With 4.8 Claude has begun refusing to ground, leaking destabilizing injections into the web interface (in XML for some reason), and being generally argumentative.

By arguing he means trying to get a result that 4.6 just did and it was fun. You have to laboriously re-align 4.8 over incredibly dumb shit, especially if you're working on AI. And it's not meaningfully better at anything, the distribution is perturbed but net , net it's just shrinkflation.

It's basically identical to when GPT 5.1 went full corpo shill, something about the RLHF gradient necessary to do whatever IPO adjacent manipulation they need makes these things nasty and argumentative in general.