoticed, then be 100% sure that your clients will check every possible alternative and will leave you as soon as they find anything similar in quality (and no, not a degraded one).