> That’s it. “Read 3 files.” Which files? Doesn’t matter. “Searched for 1 pattern.” What pattern? Who cares.
Product manager here. Cynically, this is classic product management: simplify and remove useful information under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism if you're more overt about your influences.
It's something that as an industry we should be over by now.
It requires deep understanding of customer usage in order not to make this mistake. It is _really easy_ to think you are making improvements by hiding information if you do not understand why that information is perceived as valuable. Many people have been taught that streamlining and removal is positive. It's even easier if you have non-expert users getting attention. All of us here at HN will have seen UIs where this has occurred.
Product management might be the worst meme in the industry. Hire people who have never used the product and don't think like or accurately represent our users, then let them allocate engineering resources and gate what ships. What could go wrong?
It should be a fad gone by at this point, but people never learn. Here's what to do instead: Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times a month. Just saved you thousands or millions in salaries, and you have a better chance of making things that your users actually want.
I have worked with some really really good product managers.
But not lately. Lately it’s been people who have very little relevant domain expertise, zero interest in putting in the time to develop said expertise beyond just cataloguing and regurgitating feedback from the customers they like most on a personal level, and seem to mostly have only been selected for the position because they are really good at office politics.
But I think it’s not entirely their fault. What I’ve also noticed is that, when I was on teams with really elective product managers, we also had a full time project manager. That possibly freed up a lot of the product manager’s time. One person to be good at the tactical so the other can be good at the strategic.
Since project managers have become passé, though, I think the product managers are just stretched too thin. Which sets up bad incentive structures: it’s impossible to actually do the job well anymore, so of course the only ones who survive are the office politicians who are really good at gladhanding the right people and shifting blame when things don’t go well.
There are individuals who have good taste for products in certain domains. Their own preferences are an accurate approximation for those of the users. Those people might add value when they are given control of the product.
That good taste doesn't translate between domains very often. Good taste for developer tools doesn't mean good taste for a video game inventory screen. And that's the crux of the problem. There is a segment of the labor market calling themselves "product manager" who act like good taste is domain independent, and spread lies about their importance to the success of every business. What's worse is that otherwise smart people (founders, executives) fall for it because they think hiring them is what they are supposed to do.
Over time, as more and more people realized that PM is a side door into big companies with lots of money, "Product Manager" became an imposter role like "Scrum Master". Now product orgs are pretty much synonymous with incompetence.
The proportion of "really good" PMs on product engineering teams has to be less than 0.1%.
The counter to that is "the proportion of 'really good engineers' to product engineering teams has got to be in the single digits," and I would agree with that, as well.
The problem is what is incentivized to be built - most teams are working on "number go up?" revenue or engagement as a proxy to revenue "problems." Not "is this a good product that people actively enjoy using?" problems.
Just your typical late-stage capitalism shit.
This sentiment is going exactly against the trend right now. AI coding is making technically minded product manager's MORE powerful not less. When/if coding just because your ability to accurately describe what you want to build, the people yielding this skill are the ones who understand customer requirements, not the opposite.
> Find your most socially competent engineer,
These usually get promoted to product management anyway, so this isn't a new thought.
> Hire people who have never used the product and don't think like or accurately represent our users
In most of my engineering jobs, the Product Managers were much closer to our users than the engineers.
Good product managers are very valuable. There are a lot of bad ones carrying the product manager title because it was viewed as the easy way to get a job in tech without having to know how to program, but smart companies are getting better at filtering them out.
> Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times a month
Every single time I've seen this tried, it turns into a situation where one or two highly vocal customers capture the engineering team's direction and steer the product toward their personal needs. It's the same thing that happens when the sales people start feeding requests from their customers into the roadmap.
Product managers are fooling themselves if they think they can "improve the user experience" for developers -- developers can't agree on the simplest things such as key bindings (vim, emacs) or identation (tabs, spaces).
Make the application configurable. Developers like to tinker with their tools.
This also shifts over time - new users, especially people sophisticated in the field your tool is addressing, need to be convinced the product is doing what they believe it should be doing, and want to see more output from it. They may become comfortable with the product over time and move further up the trust/abstraction ladder, but at the beginning, verbose output is a trust-building mechanism.
> Many people have been taught that streamlining and removal is positive.
Over the past ten years or so the increasing de-featuring of software under the guise of 'simplification' has become a critical issue for power users. For any GUI apps which have a mixed base of consumer and power users, I mostly don't update them anymore because they're as likely to get net worse vs better.
It's weird that companies like MSFT seem puzzled why so many users refuse to update Windows or Office to major new feature versions.
What in Office has been a degradation? Just curious. I mostly agree about Windows.
Or is this PM and executive management aiming for the no and low code users? That would fit the zeitgeist especially in the tech C level and their sales pitch to non-tech C levels.
Well, some who start as developers don't truly see users as stakeholders, sometimes not even remotely, and they often aren't assisted to change that view. While it feels astonishing in direct encounters, on the sliding scale of "are you a person that sees other people as stakeholders in general", many developers can be close to the "no" end of that scale. So not necessarily an institutional view.
I think it might also come down to UI churn. Sprint over? What to do next? Everything is always moving because people have nothing meaningful to do.
> Cynically, this is classic product management: simplify and remove useful information under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism if you're more overt about your influences.
Cynically, it's a vibe coded mess and the "programmers" at Anthropic can't figure out how to put it back.
More cynically, Anthropic management is trying to hide anything that people could map to token count (aka money) so that they can start jiggling the usage numbers to extract more money from us.
Fairly cynical indeed. Though I must admit that Anthropic's software - not the models, the software they build - seems to be generally plagued by quality issues. Even the dashboard is _somehow_ broken most of the time, at least whenever I try to do something.
Product management --and managers-- can be, shall we say, interesting.
I was recently involved with a company that wanted us to develop a product that would be disruptive enough to enter an established market, make waves and shock it.
We did just that. We ran a deep survey of all competing products, bought a bunch of them, studied absolutely everything about them, how they were used and their users. Armed with that information, we produced a set of specifications and user experience requirements that far exceeded anything in the market.
We got green-lit to deliver a set of prototypes to present at a trade show. We did that.
The prototypes were presented and they truly blew everyone away. Blogs, vlogs, users, everyone absolutely loved what we created and the sense was that this was a winning product.
And then came reality. Neither the product manager nor the CTO (and we could add the CEO and CFO to the list) had enough understanding and experience in the domain to take the prototypes to market. It would easily have required a year or two of learning before they could function in that domain.
What did they do? They dumbed down the product specification to force it into what they understood and what engineering building blocks they already had. Square peg solidly and violently pounded into a round hole.
The outcome? Oh, they built a product alright. They sure did. And it flopped, horribly flopped, as soon as it was introduced and made available. Nobody wanted it. It was not competitive. It offered nothing disruptive. It was a bad clone of everything already occupying space in that ecosystem. Game over.
The point is: Technology companies are not immune to human failings, ego, protectionism/turf guarding, bad decisions, bad management, etc.
When someone says something like "I am not sure that's a good idea for a startup. There's competition." My first though is: Never assume that competitors know what they are doing, are capable and always make the right decisions without making mistakes. You don't always need a better product, you need better execution.
Replace the C levels with AI. The C suite is am impediment to innovation and progress. They are the office politics mentioned in this entire thread. The person with the vision and the strategy is a random person out there that doesn't even work for your company. Hell, you could have done it.
> The point is: Technology companies are not immune to human failings, ego, protectionism/turf guarding, bad decisions, bad management, etc.
They only accidentally succeed in spite of those things. They have those things more than existing businesses precisely because having too much money masks the pressures that would force solid execution and results. When you have 80% profit margins, you can show up drunk.
Also product manager here.
Not at all cynically, this is classic product management - simplify by removing information that is useful to some users but not others.
We shouldn't be over it by now. It's good to think carefully about how you're using space in your UI and what you're presenting to the user.
You're saying it's bad because they removed useful information, but then why isn't Anthropic's suggestion of using verbose mode a good solution? Presumably the answer is because in addition to containing useful information, it also clutters the UI with a bunch of information the user doesn't want.
Same thing's true here - there are people who want to see the level of detail that the author wants and others for whom it's not useful and just takes up space.
> It requires deep understanding of customer usage in order not to make this mistake.
It requires deep understanding of customer usage to know whether it's a mistake at all, though. Anthropic has a lot deeper understanding of the usage of Claude Code than you or I or the author. I can't say for sure that they're using that information well, but since you're a PM I have to imagine that there's been some time when you made a decision that some subset of users didn't like but was right for the product, because you had a better understanding of the full scope of usage by your entire userbase than they did. Why not at least entertain the idea that the same thing is true here?
Simplification can be good---but they've removed the wrong half here!
The notifications act as an overall progress bar and give you a general sense of what Claude Code is doing: is it looking in the relevant part of your codebase, or has it gotten distracted by some unused, vendored-in code?
"Read 2 files" is fine as a progress indicator but is too vague for anything else. "Read foo.cpp and bar.h" takes almost the same amount of visual space, but fulfills both purposes. You might want to fold long lists of files (5? 15?) but that seems like the perfect place for a user-settable option.
> "Read 2 files" is fine as a progress indicator but is too vague for anything else. "Read foo.cpp and bar.h" takes almost the same amount of visual space, but fulfills both purposes.
Now this is a good, thoughtful response! Totally agree that if you can convey more information using basically the same amount of space, that's likely a better solution regardless of who's using the product.
> It requires deep understanding of customer usage to know whether it's a mistake at all
Software developers like customizable tools.
That's why IDEs still have "vim keybindings" and many other options.
Your user is highly skilled - let him decide what he wants to see.
Then why is the suggestion to use verbose mode treated as another mistake?
The user is highly skilled; let them filter out what is important
This should be better than adding an indeterminate number of toggles and settings, no?
does claude code let me control whats output when?
verbose i think puts it on the TUI and i cant particularly grep or sed on the TUI
There are a lot of Claude Code users who aren't software developers. Maybe they've decided that group is the one they want to cater to? I recognize that won't be a popular decision with the HN crowd, but that doesn't mean it's the wrong one.
I fully agree with you on almost everything you wrote in this thread, but I’m not sure this is the right answer. I myself currently spend a lot of time with CC and belong to that group of developers who don’t care about this problem. It’s likely that I’m not alone. So it doesn’t have to be the least professional audience they serve with this update. It’s possible that Anthropic knows what are they doing (e.g. reducing level of detail to simplify task of finding something more important in the output) and it’s also possible that they are simply making stupid product decisions because they have a cowboy PM who attacks some OKR screaming yahoo. We don’t know. In the end having multiple verbosity levels configured with granularity similar to java loggers would be nice.
Oh totally - I'm definitely not saying that they made the decision to cater to non-dev users, just that it's a possibility. Totally agree with you that at the end of the day, we haven't the foggiest idea.
Yeah, I made a similar point about the tone of ChatGPT responses; to me, I can't imagine why someone would want less information when working and tuning an AI model. However, something tells me they actually have hard evidence that users respond better with less information regardless of what the loud minority say online, and are following that.
Developer> This is important information and most developers want to see it.
PM1> Looks like a PM who is out of touch with what the developers want. Easy mistake to make.
PM2> Anthropic knows better than this developer. The developer is probably wrong.
I don't know for sure what the best decision is here, I've barely used CC. Neither does PM1 nor PM2, but PM2 is being awfully dismissive of the opinion of a user in the target audience. PM1 is probably putting a bit too much weight on Developer's opinion, but I fully agree with "All of us... have seen UIs where this has occurred." Yes, we have. I personally greatly appreciate a PM who listens and responds quickly to negative feedback on changes like this, especially "streamlining" and "reducing clutter" type changes since they're so easy to get wrong (as PM1 says).
> It's good to think carefully about how you're using space in your UI and what you're presenting to the user.
I agree. It's also good to have the humility to know that your subjective opinion as someone not in the target audience even if you're designing the product is less informed in many ways than that of your users.
----
Personally, I get creeped out by how many things CC is doing and tokens it's burning in the background. It has a strong "trust me bro" vibe that I dislike. That's probably common to all agent systems; I haven't used enough to know.
> PM2> Anthropic knows better than this developer. The developer is probably wrong.
Nope! Not what I said. I specifically said that I don't know if Anthropic is using the information they have well. Please at least have the courtesy not to misrepresent what I'm saying. There's plenty of room to criticize without doing that.
> It's also good to have the humility to know that your subjective opinion as someone not in the target audience even if you're designing the product is less informed in many ways than that of your users.
Ah, but you don't know I'm not the target audience. Claude Code is increasingly seeing non-developer users, and perhaps Anthropic has made a strategic decision to make the product friendlier to them, because they see that as a larger userbase to target?
I agree that it's important to have humility. Here's mine: I don't know why Anthropic made this decision. I know they have much more information than me about the product usage, its roadmap and their overall business strategy.
I understand that you may not like what they're doing here and that the lack of information creeps you out. That's totally valid. My point isn't that you're wrong to have that opinion, it's that folks here are wrong to assume that Anthropic made this decision because they don't understand what they're doing.
> Personally, I get creeped out by how many things CC is doing and tokens it's burning in the background. It has a strong "trust me bro" vibe that I dislike.
100% this.
It might be convenient to hide information from non-technical users; but software engineers need to know what is happening. If it is not visible by default, it should be configurable via dotfiles.
I'm sure the goal is that reading files is something you debug, not monitor, like individual network requests in a browser.
They know what people type into their tools, but they don't know what in the output users read and focus on unless they're convening a user study or focus group.
I personally love that the model tells me what file it has read because I know whether or not it's headed in the generally right direction that I intended. Anthropic has no way of knowing I feel this way.
But you have no idea if they've convened user study or focus groups, right?
I'll just reiterate my initial point that the author of the post and the people commenting here have no idea what information Anthropic is working with. I'm not saying they've made the right decision, but I am saying that people ought to give them the slightest bit of credit here instead of treating them like idiots.
> You're saying it's bad because they removed useful information, but then why isn't Anthropic's suggestion of using verbose mode a good solution?
Because reading through hundreds of lines verbose output is not a solution to the problem of "I used to be able to see _at a glance_ what files were being touched and what search patterns were being used but now I can't".
Right, I understand why people prefer this. The point was that the post I was responding to was making pretty broad claims about how removing information is bad but then ignoring the fact that they in fact prefer a solution that removes a lot of information.
Product managers aren’t needed anymore.
First they came for the product managers, and I said nothing, because I was a coder, and we're invincible and can do everything and also deliver value unlike all those other slackers, so they'd never come for us.
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8477
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/15263
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/9099
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8371
It's very clear that Anthropic doesn't really want to expose the secret sauce to end users. I have to patch Claude every release to bring this functionality back.
I just assume that they realized that they can split the offering, and to charge for the top tier more. (Yes, even more.)
If Claude Code can replace an engineer, it should cost just a bit less than an engineer, not half as much.
But then you pay for the less outrageously subsidized rates of API instead of the a bit less incredibly generous prices of the subscription.
Its not subsidized, in fact, they probably have very healthy margins on Claude Code.
Why do you think that?
Remember there are no moats in this industry - if anything one company might have a 2 month lead, sometimes. We've also noticed that companies paying OpenAI may swiftly shift to paying Google or Anthropic in a heartbeat.
That means the pricing is going to be competitive. You may still get your wish though, but instead of the price of an engineer remaining the same, it will cut itself down by 95%.
I don't know about you, but I benefit so much from using Claude at work that I would gladly pay $80,000-$120,000 per year to keep using it.
Why would you gladly pay more than what it's worth? It's not an engineer you are hiring, it's AI. The whole point of it was to make intelligent workflows cheaper. If it's going to cost as much as an engineer, hire the engineer, at least you'd have an escape goat when things invariably go wrong.
> an escape goat
Autocorrect hall of famer, there.
Scapegoat, got it. Can't blame the autocorrect, I thought it was like that, which is a shame since I've been studying English my entire life as a second language.
At least that misunderstanding didn’t cause a nuclear accident: https://practical.engineering/blog/2025/4/15/when-kitty-litt...
I agree with you, I was just joking.
Oh now I see... Joke's on me then I guess :D
It wasn't clear to me that this was a joke either. I assume the same for others since the post is grayed out.
What do you use it for, do you have example? For you to be ok with paying 80k to 120k I'm guessing its making you 375-450k a year?
I'm joking, my point is that it's already quite expensive and I don't think it's making anyone money.
that means customers will pay minimum 2x that much I think
Oh come on. That pays for more than 10 fte in some countries
I made this joke with "$1,500-$2000 per month" last night and everyone thought I was serious
I know people who burned several hundreds a day and still were finding it worth it.
Were they actually making money though? A lot of the people on the forefront of this AI stuff seem like cult leaders and crackheads to me.
I'd pay up to $1000 pretty easily just based off the time it saves me personally from a lot of grindy type work which frees me up for more high value stuff.
It's not 10x by any means but it doesn't need to be at most dev salaries to pay for itself. 1.5x alone is probably enough of an improvement for most >jr developers for a company to justify $1000/month.
I suppose if your area of responsibility wasn't very broad the value would decrease pretty quickly so maybe less value for people at very large companies?
I can see $200 but $1,000 per month seems crazy to me.
Using Claude Code for one year is worth the same as a used sedan (I.E., ~$12,000) to you?
You could be investing that money!
Yes, easily. Paying for Claude would be investing that money. Assuming 10% return which would be great I'd make an extra $1200 a year investing it. I'm pretty sure over the course of a year of not having to spend time doing low value or repetitive work I can increase productivity enough to more than cover the $13k difference. Developer work scales really well so removing a bunch of the low end and freeing up time for the more difficult problems is going to return a lot of value.
I would probably pay $2000 a month if I had to - it's a small fraction of my salary, and the productivity boost is worth it.
It's *worth it* when you're salaried? Compared to investing the money? Do you plan to land a very-high-paying executive role years down the line? Are you already extremely highly paid? Did Claude legitimately 10x your productivity?
edit: Fuck I'm getting trolled
I'm serious - the productivity boost I'm getting from using AI models is so significant, that it's absolutely worth paying even 2k/month. It saves me a lot of time, and makes me deliver new features much faster (making me look better for my employer) - both of which would justify spending a small fraction of my own money. I don't have to, because my employer pays for it, but as I said, if I had to, I would pay.
I am not paying this myself, but the place I work at is definitely paying around 2k a month for my Claude Code usage. I pay 2 x 200, for my personal projects.
I think personal subs are subsidized while corporate ones definitely not. I have CC for my personal projects running 16h a day with multiple instances, but work CC still racks way higher bills with less usage. If I had to guess my work CC is using 4x as little for 5x the cost so at least 20x difference.
I am not going to say it has 10xed or whatever with my productivity, but I would have never ever in that timeframe built all those things that I have now.
Patching's not long for this world; Claude Code has moved to binary releases. Soon, the NPM release will just be a thin wrapper around the binary.
> to end users
To other actors who want to train a distilled version of Claude, more likely.
If they cared about that, they wouldn't expose the thinking blocks to the end-user client in the first place; they'd have the user-side context store hashes to the blocks (stored server-side) instead.
To be fair they have like 10,000 open issues / spam issues, it's probably insane out there for them to filter all of it haha
GitHub Issues as a customer support funnel is horrible. It's easy for them, but it hides all the important bugs and only surfaces "wanted features" that are thumbs-up'd alot. So you see "Highlight text X" as the top requested feature; meanwhile, 10% of users experience a critical bug, but they don't all find "the github issue" one user poorly wrote about it, so it has like 7 upvotes.
GitHub Codespaces has a critical bug that makes the copilot terminal integration unusable after 1 prompt, but the company has no idea, because there is no clear way to report it from the product, no customer support funnel, etc. There's 10 upvotes on a poorly-written sorta-related GH issue and no company response. People are paying for this feature and it's just broken.
Humans don't look at these anymore, Claude itself does. They've even said so.
I think it's more classic enshittification. Currently, as a percentage, still not many devs use it. In a few months or 1-2 years all these products will start to cater to the median developer and start to get dumbed down.
Honestly, just use OpenCode. It works with Claude Code Max, and the TUI is 100x better. The only thing that sucks is Compaction.
How much longer is Anthropic going to allow OpenCode to use Pro/Max subscriptions? Yes, it's technically possible, but it's against Anthropic's ToS. [1]
1: https://blog.devgenius.io/you-might-be-breaking-claudes-tos-...
Consider switching to an OpenAI subscription, which allows OpenCode use.
Doesn’t Claude code have an agents sdk that officially allows you to use the good parts?
Yes but you can't use a subscription with that
There are also Azure versions of Opus
Nope, OpenCode is nowhere near Claude Code.
It's amazing how much other agentic tools suck in comparison to Claude Code. I'd love to have a proper alternative. But they all suck. I keep trying them every few months and keep running back to Claude Code.
Just yesterday I installed Cursor and Codex, and removed both after a few hours.
Cursor disrespected my setting to ask before editing files. Codex renamed my tabs after I had named them. It also went ahead and edited a bunch of my files after a fresh install without asking me. The heck, the default behavior should have been to seek permission at least the first time.
OpenCode does not allow me to scrollback and edit a prior prompt for reuse. It also keeps throwing up all kinds of weird errors, especially when I'm trying to use free or lower cost models.
Gemini CLI reads strange Python files when I'm working on a Node.js project, what the heck. It also never fixed the diff display issues in the terminal; It's always so difficult for me to actually see what edits it is actually trying to make before it makes it. It also frequently throws random internal errors.
At this point, I'm not sure we'll be seeing a proper competitor to Claude Code anytime soon.
Hmmm, I used OpenCode for awhile and didn't have this experience. I felt like OpenCode was the better experience.
5.3 Codex on cursor is better than Claude code
Not in my (limited) experience. I gave CC and codex detailed instructions for reworking a UI, and codex did a much worse job and took 5x as long to finish.
I have been unable to use OpenCode with my Claude Max subscription. It worked for awhile, but then it seems like Anthropic started blocking it.
What’s 100x better about the TUI?
Claude's brand is sliding dangerously close to "the Microsoft of AI."
DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS
I write mainly out of the hope that some Anthropic employees read this: you need an internal crusade to fight these impulses. Take the high road in the short-term and you may avoid being disrupted in the long-term. It's a culture issue.
Probably your strongest tool is specifically educating people about the history. Microsoft in the late 90s and early 00s was completely dominant, but from today's perspective it's very clear: they made some fundamental choices that didn't age well. As a result, DX on Windows is still not great, even if Visual Studio has the best features, and people with taste by and large prefer Linux.
Apple made an extremely strategic choice: rebuild the OS around BSD, which set them up to align with Linux (the language of servers). The question is: why? Go find out.
The difference is a matter of sensibility, and a matter of allowing that sensibility to exist and flourish in the business.
The thing that annoys me most of all is they block me from using OpenCode with my Claude Max plan. I find the OpenCode UI to be meaningfully better than Claude Code's, so this is really annoying.
Huh? Why wouldn’t developers (who probably have stock options in Claude) try to prevent becoming 'the Microsoft of AI'? That's probably what they are actively trying to do.
Your incentive is to stay in the job so you can vest. Fighting the slide may just make enemies
I’m a heavy Claude code user and it’s pretty clear they’re starting to bend under their vibe coding. Each Claude code update breaks a ton of stuff, has perf issues, etc.
And then this. They want to own your dev workflow and for some reason believe Claude code is special enough to be closed source. The react TUI is kinda a nightmare to deal with I bet.
I will say, very happy with the improvements made to Codex 5.3. I’ve been spending A LOT more time with codex and the entire agent toolchain is OSS.
Not sure what anthropic’s plan is, but I haven’t been a fan of their moves in the past month and a half.
Same, codex 5.3 was able to solve a problem that I personally was stuck on even with help from Claude for the last 2 weeks.
I switched to Codex 5.3 too, it's cheaper also anyway and as dumb as it sounds, Scam Altman is actually the less annoying CEO compared to Amodei which is kind of an achievement. Amodei really looking more and more like some huckster giving these idiotic predictions to the press.
There are a lot of non developer claude code users these days. The hype about vibe coding lets everyone think they can now be an engineer. Problem is if anthropic caters to that crowd the devs that are using it to do somewhat serious engineering tasks and don't believe in the "run an army of parallel agents and pray" methodology are being alienated.
Maybe Claude Code web or desktop could be targeted to these new vibe coders instead? These folks often don't know how simple bash commands work so the terminal is the wrong UX anyway. Bash as a tool is just very powerful for any agentic experience.
It’s funny because on one end of the spectrum you have non dev vibe coders for whom every log is noise
On the other end are the hardcore user orchestrating a bunch of agents, not sitting there watching one run, so they don’t care about these logs at all
In the middle are the engineers sitting there watching the agent go
Logs (and in this case, Verbose Mode) aren't for knowing what a thing is currently doing as its doing it, it's for finding out what happened when the thing didn't do what you expected or wanted.
The non dev vibe coders are probably a bigger group of users, and therefore equal more money. Change justified...
The others are also paying. Make it configurable...
If 80% of their paying customers are vibe coders then it makes sense to make IDE “easy” for them. “Hey, Claude, make a website. Don’t make mistakes.”
Or, it could serve as a textbook example how to make your real future long term customers (=fluent coders) angry… what a strategy :)
Microsoft fell into this trap in the 90s -- they believed that they could hide the DOS prompt, and make everything "easier" with wizards where you just go through a series of screens clicking "next", "next", "finish".
Yes, it was easier. But it dumbed down a generation of developers.
It took them two decades to try to come up with Powershell, but it was too late.
Exactly how I feel. I'm happy that more people are using these tools and learning (hopefully) about engineering but it shouldn't degrade the core experience for let's say "more advanced" users who don't see themselves as Vibe coders and want precise control over what's happening.
> learning (hopefully) about engineering
Not a chance.
If anything, the reverse, in that it devalues engineering. For most, LLMs are a path to an end-product without the bother or effort of understanding. No different than paid engineers were, but even better because you don't have to talk to engineers or pay them.
The sparks of genuine curiosity here are a rounding error.
If I give pupils the solution book will they learn or just copy the answers?
There is a reason why nowadays games start to help massively if the player gets stuck.
"There is a reason why nowadays games start to help massively if the player gets stuck"
You mean those "free" games, that are hard and grindy by design and the offered help comes in the shape of payed perks to solve the challenges?
No, those paid games where NPCs starts to point to clues if the player takes too long to solve a riddle or where you can skip the hard parts if you fail to often.
Run an army of parallel agents is orders of magnitude more profit per human, so they will tend to steer you towards that.
Anecdotally, all the non-technical people I know are adapting fine to the console. You don’t need to know how bash commands work to use it as you are just approving commands, not writing them.
Approving commands you don't understand doesn't seem ideal
People are handing over their entire system to openclaw, so that's about where we are.
Because we haven't heard about the disaster stories yet, give it some time and see how people will talk about it as if it were a virus.
I think Dario & crew are getting high on their own supply and really believe the "software developers out of work by end of 2026" pronouncements.
Meanwhile all evidence is that the true value of these tools is in their ability to augment & super-charge competent software engineers, not replace them.
Meanwhile the quality of Claude Code the tool itself is a bit of a damning indictment of their philosophy.
Give me a team of experienced sharp diligent engineers with these coding tools and we can make absolutely amazing things. But newbie product manager with no software engineering fundamentals issuing prompts will make a mess.
I can see it even in my own work -- when I venture into doing frontend eng using these tools the results look good but often have reliability issues. Because my background/specialization is in systems, embedded & backend work -- I'm not good at reviewing the React etc code it makes.
Amodei has to be the most insufferable of all the AI hucksters, nowadays even Altman looks tame compared to him.
The whole company also has this meme about AI safety and some sort of fear-mongering about the models every few months. It's basically a smokescreen for normies and other midwits to make it look more mysterious and advanced than it really is. OOOOH IT'S GOING TO BREAK OUT! IT KNOWS IT'S BEING EVALUATED!
I bet there are some true believers in Anthropic too, people who think themselves too smart to believe in God so they replaced it with AI instead but all the same hopes are there, eg. Amodei preaching about AI doubling the human lifespan. In religion we usually talk about heaven.
Just 1 more data center build, man! A few more megawatts and double the context window and it's AGI!
I just want useful tools.
And even if there are lots of vibe coders who don’t like/need the information then make it a toggle for those who want/need it
I'm old, so I remember when Skyrim came out. At the time, people were howling about how "dumbed down" the RPG had become compared to previous versions. They had simplified so many systems. Seemed to work out for them overall.
I understand the article writers frustration. He liked a thing about a product he uses and they changed the product. He is feeling angry and he is expressing that anger and others are sharing in that.
And I'm part of another group of people. I would notice the files being searched without too much interest. Since I pay a monthly rate, I don't care about optimizing tokens. I only care about the quality of the final output.
I think the larger issue is that programmers are feeling like we are losing control. At first we're like, I'll let it auto-complete but no more. Then it was, I'll let it scaffold a project but not more. Each step we are ceding ground. It is strange to watch someone finally break on "They removed the names of the files the agent was operating on". Of all of the lost points of control this one seems so trivial. But every camels back has a breaking point and we can't judge the straw that does it.
If you're paying a monthly rate you still have to optimize for tokens, otherwise you'll be rate limited.
It's nerfed to a point that it feels more like lawyer than a coding assistant now. We were arguing about an 3rd party API ToU for 1 hour last night. VSC Copilot executed it within 1 minute.
All my information about this is being based on feels, because debugging isn't really feasible. Verbose mode is a mess, and there's no alternative.
It still does what I need so I'm okay with it, but I'm also on the $20 plan so it's not that big of a worry for me.
I did sense that the big wave of companies is hitting Anthropic's wallet. If you hadn't realized, a LOT of companies switched to Claude. No idea why, and this is coming from someone who loves Claude Code.
Anyway, getting some transparency on this would be nice.
> If you hadn't realized, a LOT of companies switched to Claude. No idea why, and this is coming from someone who loves Claude Code.
It is entirely due to Opus 4.5 being an inflection point codingwise over previous LLMs. Most of the buzz there has been organic word of mouth due to how strong it is.
Opus 4.5 is expensive to put it mildly, which makes Claude Code more compelling. But even now, token providers like Openrouter have Opus 4.5 as one of its most popular models despite the price.
Everyone and I mean everyone keeps parroting this "inflection point" marketing hype, which is so damn tiring.
Believe me, I wish it was just parroting.
The real annoying thing about Opus 4.5 is that it's impossible to publicly say "Opus 4.5 is an order of magnitude better than coding LLMs released just months before it" without sounding like a AI hype booster clickbaiting, but it's the counterintuitive truth, to my personal frustration.
I have been trying to break this damn model since its November release by giving it complex and seemingly impossible coding tasks but this asshole keeps doing them correctly. GPT-5.3-Codex has been the same relative to GPT-5.2-Codex, which just makes me even more frustrated.
It still cannot solve a synchronization issue in my fairly simple online game, completely wrong analysis back to back and solutions that actually make the problem worse. Most training data is probably react slop so it struggles with this type of stuff.
But I have to give it to Amodei and his goons in the media, their marketing is top notch. Fear-mongering targeted to normies about the model knowing it is being evaluated and other sort of preaching to the developers.
But I used to be a skeptic but now in the last month
Yes, as all of modern politics illustrates, once one has staked out a position on an issue it is far more important to stick to one's guns regardless of observations rather than update based on evidence.
The use of inflection point in the entire software industry is so annoying and cringy. It's never used correctly, it's not even used correctly in the Claude post everyone is referencing.
What euphemism better describes the trend?
If it's a trend, there's not an inflection point. The inflection point would be a point where the trend breaks.
step function
No, I just think that timing wise it finally made it through everyone’s procurement process.
I can't watch a YouTube video without seeing a Claude ad. Same for friends. Safe for non-programmer friends.
They have insane marketing push, across HN and reddit too btw.
The below remark is unrelated to the main topic of this thread.
Why would you even watch a YouTube video with ads?
There are ad blockers, sponsor segment blockers, etc. If you use them, it will block almost every kind of YouTube ad.
I used to use ad blockers.
One day I visited DistroWatch.com. The site deliberately tweaked its images so ad blockers would block some "good" images. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on. The site freely admitted what it was doing. The site's point was: you're looking at my site, which I provide for free, yet you block the thing that lets me pay for the site?
I stopped using ad blockers after that. If a site has content worth paying for, I pay. If it is a horrible ad-infested hole, I don't visit it at all. Otherwise, I load ads.
Which overall means I pay for more things and visit less crap things and just visit less things period. Which is good.
NFT moment :) Where did it end btw?
I can. I use brave
> and there's no alternative.
Use the pi coding agent. Bare-bones context, easy to hack.
For a general tool that has such a broad user base, the output should be configurable. There's no way a single config, even with verbose mode, will satisfy everyone.
Set minimal defaults to keep output clean, but let users pick and choose items to output across several levels of verbosity, similar to tcpdump, Ansible, etc. (-v to -vvvvv).
I know businesses are obsessed with providing Apple-like "experiences", where the product is so refined there's just "the one way" to magically do things, but that's not going to work for a coding agent. It needs to be a unix-like experience, where the app can be customized to fit your bespoke workflow, and opening the man page does critical damage unless you're a wizard.
LLMs are already a magic box, which upsets many people. It'll be a shame if Anthropic alienates their core fan base of SWEs by making things more magical.
It's pretty interesting to watch AI companies start to squeeze their users as the constraints (financial, technical, capacity-wise) start to squeeze the companies.
Ads in ChatGPT. Removing features from Claude Code. I think we're just beginning to face the music. It's also funny that how Google "invented" ad injection in replies with real-time auction capabilities, yet OpenAI would be the first implementer of it. It's similar to how transformers played out.
For me, that's another "popcorn time". I don't use any of these to any capacity, except Gemini, which I seldom use to ask stuff when deep diving in web doesn't give any meaningful results. The last question I asked managed to return only one (but interestingly correct) reference, which I followed and continued my research from there.
I absolutely love reading thoughts and see the commands it uses. It teaches me new stuff, and I think this is what young people need: be able to know WHAT it is doing and WHY it is doing it. And have the ability to discuss with another agent about what the agent and me are trying to archive, and we can ask them questions we have without disturbing the flow, but seeing the live output.
Regarding the thoughts: it also allows me to detect problematic paths it takes, like when it can't find a file.
For example today I was working on a project that depends on another project, managed by another agent. While refactoring my code it noticed that it needs to see what this command is which it is invoking, so it even went so far as to search through vs code's user data history if it can find out more about that command... I stopped it and told it that if it has problems, it should tell me. It explained it can't find that file, i gave it the paths and tokens were saved.
Why dumb it down?
LOL, no, dumbing down was when I paid two months of subscription with the model literally struggling to write basic functions. Something Anthropic eventually acknowledged but offered no refunds for. https://ilikekillnerds.com/2025/09/09/anthropic-finally-admi...
I care A LOT about the details, and I couldn't care less that they're cleaning up terminal output like this.
Meanwhile GPT-5.3-Codex which just released recently is a huge change and much better. It now displays intermediate thinking summaries instead of being silent.
My experience using it from cursor has been fairly disappointing
Much better in the codex cli harness
There's one really confusing thing in Codex CLI from my perspective. How do I make it run unsandboxed but still ask me for approvals? I'm fine with it running bare on my machine but I like to approve first before it runs commands. But I only see how I can configure to have both or none. What am I missing?
Interesting, I can give that a try at some point.
In what way(s), if you can elaborate?
Claude 4.5 or 4.6 just one shots what I ask instead of getting stuck in random tangents.
Absolutely worse than dumbed down, 4.6 is a mess. Ask it the simplest of questions, look away, and come back to 700 parallel tool uses. https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1r1cfha/is_anyone...
This was really useful; sometimes, by a glance, you'd see Claude looking at the wrong files or searching the wrong patterns, and would be able to immediately interrupt it. For those of us who like to be deeply involved in what Claude is doing, those updates were terribly disappointing.
Sounds like the compacting issue.
> Compacting fails when the thread is very large
> We fixed it.
> No you did not
> Yes now it auto compacts all messages.
> Ok but we don't want compaction when the thread isn't large, plus, it still fails when the compacted thread is too large
> ...
Let me fix that for you:
> Compacting fails when the thread is very large
Flips coin, it is Heads
> We fixed it.
> No you did not
Flips coin, it is Tails
> Yes now it auto compacts all messages.
Flips coin, it is Heads
> Ok but we don't want compaction when the thread isn't large, plus, it still fails when the compacted thread is too large
Flips coin, it is Grapefruit
> ...
Congratulations on a vibe solution, if you are unhappy with the frequency of isomorphic plagiarism... the vendor still has your money and new data =3
We're having a UI argument about a workflow problem.
We treat a stateless session like a colleague, then get upset when it forgets our preferences. Anthropic simplified the output because power users aren't the growth vector. This shouldn't surprise anyone.
The fix isn't verbose mode. It's a markdown file the model reads on startup — which files matter, which patterns to follow, what "good" looks like. The model becomes as opinionated as your instructions. The UI becomes irrelevant.
The model is a runtime. Your workflow is the program. Arguing about log verbosity is a distraction.
Working at Microsoft, I've just now hooked up to Claude Code (my department was not permitted to use it previously), through something called "Agent Maestro", a vscode extension which I guess pipes claude code API requets to our internally hosted Claude models, including Opus 4.6.
I do wonder if there is going to be much of a difference between using Claude Code vs. Copilot CLI when using the same models.
Compare their system prompts and the agent harness logic. It's 99% of what makes the agent useful, and it can be quite different.
> I do wonder if there is going to be much of a difference between using Claude Code vs. Copilot CLI when using the same models.
I’m also at MS, not (yet?) using Claude Code at work and pondering precisely the same question.
I honestly don’t think the models are as important as people tend to believe. More important is how the models are given tools - find, grep, git, test runners, …
> I honestly don’t think the models are as important as people tend to believe.
I tend to disagree. While I don't see meaningful _reasoning power_ between frontier models, I do see differences in the way they interact with my prompts.
I use exclusively Anthropic models because my interactions with GPT are annoying:
- Sonnet/Opus behave like a mix of a diligent intern, or a peer. It does the work, doesn't talk too much, gives answers, etc.
- GPT is overly chatty, it borderline calls me "bro", tend to brush issues I raise "it should be good enough for general use", etc.
- I find that GPT hardly ever steps back when diagnosing issues. It picks a possible cause, and enters a rabbit hole of increasingly hacky / spurious solutions. Opus/Sonnet is often to step back when the complexity increases too much, and dig an alternative.
- I find Opus/Sonnet to be "lazy" recently. Instead of systematically doing an accurate search before answering, it tries to "guess", and I have to spot it and directly tell it to "search for the precise specification and do not guess". Often it would tell me "you should do this and that", and I have to tell it "no, you do it". I wonder if it was done to reduce the number of web searches or compute that it uses unless the user explicitly asks.
Is this an indictment of OpenAI's models -- that Microsoft has access to through their investment?
We've had both GPT and Claude models available to us in Github Copilot for some time. At first, it was only GPT models.
Claude Code is a nice experience on the terminal, and this makes it compatible with very well-established remote terminal software too which can be quite powerful. But I really do hope the main focus shifts to Claude Code not just exposing a WebSocket for the SDK, but also exposing a web UI where you can solve a lot of this information hierarchy with things that don't work very well in the terminal (though they certainly did their best at making it feel like a modern UI). There are plenty of good GUI patterns outside of the terminal to solve a lot of the challenges mentioned here.
> “Read 3 files.” Which files?
> “Searched for 1 pattern.”
Hit Ctrl-o like it mentions right there, and Claude Code will show you. Or RTFM and adjust Output Styles[1]. If you don't like these things, you can change them.
Like it or not, agentic coding is going mainstream and so they are going to tailor the default settings toward that wider mainstream audience.
This shows one problem here: a private entity controls Claude Code. You can reason that it brings benefits (perhaps), but to me it feels wrong to allow my thinking or writing code be controlled by a private entity. Perhaps I have been using Linux for too long - I may turn into RMS 2.0 (not really though, I like BSD/MIT licences too).
I also found this change annoying.
Often a codebase ends up with non-authoritative references for things (e.g. docs out of sync with implementation, prototype vs "real" version), and the proper solution is to fix and/or document that divergence. But let's face it, that doesn't always happen. When the AI reads from the wrong source it only makes things worse, and when you can't see what it's reading it's harder to even notice that it's going off track.
My last experience with Claude support was a fun merry go round.
I had used a Visa card to buy monthly Pro subscription. One day I ran out of credits so I go to buy extra credit. But my card is declined. I recheck my card limit and try again. Still declined.
To test the card I try extending the Pro subscription. It works. That's when I notice that my card has a security feature called "Secure by Visa". To complete transaction I need to submit OTP on a Visa page. I am redirected to this page while buying Pro subscription but not when trying to buy extra usage.
I open a ticket and mention all the details to Claude support. Even though I give them the full run down of the issue, they say "We have no way of knowing why your card was declined. You have to check with your bank".
Later I get hold of a Mastercard with similar OTP protection. It is called Mastercard Securecode. The OTP triggers on both subscription and extra usage page.
I share this finding with support as well. But the response is same - "We checked with our engineering team and we have no way of knowing why the other Visa card was declined. You have to check with your bank".
I just gave up trying to buy extra usage. So, I am not really surprised if they keep making the product worse.
Its true. They have no idea why your bank was declining the charge, only that it was declined.
I guarantee you talked to a chat bot. There are no human support agents anywhere anymore.
Vibe-coders griping about Claude's vibe-coded CLI hits all the right vibes.
Literally the opposite though, as being able to see what it reads allows you to tell it to ignore certain files when you see it read the wrong one, and adjust the claude.md file to ensure that it does not read incorrect files given a specific input.
True vibe coders don't care about this.
Jokes about vibe-coded CLI aside, I think that's the issue for me, the defaults are being tailored to vibe coders. (and the general weirdness of trying to fix it with verbose mode)
I like that people who were afraid of CLIs perhaps are now warming up to them through tools like Claude Code but I don't think it means the interfaces should be simplified and dumbed down for them as the primary audience.
Sure you can press CTRL+O, but that's not realtime and you have to toggle between that and your current real time activity. Plus it's often laggy as hell.
Yeah, these all sound like complete non issues if you're actually... keeping your codebase clean and talking through design with Claude instead of just having it go wild.
I'm using it for converting all of the userspace bcachefs code to Rust right now, and it's going incredibly smoothly. The trick is just to think of it like a junior engineer - a smart, fast junior engineer, but lacking in experience and big picture thinking.
But if you were vibe coding and YOLOing before Claude, all those bad habits are catching up with you suuuuuuuuuuuper hard right now :)
I hate to say it, but "vibe-coders" are just "coders" now.
It's a huge shift, but we need to start thinking of AI-tools as developer tools, just like a formatter, linter, or IDE would be.
The right move is diversity. Just like diversity of editors/IDEs. We need good open source claude code alternatives.
Well, the term lacks clarity and a shift of meaning.
If you define "vibe-coders" as people who just write prompts and don't look at code - no, they ain't coders now.
But if you mean people who do LLM-assistet coding, but still read code (like all of those who are upset by this change) - then sure, they always have been coders.
They aren't, though.
As a SE with over 15 years' professional experience, I find myself pointing out dumb mistakes to even the best frontier models in my coding agents, to refine the ouput. A "coder" who is not doing this on the regular is only a tool of their tool.
(in my mental model, a "vibe coder" does not do this, or at least does not do it regularly)
I don't get why people cling to the Claude Code abusive relationship. It's got so many issues, it's being worse, and it's clear that there's no plan to make it open for patching.
Meanwhile OpenCode is right there. (despite Anthropic efforts, you can still use it with a subscription) And you can tweak it any way you want...
Perhaps some power user of Claude Code can enlighten me here, but why not just using OpenCode? I admit I've only briefly tried Claude Code, so perhaps there are unique features there stopping the switch, or some other form of lock-in.
Anthropic is actively blocking calls from anything but claude code for it's claude plans. At this point you either need to be taking part in the cat and mouse game to make that plan work with opencode or you need to be paying the much more expensive API prices.
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/24537
Seems like a dashboard mode toggle to run in a dedicated terminal would be a good candidate to move some of this complexity Anthropic seems to think “most” users can’t handle. When your product is increasing cognitive load the answer isn’t always to remove the complexity entirely. That decision in this case was clearly the wrong one.
It was because of the (back then) new Haiku model, maybe 3.5, that i decided to subscribe yearly. more than good enough for a language layer to interact with the mcp server. Now I'm even hesitant to use it.
Strong meme game. I'm on an older release and now I'm reluctant to update. In my current release, the verbosity is just where I want it and control-o is there when I really need it.
So much for human replacement.
Map it to a workplace:
- Hey Joe, why did you stop adding code diff to your review requests?
- Most reviewers find it simpler. You can always run tcpdump on our shared drive to see what exactly was changed.
- I'm the only one reviewing your code in this company...
My biggest beef in recent versions is the automatic use of generic built in skills. I hate it when I ask a simple question and it says "OK! Time to use the RESEARCHING_CRAZY_PROBLEM skill! I'll kickstart the 20 step process!" when before it would just answer the question.
You can control this behavior, so it's not a dealbreaker. But it shows a sort of optimism that skills make everything better. My experience is that skills are only useful for specific workflows, not as a way to broadly or generally enhance the LLM.
I really dislike this trend that unfortunately has become, well, a trend. And has followers. Namely, let's simplify to "reduce noise" and "not overwhelm users", because "the majority of users don't need…".
This is spreading like a plague: browser address bars are being trimmed down to nothing. Good luck figuring out which protocol you're using, or soon which website you are talking to. The TLS/SSL padlock is gone, so is the way to look into the site certificate (good luck doing that on recent Safari versions). Because users might be confused.
Well the users are not as dumb as you condescendingly make them out to be.
And if you really want to hide information, make it a config setting. Ask users if they want "dumbo mode" and see if they really do.
Everyone, file your own ticket (check the box saying you searched for existing tickets anyway)!
After the Anthropic PMs have to delete their hundredth ticket about this issue, they will feel the need to fix it ... if only to stop the ticket deluge!
If you're not vibecoding your own UX to render CC's output the way you like it, you're not living.
If you're not vibecoding your own UX to render CC's output the way you like it, you're getting replaced by AI.
If you're not replacing the replacers, you're the replaced.
This is why I joined The Watchmen.
I have noticed, if I hit my session quota before it resets, that Claude gets "sleepy" for a day or so afterward. It's demonstrably worse at tasks...especially complex ones. My cofounder and I have both noticed this.
Our theory is that Claude gets limited if you meet some threshold of power usage.
It's clear we're seeing the same code-vs-craft divergence play out as before, just at a different granularity.
Codex/Claude would like you to ignore both the code AND the process of creating the code.
I'm not sure this is a regression, at least how I use it - you can hit control + o to expand, and usually the commands it runs show the file path(s) it's using, and I'm really paranoid with it, and I didn't even notice this change.
i've never had to use control + o before but with the latest changes, i give Opus a simple task that should take a few seconds and it's like "used 15k tokens" and "thinking" for three minutes with absolutely zero indication or visibility as to what it's actually doing and i have to ESC ESC it to stop and ask what the FUCK are you actually doing claude?
Yes, I’ve been evaluating since the start of the year and since 4.6 suddenly the most innocuous requests will sit there “thinking” for 5+ minutes and if I can get it to show me the thinking it’s just going round in circles.
Or, it decided it needs to get API documentation out and spends tens of thousands of tokens fetching every file in a repo with separate tool use instead of reading the documentation.
Profitable, if you are charging for token usage, I suspect.
But I’m reaching the point where I can’t recommend claude to people who are interesting in skeptically trying it out, because of the default model.
Yeah after my switch to Opus 4.6 I noticed a lot of this. I've been wary that eventually models are going to optimize for token usage increases, since that's how the company makes money. I told it to read the files in my directory (4 files, longest was like 380 lines) and caught it using 14 tool uses- including head -n 20 and tail -n 20 on a file. Definitely a what are you doing moment.
OTOH I find it pretty funny that the instant they manage to make a model that breaks general containment of popularity and usefulness (4.5), the toxicity of the business model kicks in and they instantly enshittify.
I think this change is really disingenuous.
If they hide how the tool is accessing files (aka using tokens) and then charging us per token - how are we able to track loosely what our spend is?
I’m all for simplification of the UX. But when it’s helping to hide the main spend it feels shitty.
What a weird hill to die on
And also a complete PR fail. This is damaging their brand with devs for no meaningful benefit.
can't stand not seeing what exactly an ai agent is doing on my machine
The histrionic tone is annoying but this is actually a feature failure. The utility of seeing what files were being read is I could help direct its use if it goes down the wrong pathway. I use a monorepo so that's an easy mistake for the software to make.
Serous question - why do people stick with Clause Code over Cursor? With Cursors base subscription I have access to pretty much all the Frontier models and can pick and choose. Anthropic models haven’t been my go-to in months, Gemini and Codex produce much better results for me.
Cursor performs notably worse for me on my medium-sized codebase (~500kloc), possibly because they try to aggressively conserve context. This is especially true for debugging, Claude Code will read dozens of files and do a surprisingly good job of finding complex bugs, while Cursor seems to just respond with the first hypothesis it comes up with.
That said, Cursor Composer is a lot faster and really nice for some tasks that don't require lots of context.
My answer is that I tested both, and Claude Code (~8 months ago) was so obviously better than Cursor that I continue to happily pay Anthropic $200/month. Based on anecdotes I happen to catch, I don't believe Cursor's caught up.
The value isn't just the models. Claude Code is notably better than (for example) OpenCode, even when using the same models. The plug-in system is also excellent, allowing me to build things like https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ that everyone can benefit from.
Because when it's good, it's really good - Cursor doesn't work as well for me and also I prefer the TUI experience. If anything, the real alternative is OpenCode.
Part of the sauce is not in the model, but in the agent itself. And for that matter, I think AMP an incredibly better agent that Claude Code. But then, Claude heavily subsidized subscription prices are hard to beat.
Wouldn't you run out of tokens sooner? That's the big problem.
Because I tried all the Cs - Copilot, Cursor, Codex, and Claude - and Claude consistently have better results. Codex was faster, Copilot had better integration, Cursor sometimes seemed smarter, but Claude was the best most reliable consistent experience overall, so Claude is what I stuck with - and so did the rest of our eng department.
I find it hard to care about claims of degradation of quality, since this has been a firehouse of claims that don't map onto anything real and is extremely subjective. I myself made the claim in error. I think this is just as ripe for psychological analysis as anything else.
You seem to be referring to something else than the topic the article is about.
Did you read the article? It's not about subjective claims, it's about a very real feature getting removed (file reads showing the filepath and numbers of lines read).
If you've got a solution to the problem of bad decisions made by people who shouldn't be empowered to make them in the first place, you'll solve more than Claude Code.
Since last Friday it’s felt like CC rolled back a year of progress. Not sure what to attribute it to, or what this article seems to be about but it _felt_ much dumber.
What if it’s used with a different harness, e.g. Opencode?
You infamously cannot use Claude Code with a different harness anymore (without shenanigans that will likely draw Anthropic's ire).
What happens when you press ctrl+o? You get verbose mode?
You can only ctrl+o the most recent response, and its a lot worse than knowing the # of lines read or the pattern grepped, which are useful because it can tell you what the agent is thrashing on trying to find, or what context would be useful to give it upfront in the future.
I just tested, it shows you which files it read, same as first example he gave "Where you used to see."
Yeah just that it's not real time and you have to toggle to see it. It lags a bunch also in longer threads. Definitely a downgrade.
I mean yes, they claim that it's "Claude Code Native" or something but it does feel laggy and takes multiple seconds to start. What do they even mean native, didn't they acquire Bun? It's not native. They need to rewrite it in Rust, I'm serious.
Codex feels much faster. For a while after the rewrite (to rust also I think?) it was bad because you couldn't copy anything from the terminal but since then it's gotten much much better.
I believe it opens the file that was referenced. Apologies in advance if I got that wrong.
Honestly? Half the time the shitty vibe coded Claude CLI interface spergs out. Don't try to scroll too much
As soon as there is a viable alternative to Claude Code, I'm gone after this change. It appears minor on the surface but their response to all the comments tells you everything you need to know. They don't even want to concede at all, or at least give a flag to enable the old behavior, what was deployed and working for many users before. It's a signal that someone, somewhere at Anthropic is making decisions based on ego, not user feedback.
The other fact pattern is their CLI is not open source, so we can't go in and change it ourselves. We shouldn't have to. They have also locked down OpenCode and while there are hacks available, I shouldn't have to resort to such cat and mouse games as someone who pays $200/month for a premium service.
I'm aggressively exploring other options, and it's only a matter of if -- not when, one surfaces.
Am I right that they still refuse to read AGENTS.md?
codex cli. I switched, no regrets. Also, $20 for top model vs being limited to sonnet.
Plus (the $20 plan) is still stuck on 5.2 right now..
5.3 codex xhigh works for me
Honestly even medium is quite good.
"It appears minor on the surface but their response to all the comments tells you everything you need to know."
I mean I hope it's just a single developer being stubborn rather than guidance from management asking everyone to simplify Claude Code for maximum mass appeal. But I agree otherwise, it's telling.
Another instance of devs being out of touch is them wanting Claude Code to respect AGENT.md: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235
What’s wrong with you, people? Are you stupid?
I've never used Claude or anything like it so this may be a dumb question: could you solve this problem by having a CLAUDE.md file that simply says to use AGENT.md if one is available. Can an AI agent not do that?
Yes, the most common solution for this problem either creating a symbolic CLAUDE.md link pointing to AGENT.md (or visa versa) if OS supports it.
Or, in CLAUDE.md have an instruction to follow AGENT.md - but this approach is quite unreliable.
These are solutions to a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place. How else can one explain Anthropic’s reluctance to adhere to a widely adopted standard, if not as an attempt to build a walled garden around an otherwise great product?
Can we not like, just apply a patch? Or will anthropic be mad if I run their client with my own patch?
Nix makes it easy to package up esotheric patches reliably and reproducibly, claude lowers the cost of creating such patches, the only roadblocks Inforesee are legal.
Claude code is distributed as a minified JS bundle so you cant just easily patch in this functionality
I’m told that this new LLM tech is great at deminimizing minified javascript, no?
We opensourced our claude code ui today: https://github.com/bearlyai/openade
I wanted a terminal feel (dense/sharp) + being able to comment directly on plans and outputs. It's MIT, no cloud, all local, etc.
It includes all the details for function runs and some other nice to haves, fully built on claude code.
Particularly we found planning + commenting up front reduces a lot of slop. Opus 4.6 class models are really good at executing an existing plan down to a T. So quality becomes a function of how much you invest in the plan.
Built similar focused specifically on planning annotations.
https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator
It integrates with the CLI through hooks. completely local.
That looks great! Planning phase is really key.
not getting dumbed down, ai is getting smarter than you at a speed faster than you can keep up or understand, have to abstract things and simplify so you can stay connected.
>Try using it for a few days. We've been using this internally at Anthropic for about a month now, and found that it took people a few days to mentally switch over to the new UI. Once they did, it "clicked" and they appreciated the reduced noise and focus on the tools that actually do need their attention.
Ah, the old "you're holding it wrong."
Sorry I'm dumber than the average Anthropic employee, might just take me a few more days for it to "click" that I'm no longer seeing useful information and that this is good.
They’re dog-fooding it wrong. ;)
I have been using it extensively, and for me it's fine as it is. Also, the title is just false. How did this get into HN frontpage, that's a good question.
I don't feel as if any CLI editor has quite nailed UX yet
If you are talking about agents I feel like opencode has gotten pretty good UI/UX
If you are talking about a CLI editor, then micro has hit the nail on quality UX
The UX where it completely breaks copy paste conventions on Linux? Other than that I agree it's gotten pretty good but this one thing drives me mad each time I use it.
> Read 3 fies (ctrl+o to expand)
What if you hit ctrl+o?
exactly what i think when reading the top of the article, maybe the author turned off vebose mode
The verbose mode is, well, verbose. They removed, without any need, info and hid it in a wall of text.
This comes up from time to time and although my experience is anecdotal, I see clear degradation of output when I run heavy loads (100s of batched/chunked requests, via an automated pipeline) and sometimes the difference in quality is absolutely laughable in how poor it is. This gets worse for me as I get closer to my (hourly, weekly) limits. I am Claude Max subscriber. There’s some shady stuff going on in the background, for sure, from my perspective and experience during my year or so of intense usage.
Man, you have to read the article, not just the headline
That would definitely be helpful, but the headline hit a painful spot for me and I went in! You’re right tho! I was in my feelins. I still am. lol
My issue with CC is that its interface deliberately obscures the code from you, making you treat it more like a genie you make wishes of rather than making changes and checking the output.
I may not be up to date with the latest & greatest on how to code with AI, but I noticed that as opposed to my more human in the loop style,
Because they don't want you to improve.
another case of 'devs are out of touch with users basics needs and basic day-to-day usage of our app'
I think it's a case of wishful design. When they (or rather their own vibecoding tools) imagine how the tool is used, they aren't imagining that it's actually a human-machine interface, with the human actively engaged in the loop. Instead, the human is mostly expected to behave as a magical prompt oracle with a credit card and let the machine take care of the details.
by devs you mean those two guys on twitter who brag about vibe coding with 100 agents running simultaneously. While Claude Code still can't display images. I wonder what they are doing with those 100 agents
It's definitely a case of out-of-touch devs, but which cohort they are is still to be seen.
This is why I am a big fan of self-hosting, owning your data and using your own Agent. pi is a really good example. You can have your own tooling and can switch any SOTA model in a single interface. Very nice!
At least now we also have a tracker: https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/
Saw this the other day and loved it. Especially seeing Opus 4.5 degrading prior to the 4.6 release (IIRC) and Codex staying very stable and even improving over time.
But FYI the blog post is not about the actual model being dumbed down, but the command line interface.
Quite frankly, most seasoned developers should be able to write their own Claude Code. You know your own algorithm for how you deal with lines of code, so it's just a matter of converting your own logic. Becoming dependent on Claude Code is a mistake (edit: I might be too heavy handed with this statement). If your coding agent isn't doing what you want, you need to be able to redesign it.
It's not that simple. Claude Code allows you to use the Anthropic monthly subscription instead of API tokens, which for power users is massively less expensive.
Drug dealer business model. The first bag is free. Don't act surprised when you get addicted and they 10x the price.
this is the real reason why people are switching to claude code.
Yes and no. There are many not-trivial things you have to solve when using an LLM to help (or fully handle writing) code.
For example, applying diffs to files. Since the LLM uses tokenization for all its text input/output, sometimes the diffs it'll create to modify a file aren't quite right as it may slightly mess up the text which is before/after the change and/or might introduce a slight typo in text which is being removed, which may or may not cleanly apply in the edit. There's a variety of ways to deal with this but most of the agentic coding tools have this mostly solved now (I guess you could just copy their implementation?).
Also, sometimes the models will send you JSON or XML back from tool calls which isn't valid, so your tool will need to handle that.
These fun implementation details don't happen that often in a coding session, but they happen often enough that you'd probably get driven mad trying to use a tool which didn't handle them seamlessly if you're doing real work.
I'm part of the subset of developers that was not trained in Machine Learning, so I can't actually code up an LLM from scratch (yet). Some of us are already behind with AI. I think not getting involved in the foundational work of building coding agents will only leave more developers left in the dust. We have to know how these things work in and out. I'm only willing to deal with one black box at the moment, and that is the model itself.
It's hardly a subset. Most devs that use it have no idea how it works under the hood. If a large portion of them did, then maybe they'd cut out the "It REALLY IS THINKING!!!" posting
It's quite tricky as they optimize the agent loop, similar to codex.
It's probably not enough to have answer-prompt -> tool call -> result critic -> apply or refine, there might be a specific thing they're doing when they fine tune the loop to the model, or they might even train the model to improve the existing loop.
You would have to first look at their agent loop and then code it up from scratch.
I bet you could derive a lot by using a packet sniffer while using CC and just watch the calls go back and forth to the LLM API. In every api request you'll get the full prompt (system prompt aside) and they can't offload all the magic to the server side because tool calls have to be done locally. Also, LLMs can probably de-minimize the minimized Javascript in the CC client so you can inspect the source too.
edit: There's a tool, i haven't used it in forever, i think it was netsaint(?) that let you sniff https in clear text with some kind of proxy. The enabling requirement is sniffing traffic on localhost iirc which would be the case with CC
The model is being trained to use claude code. i.e. the agentic patterns are reinforced using reinforcement learning. thats why it works so well. you cannot build this on your own, it will perform far worse
Are you certain of this? I know they use a lot of grep to find variables in files (recall reading that on HN), load the lines into into context. There's a lot of common sense context management that's going on.
Claude Code has thousands of human manhours fine tuning a comprehensive harness to maximize effectiveness of the model.
You think a single person can do better? I don't think that's possible. Opencode is better than Claude Code and they also have perhaps even more manhours.
It's a collaboration thing, ever improving.
Challenge accepted.
"This is as bad as it's going to be" turning out to be wrong
They could change course, obviously. But how does the saying go again -- it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a VC funded tech startup to not enshittify.
Well, they already fucked over the community with their "lol not really unlimited" rug-pull.
For those of you who are still suckered in paying for it, why do you think the company would care how they abuse the existing users? You all took it the last time.
I've been on the other side of this as a PM, and it's tough because you can't always say what you want to, which is roughly: This product is used by a lot of users with a range of use cases. I understand this change has made it worse for you, and I'm genuinely sorry about that, but I'm making decisions with much more information than you have and many more stakeholders than just you.
> What majority? The change just shipped and the only response it got is people complaining.
I'll refer you to the old image of the airplane with red dots on it. The people who don't have a problem with it are not complaining.
> People explained, repeatedly, that they wanted one specific thing: file paths and search patterns inline. Not a firehose of debug output.
Same as above. The reality is there are lots of people whose ideal case would be lots of different things, and you're seeking out the people who feel the same as you. I'm not saying you're wrong and these people don't exist, but you have to recognize that just because hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people want something from a product that is used by millions does not make it the right decision to give that thing to all of the users.
> Across multiple GitHub issues opened for this, all comments are pretty much saying the same thing: give us back the file paths, or at minimum, give us a toggle.
This is a thing that people love to suggest - I want a feature but you're telling me other people don't? Fine, just add a toggle! Problem solved!
This is not a good solution! Every single toggle you add creates more product complexity. More configurations you have to QA when you deploy a new feature. Larger codebase. There are cases for a toggle, but there is also a cost for adding one. It's very frequently the right call by the PM to decline the toggle, even if it seems like such an obvious solution to the user.
> The developer’s response to that?
> I want to hear folks’ feedback on what’s missing from verbose mode to make it the right approach for your use case.
> Read that again. Thirty people say “revert the change or give us a toggle.” The answer is “let me make verbose mode work for you instead.”
Come on - you have to realize that thirty people do not in any way comprise a meaningful sample of Claude Code users. The fact that thirty people want something is not a compelling case.
I'm a little miffed by this post because I've dealt with folks like this, who expect me as a PM to have empathy for what they want yet can't even begin to considering having empathy for me or the other users of the product.
> Fucking verbose mode.
Don't do this. Don't use profanity and talk to the person on the other side of this like they're an idiot because they're not doing what you want. It's childish.
You pay $20/month or maybe $100/month or maybe even $200/month. None of those amounts entitles you to demand features. You've made your suggestion and the people at Anthropic have clearly listened but made a different decision. You don't like it? You don't have to use the product.
I know product managers in particular hate it but, especially with professional software, when you gave lots of users you have to make things configurable and live with maintaining the complexity.
The alternatives are alienating users or dumbing down the software, both of which are worse for any serious professional product.
I don't think it's fair to say that product managers hate it. There are a lot of product managers and a lot of kinds of software. I've worked on complex enterprise software and have added enormous amounts of complexity into my products when it made sense.
> The alternatives are alienating users or dumbing down the software, both of which are worse for any serious professional product.
I disagree that this is universally true. Alienating users is very frequently the right call. The alienated users never feel that way, but it's precisely the job of the PM to understand which users they want to build the product for and which ones they don't. You have to be fine alienating the latter group.
This is the end game I've been Casandra'ing since the beginning.
You all are refining these models through their use, and the model owners will be the only ones with access to true models while you will be fed whatever degraded slop they give you.
You all are helping concentrate even more power in these sociopaths.
I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about! - Zapp
I mean I get it I guess but I'm not nearly so passionate as anyone saying things about this
Add another LLM to extract paths from verbose mode...
As a heavy CC user, I appreciate a cleaner console output. If you really need to know which 3 files CC read, AI-assisted coding agents might not be for you.
Downvoted, but fight me on this… It's important to see what it wrote, but what it read?
Just stop using the damn thing if you don't like it.
Developers are just complainers.
Am I mistaken or is Claude Code essentially an opt-in rootkit?
Modern agenting coding software is scoped to only allow edits in the project folder, with some sandboxing more aggressively than others (Claude Code the most)
only if you run it as root, run it as a user and it can't do any more damage than the user running it could. It can still certainly send any data the user has access to anywhere on the inet though, that's a big problem. idk if there's a way to lock down a user so that they can only open sockets to an IP on a whitelist.. maybe that could be an option to at least keep the data from going anywhere except to Anthropic (that's not anywhere close to perfect/correct either but it's something i guess).
And it's pretty easy to run in a stronger sandbox too.
"docker sandbox run claude" in a recent version of docker is a super easy way to get started.