alt Hacker News(Being true to the HN guidelines, I’ve used the title exactly as seen on the GitHub issue)
I was wondering if anyone else is also experiencing this? I have personally found that I have to add more and more CLAUDE.md guide rails, and my CLAUDE.md files have been exploding since around mid-March, to the point where I actually started looking for information online and for other people collaborating my personal observations.
This GH issue report sounds very plausible, but as with anything AI-generated (the issue itself appears to be largely AI assisted) it’s kind of hard to know for sure if it is accurate or completely made up. _Correlation does not imply causation_ and all that. Speaking personally, findings match my own circumstances where I’ve seen noticeable degradation in Opus outputs and thinking.
EDIT: The Claude Code Opus 4.6 Performance Tracker[1] is reporting Nominal.
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If that tracker is using paid tokens, as opposed to the regular subscription, then there's no financial incentive for Antrophic to degrade their thinking, so their benchmark likely would not be affected by the cost-cutting measures that regular users face.
Also, it's probably very easy to spot such benchmarks and lock-in full thinking just for them. Some ISPs do the same where your internet speed magically resets to normal as soon as you open speedtest.net ...
I haven't noticed any changes but my stuff isn't that complex. People are saying they quantized Opus because they're training the next model. No idea if that's true... It's certainly impacting my decision to upgrade to Max though. I don't want to pay for Opus and get an inferior version.
I've seen a lot of the issues mentioned in the issue. The attempts to end the session early are particularly annoying. We spend a while iterating on a plan and after every phase of implementation I get some variation of "That's a lot of work for today, should we wrap up?" like it's actively trying to drive sessions to a close. I wouldn't say it's useless for these tasks. But it's requiring more effort and guidance than it used to. It's also more likely to jump right into changes from a question I ask rather than addressing the question which is very annoying.
Cannot say I've noticed, but I run virtually everything through plan mode and a few back and forth rounds of that for anything moderately complex, so that could be helping.
What I've noticed is that whenever Claude says something like "the simplest fix is..." it's usually suggesting some horrible hack. And whenever I see that I go straight to the code it wants to write and challenge it.