I keep getting the sense that people feel like they have no idea if they are getting the product that they originally paid for, or something much weaker, and this sentiment seems to be constantly spreading. Like when I hear Anthropic mentioned in the past few weeks, it's almost always in some negative context.
- Banning OpenClaw users (within their rights, of course, but bad optics)
- Banning 3rd party harnesses in general (ditto)
(claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?)
- Lowering reasoning effort (and then showing up here saying "we'll try to make sure the most valuable customers get the non-gimped experience" (paraphrasing slightly xD))
- Massively reduced usage (apparently a bug?) The other day I got 21x more usage spend on the same task for Claude vs Codex.
- Noticed a very sharp drop in response length in the Claude app. Asked Claude about it and it mentioned several things in the system prompt related to reduced reasoning effort, keeping responses as brief as possible, etc.
It's all circumstantial but everything points towards "desperately trying to cut costs".
I love Claude and I won't be switching any time soon (though with the usage limits I'm increasingly using Codex for coding), but it's getting hard to recommend it to friends lately. I told a friend "it was the best option, until about two weeks ago..." Now it's up in the air.
I have been wondering if it's more geared at reducing resource usage, given that at the moment there's a known constraint on AI datacenter expansion capability. Perhaps they are struggling to meet demand?
What they changed is that it now uses extra usage, which is charged at api rates
How often? Realistically, if you invoke it occasionally, for what's clearly an amount that's "reasonable personal use", then no you don't get nuked.
For example, after a question about a script that used taskset and CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES to handle NUMA domains on a parallel GLUE evaluation run:
>Round 2 tasks reuse GPU slots that Round 1 may still be occupying. Cola, SST-2, and QQP are small datasets and will likely finish before MNLI, but QNLI is sizable. If QNLI (GPU 3, slot 3) is still running when Round 2 launches, that's fine — they're on different slots. But more importantly, Round 2 uses slots 5/6/7 (GPUs 7/0/1), while Round 1 uses slots 0/1/2/3/4 (GPUs 4/5/2/3/6). So there's no GPU collision — you're good here actually. Disregard, this is clean.
Support consisted of AI bots saying you did something stupid, you did something wrong, you were abusing the system, followed by (only when I asked for it explicitly) claiming to file a ticket with a human who will contact you later (and it either didn't happen or their ticket system is /dev/null).
(By the way this is the 2nd time I've been "please hold" gaslit by support LLMs this exact same way, the other being with Square)
Generally I find codex and claude make a good team. I'm not a heavy user, but I am currently Claude Max 5x and ChatGPT Plus. Now that OpenAI has a $100 offering and I am finding myself using Claude less, I am considering switching to Claude Pro and ChatGPT Pro x5. The work hours restriction on Claude Max x5 really pisses me off.
I am not a heavy user. Historically I only break over 50% weekly one week a month and average about 30-40% of Max x5 over the entire month. I went Max because of the weekly limits and to access the better models and because I felt I was getting value. I need an occasional burst of usage, not 24/7 slow compute. But even for pay-as-you-go burst usage Anthropic's API prices are insane vs Max.
I have yet to ever hit a limit on codex so it's not on my mind. And lately it seems like Claude is likely to be having a service interruption anyway. A big part of subscribing to Claude Max was to get away from how the usage limits on Pro were causing me to architect my life around 5hr windows. And now Anthropic has brought that all back with this don't use it before 2pm bullshit. I want things ready to go when the muses strike. I'm honestly questioning whether Anthropic wants anyone who isn't employed as a software engineer to use their kit.
Anyway for the last month or so codex "just works" and Claude has been an invitation for annoyances. There was a time when codex was quite a bit behind claude-code. They have been roughly equal (different strength and weaknesses) since at least February (for me).
Very sad considering I got my whole company on Claude Code for them to just ban be like this, with no customer support response.
100% this, I’ve posted the same sentiment here on HN. I hate the chilling effect of the bans and the lack of clarity on what is and is not allowed.
I don’t think they could have done that much better I’d say.
it's a bug only if they get a harsh public response, otherwise it becomes a feature
I've used it with a sub a lot. Concurrency of 40 writing descriptions of thousands of images, running for hours on sonnet.
I have a lot of complaints. I've cancelled my $200 subscription and when it runs out in a few days I'll have to find something else.
But claude -p is fine.
... Or it was 2 week ago. Who knows if they've silently throttled it by now?
1) Nobody should expect to use OpenClaw without API usage.
2) We have known for a long time that the plans are subsidized. It was not as big of a deal but now that demand has continued to explode at a multiple and tools like OpenClaw were creating a lot of usage from a small minority of customers, prices change.
Everything for me points more towards, we have made a service people really want to use and we are trying to balance a supply shortage (compute) with pricing. Nothing is stopping folks like yourself from simply paying the API rates. It is the simple no hassle way to get around any issue you are having, pay the API cost and you will have no limitations!
Claude seems to be getting nerfed every week since we've switched. I wonder how our EVP is feeling now.
It kind of reminds me of the joke where a plumber charges $500 for a 5 minute visit. When the client complains the plumber says it's $50 for labor and $450 for knowing how to fix the problem.
A friend’s company fired all EMs and have engineers reporting to product managers. They aren’t allowed to do refactors because the CTO believes the AI doesn’t need organized code.
There's 0 chance of him facing the consequences for it either.
Whether it's due to bugs or actual malice, it's not a good look. I genuinely can't tell if it's buggy, if it's been intentionally degraded, if it's placebo or if it's all just an elaborate OpenAI psyop.
I now have been using Codex and everything has been great (I still swap back and forth but generally to check things out.)
My theory is just that the models are great after release to get people switching, then they cut them back in capabilities slowly over time until the next major release to increase the hype cycle.
I think it's more likely they're trying to optimize the Claude Code prompts to reduce load on their system and have overcorrected at the cost of quality.
1: https://gist.github.com/roman01la/483d1db15043018096ac3babf5...
Duly runs, and finishes. "All merged into develop".
I do some other work, don't see any of this, double check myself, I'm working off of develop.
"Hey, where is this work?"
"It is in this branch and this worktree, as you would expect, you will need to merge into develop."
"I'm confused, I asked you to do that and you said it was done."
"You're right and I did say that but I didn't do it. Shall I do it now?"
There's like this really weird balancing act between managing usage, but making people burn more tokens...
I was using both Codex and Claude Code heavily on some projects this weekend.
In one project Codex was screwing everything up and in another one absolutely killing it. I’ve seen the same from Claude.
In the bad Codex example it had the wrong idea and kept trying to figure out how to accomplish the same thing no matter how many times I attempt to correct it. Undoing the recent changes where it went down the wrong path was the only way to get things back on track.
I wonder if context poisoning is a bigger problem than people realize.
I'm on the enterprise team plan so a decent amount of usage.
In March I could use Opus all day and it was getting great results.
Since the last week of March and into April, I've had sessions where I maxed out session usage under 2 hours and it got stuck in overthinking loops, multiple turns of realising the same thing, dozens of paragraphs of "But wait, actually I need to do x" with slight variations of the same realisation.
This is not the 'thinking effort' setting in claude code, I noticed this happening across multiple sessions with the same thinking effort settings, there was clearly some underlying change that was not published that made the model get stuck in thinking loops more for longer and more often without any escape hatch to stop and prompt the user for additional steering if it gets stuck.
It's pretty clear that OpenAI has consistently used bots on social networks to peddle their products. This could just be the next iteration, mass spreading lies about Anthropic to get people to flock back to their own products.
That would explain why a lot of users in the comments of those posts are claiming that they don't see any changes to limits.
It is not in the interests for Anthropic to screw its customer base. Running a frontier lab comes with tradeoffs between training, inference and other areas.
The ideal time to make your product worse is probably not at the same point that all of your competitor's customers are looking. Anthropic really, really fucked up here.
And beyond that, there's a ton of people who are just regular 9-5 Claude CLI users with an enterprise subscription who are getting punished with a worse model at the same price just as if we were Claw users. This kind of thing does not make one feel warm and fuzzy. I feel like I just got a boot to the teeth.
Sometimes Claude can be a little weird. I was asking it about some settings in Grafana. It gave me an answer that didn't work. I told it that. "Yeah, I didn't really check, I just guessed." Then I said, "please check" and it said "you should read the discussion forums and issue tracker". I said "YOU should read the discussion forms and issue tracker". It consumed 35k tokens and then told me the thing I wanted was a checkbox. It was! I am not sure this saved me time, Claude. I am not experienced enough to say that this is a deal breaker. While this is burned into my mind as an amusing anecdote, it doesn't ruin the service for me.
My coworkers have noticed a degradation and feel vindicated by some of the posts here that I link. A lot of them are using Cursor more now. I have not tried it yet because I kind of like the Claude flow and /effort max + "are you sure?" yield good results. For now. I'm always happy to switch if something is clearly better.
I’m pretty much using 90% Codex now, although since Claude is consistently faster at answering quick questions, I still keep it open for that and for code-reviewing codex/human work before commit.
So yeah... I'm not thrilled with that, because I had done a similar analysis in December and had plenty of logs to review.
The results I do have for the last month aren't great. If you're curious I did post the results on HN:
It looks like the spreadsheet-touchers over at Anthropic won out over the brand leaders, which is too bad as good will can be a trench if you don't abuse your customers.
So the trick is to always set to max, and then begin every task with “this is an extremely complex task, do not complete it without extensive deep thinking and research” or whatever.
You’re basically fighting a battle to make the model think more, against the defaults getting more and more nerfed to save costs.
A few days later it simply stopped working again, API authentication error. What must I do to have working, paid, premium service?
Screwing around with it today, it works 5x slower and times out all of the time. I'm paying more and getting waaaaay less. Why can't companies just raise prices like normal?
They do indeed get the product they originally paid for.
It's simply that they were suckers and didn't read the "fine" print of the product they bought.
The label says "more tokens than the lower tier".
For instance on exe.dev VMs with Shelley agent/harness and Opus 4.5/4.6, I haven't noticed any deterioration.
Any similar feedback perhaps from Opencode / GH Copilot subscription-provided Opus models?
The UX of codex is exceptionally nice however.
If you don't believe me you can search HN posts about Codex/Claude six months ago.
And to me, this lie is mostly a fight to see who bites the biggest chunk of the war death machine.
Claude Code was able to implement something in one shot. It was decent for a proof of concept initial implementation. It's barely able to do work now with full specs and detailed plans.
ChatGPT is also being watered down.
It seems obvious that Anthropic and OpenAI aren't the solution to any problem.
The quality will be a bit behind frontier proprietary models. You gotta pay for what you use, no way to cover your expenses from peers underusing their subscription. But otherwise it should be a reasonable middle ground, with very little risk of rug being pulled out from you.
Quite interesting considering all the claims that Cursor was dead a few months ago.
The SI symbol for minutes is "min", not "M".
A compromise would be to use the OP notation "m".
If you run out of session quota too quickly and need to wait more than an hour to resume your work ... you are paying even more penalty just to resume your work -- a penalty you wouldnt have needed if session quota was not so restrictive in first place, and which in turn causes you to burn through next session quota even faster.
Seems like a vicious cycle that made the UX very poor. I remember Claude Code with Pro became virtually unuseable in middle of March with session quota expiring within first hour or less for me -- which was wildly different experience from early March.
Seeing some things about how the effort selector isn't working as intended necessarily and the model is regressing in other ways: over-emphasizing how "difficult" a problem is to solve and choosing to avoid it because of the "time" it would take, but quoted in human effort, or suggesting the "easier" path forward even if it's a hack or kludge-filled solution.
As others have said, anthropic is between a rock and a hard place, you can't scale compute as quickly, and the influx of new accounts has definitely made things tough for them: I think all the "how is claude this session 1/2/3/4" questions that keep coming up must be part of some a/b on just how far to quantize / lower thinking while still maintaining user satisfaction.
I heard a while back Claude refused to attempt a task for days, saying it would take weeks of work. Eventually the user convinced it to try, and it one-shotted it in 30 seconds.
Totally true, also tokens seem to burn through much faster. More parallelism could explain some of it but where I could work on 3-5 projects at once on the max plan a month ago, I can't even get one to completion now on the same Opus model before the 5h session locks me up..
The above was a successful prompt to get Claude to stop whining about effort, difficulty, and time.
Unfortunately abusive language well placed is an effective LLM motivator.
I never use it to answer questions like that, what I care about is consistent tool callig and following the prompt.
And an admittedly uncharitable TLDR on the response is: "yeah... but most users just ask one thing and barely use the product so they never need the cache. Also trust me bro".
Which sure, fine. I'm willing to bet is technically true. I'd also bet those users never previously came close to hitting their session limits given their usage because their usage is so low. But now people who were previously considered low to moderate users are hitting limits within minutes.
They may as well have just said "we've looked at the data and we're happy with this change because it's a performance improvement for people we make the most margin on. Sucks to be you".
I point it to example snippets and webdocumentation but the code it gens won't work at all, not even close
Opus4.6 is a tiny bit less wrong than Codex 5.4 xhigh, but still pretty useless.
So, after reading all the success stories here and everywhere, I'm wondering if I'm holding it wrong or if it just can't solve everything yet.
That sort of GPU code has a lot of concepts and machinery, it’s not just a syntax to express, and everything has to be just right or you will get a blank screen. I also use them differently than most examples; I use it for data viz (turning data into meshes) and most samples are about level of detail. So a double whammy.
But once I pointed either LLM at my own previous work — the code from months of my prior personal exploration and battles for understanding, then they both worked much better. Not great, but we could make progress.
I also needed to make more mini-harnesses / scaffolds for it to work through; in other words isolating its focus, kind of like test-driven development.
Xhigh can also perform worse than High - more frequent compaction, and "overthinking".
Such as:
Adding fine curl noise to a volumetric smoke shader
Fixing an issue with entity interpolation in an entity/snapshot netcode
Find some rendering bugs related to lightmaps not loading in particular cases, and it actually introduced this bug.
Just basic stuff.
(Don’t get mad at me, I’m a webshit developer)
What you're doing is more specialized and these models are useless there. It's not intelligence.
Another NFT/Crypto era is upon us so no you're not holding it wrong.
Obviously it cannot. But if you give the AI enough hints, clear spec, clear documentation and remove all distracting information, it can solve most problems.
I'm not accusing anyone of foul play and I don't have financial interests in either company, but it feels like "something" within Code Claude/Anthropic models is optimizing to make you spend more tokens instead of helping you complete the task.
All of the major models have been getting worse lately, not just Opus.
[0] https://www.dwarkesh.com/i/187852154/004620-if-agi-is-immine...
It costs him more in ingredients alone than he charges. He even offers some pseudo unlimited buffet, combo sets, and happy hours.
He announced a new restaurant, apparently it will be even better, so good he's a bit worried. He makes sure to share his worries while he picks a few select enterprise for business parties and the likes.
In the meantime he cracks down on free buffet goers who happen to eat too much, and downgrades all ingredients without notice to finally hope to make a profit.
All the news i hear about this company for the past weeks made it sound like they're really desperate.
However, for the basic turn-based conversation the cache (at 5 minutes) is almost always insufficient. By the time I read the LLM response, consider my next question, write it out, etc. I frequently miss the cache.
I imagine it is much more useful if you have a tool that has a common prefix (like a system instruction, tool specs or common set of context across many users).
If you can get it to work frequently enough the savings are quite worth it.
It would be interesting to graph the cost/savings of this approach based on context length, percent cached, etc.
The UI for this is a bit tricky, I could mark conversations as "active" and then do the ping/pong dance on only active conversations and up to some determined max cached (e.g. 1 hour).
Edit: I may have conflated these two threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47739260
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-...
Since the caching really primarily is something they can be judged at scale from across many users I can only assume that Anthropic looked at their infra load and impact and made a very intentional change.
It’s only making the news now because it’s affecting Max users as well ($100/$200 plans). I understand the need for change, but having zero communication about it is just wrong.
Meanwhile their 'best' competitor just announced they want to provide unreliable mass destruction guidance tools but they don't wanna feel said.
Honestly speaking, we are wrong whenever we do business with this sort of people
FWIW that's what most TOSes say for the majority of online services. Some even include arbitration clauses to prevent civil suits and class-action cases.
What judges say is that whatever is problematic should be dealt by customer support.
For example, provider X is faulty and causes damages to you or a third party. You contact the company and the company must have a procedure to give a formal answer when required.
If that's is breach of the contact, although not required by law, the company can offer to fix the problem or at least an explanation and why is that in the contract.
If you still feel that's a breach of the contract and the company is not willing to cooperate, then you can file it.
In other places, there are laws that cannot be undermined by forceful terms of service or contracts. For example, you have the right for law anywhere.
I more or less understand the whys of why US is like that, but it feels that the law is bendable.
So you'd need some adaptive algorithm to decide when to keep caching and when to purge it whole, possibly on client side, but if you give client the control, people will make it use most cache possible just to chase diminishing returns. So fine grained control here isn't all that easy; other possible option is just to have cache size per account and then intelligently purge it instead of relying just on TTL
the hardware VM model is almost identical. Each session can go anywhere to start but a live session cant just be routed anywhere without penalty.
The very instant the AI suppliers lock in a dependency on their product, prices are going through the roof.
Looking at the table with February and April- I don't get it. What am I missing?
The cost and number of calls look pretty aligned on all rows
But more likely they are constrained on GPUs and can't get them fast enough.
(My guess having no understanding of how this industry actually works.)
They can't really revolutionize AI again so they make the product worse and worse and then offer you a "better" one
So I can't continue my claude code session I started yesterday.
Phase 1: $200/mo prosumer engineer tool
Phase 2: AI layoffs / "it's just AI washing"
Phase 3: $20,000/mo limited release model "too dangerous" to use
Phase 4: Accelerated layoffs / two person teams. Rehiring of certain personnel at lower costs.
Phase 5: "Our new model can decompile and rewrite any commercial software. We just wrote a new kernel after looking at Linux (bye, bye GPL!) We also decompiled the latest Zelda game, ported the engine to Rust, and made a new game with it. Source code has no value. Even compiled and obfuscated code is a breeze to clone."
Phase 6: $100k/mo model that replicates entire engineering teams, only large companies can afford it. Ordinary users can't buy. More layoffs.
Phase N: People can't afford computing anymore. Everything is thin clients and rented. It's become like the private railroad industry. End of the PC era. Like kids growing up on smartphones, there's nothing to tinker with anymore. And certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-skilled labor capital.
Anothropic used to be cool before they started gating access. Limiting Claw/OpenCode was strike one. Mythos is strike two.
Y'all should have started hating on their ethics when they started complaining about being distilled. For training they conducted on materials they did not own.
We need open weights companies now more than ever. Too bad China seems to be giving up on the idea.
"You wouldn't distill an Opus."
You will be backstabbed
You will be squeezed for all they can.
And you will be betrayed.
> Phase N: People can't afford computing anymore. Everything is thin clients and rented. It's become like the private railroad industry. End of the PC era. Like kids growing up on smartphones, there's nothing to tinker with anymore. And certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-skilled labor capital.
Thankfully none of them actually makes money and just runs on investment so there is a good chance bubble will drop and the price of PC equipment will... continue to rise as US gives up Taiwan to China
Anthropic is a private company but nevertheless, the sentiment is accurate and applies to all kinds of corporations.
I think it has something to do with mode collapse (although Claude certainly has its own "tells"), but I'm not sure.
It sounds trivial but even for Agentic, I found the writing style to be really important. When you give Claude a persona, it sounds like the thing. When you give GPT a persona, it sounds like GPT half-assedly pretending to be the thing.
---
Some other interesting points about Anthropic's models. I don't know if any of these relate to my LLM style question, but seems worth mentioning:
Claude models also use way less tokens for the same task (on ArtificialAnalysis, they are a clear outlier on this metric).
And there's a much stronger common sense, subjectively. (Not sure if we have a good way to actually measure that, though.) It takes context and common sense into account, to a much greater degree.
(Which ties in with their constitution. Understanding why things are wrong at a deeper level, rather than just surface level pattern matching.)
Opus is great but it should be bigger. You notice the difference between Sonnet and Opus, but with heavy use you notice Opus's limitations, too.
It all boils down to a brilliant but extremely expensive technology. Both to build and to run.
We've been sold a product with heavy subsidy. The idea (from Sam) scale out and see what happens.
Those who care to read between the lines can see what's happening. A perfect storm of demand that attract VCs who can't understand they are the real customers. Once they understand that it will be too late.
Regarding open weight models: eventually we will, as humanity, benefit from the astronomical capital poured into developing a technology ahead of its time. In a few years this and even more will run on edge.
Written by open source developers, likely former openai and anthropic employees who got so much cash in the bank they don't need to worry about renting their knowledge.
I've been using GLM for over 6 months and pretty happy.
Releasing open weights have been basically a PR move, the moment those companies need to actually make money they will cut it out as that reduces their client base.
They DO NOT want you to run AI. They want you to pay them to do it
The AI landscape in China is larger than just Qwen and Alibaba.
The first one is just incredibly naive, the second might be true for some people, for some tasks, but it's not going to capture the majority who're chasing the latest and greatest to "keep up".
If you're objective it to democratize AI, sure. But for those fed up with it and the devastating effects it's having on students, for example, can opt to actively avoid paying for products with AI (I say this as someone who uses it every day, guilty). At some point large companies will see that they're bleeding money for something that most people don't seem to want, and cancel those $100k/mo deals. I've already experienced one AI-developer-turned company crash and burn.
Personally, I don't think this LLM-based AI generation will have any significant positive impacts. Time, energy (CO2) and money would have been far better spent elsewhere.
Like with the dot com bubble there will be a crash and then whatever shakes out of that will be the companies and products who invested in understanding the actual strengths and weaknesses of the tech, instead of just trying to slap an "AI" sticker on everything.
This one seems too far fetched. Training models is widespread. There will always be open weight models in some form, and if we assume there will be some advancements in architecture, I bet you could also run them on much leaner devices. Even today you can run models on Raspberry Pis. I don't see a reason this will stop being a thing, there will be plenty of ways to tinker.
However, keep in mind the masses don't care about tinkering and never have. People want a ChatGPT experience, not a pytorch experience. In essence this is true for all tech products, not just AI.
Why the FUD?
I notice some interesting public opinion weather change since Anthropic passed OpenAI wrt revenue
>> Was there a change? Yes — March 6, intentional, part of ongoing cache optimization. You pinpointed the date correctly.
The entire issue lays out how and why it's a silent downgrade. Also silent because it just happened, without announcing.
I don't understand how is this FUD?
I mean, you are investing a lot (infrastructure and capital) into something that is essentially not yours. You claim credit for the offspring (the solution) simply because it resides in your workspace. You accept foreign code to make your project appear more successful and populated than you could manage alone. Your over-reliance on a surrogate for the heavy lifting leads to the loss of your own survival skills (coding and debugging). Last but not least, you handle the grunt work of territory defense (clients and environments) while the AI performs the actual act of creation (Displaced Agency).
https://redbeardlab.gitbook.io/acem/essays/ambient-developme...
I basically wrote a small GitHub app and I simply create a GitHub issue, the bot read it, run an LLM loop and come up with a PR (or a design)
Then I simply approve the pr (or the design)
I find it much calmer and much more productive
I canceled my subscription and switched to a codex, but it's not as good. I'm tired of Anthropic changing things all the time. I use Claude because it doesn't redirect you to a different model like OpenAI does. But now it seems like both companies are doing the same thing in different way.
anthropic for now, at least just seems to change quantization of the model
