(Being true to the HN guidelines, I’ve used the title exactly as seen on the GitHub issue)
I was wondering if anyone else is also experiencing this? I have personally found that I have to add more and more CLAUDE.md guide rails, and my CLAUDE.md files have been exploding since around mid-March, to the point where I actually started looking for information online and for other people collaborating my personal observations.
This GH issue report sounds very plausible, but as with anything AI-generated (the issue itself appears to be largely AI assisted) it’s kind of hard to know for sure if it is accurate or completely made up. _Correlation does not imply causation_ and all that. Speaking personally, findings match my own circumstances where I’ve seen noticeable degradation in Opus outputs and thinking.
EDIT: The Claude Code Opus 4.6 Performance Tracker[1] is reporting Nominal.
What I've noticed is that whenever Claude says something like "the simplest fix is..." it's usually suggesting some horrible hack. And whenever I see that I go straight to the code it wants to write and challenge it.
StanAngeloff•1h ago
That is the kind of thing that I've been fighting by being super explicit in CLAUDE.md. For whatever reason, instead of being much more thorough and making sure that files are being changed only after fully understanding the scope of the change (behaviour prior to Feb/Mar), Claude would just jump to the easiest fix now, with no backwards compatibility thinking and to hell with all existing tests. What is even worse is I've seen it try and edit files before even reading them on a couple of occasions, which is a big red flag. (/effort max)
Another thing that worked like magic prior to Feb/Mar was how likely Claude was to load a skill whenever it deduced that a skill might be useful. I personally use [superpowers][1] a lot, and I've noticed that I have to be very explicit when I want a specific skill to be used - to the point that I have to reference the skill by name.
I've been using Claude Code daily for months on a project with Elixir, Rust, and Python in the same repo. It handles multi-language stuff surprisingly well most of the time. The worst failure mode for me is when it does a replace_all on a string that also appears inside a constant definition -- ended up with GROQ_URL = GROQ_URL instead of the actual URL. Took a second round of review agents to catch it. So yeah, you absolutely can't trust it to self-verify.
StanAngeloff•1h ago
You say you've used it for months, I wonder if the example you gave was recent and if you've been noticing an overall degradation in quality or it's been constantly bad for you?
StanAngeloff•1h ago
I was wondering if anyone else is also experiencing this? I have personally found that I have to add more and more CLAUDE.md guide rails, and my CLAUDE.md files have been exploding since around mid-March, to the point where I actually started looking for information online and for other people collaborating my personal observations.
This GH issue report sounds very plausible, but as with anything AI-generated (the issue itself appears to be largely AI assisted) it’s kind of hard to know for sure if it is accurate or completely made up. _Correlation does not imply causation_ and all that. Speaking personally, findings match my own circumstances where I’ve seen noticeable degradation in Opus outputs and thinking.
EDIT: The Claude Code Opus 4.6 Performance Tracker[1] is reporting Nominal.
[1]: https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/
jgrahamc•1h ago
StanAngeloff•1h ago
Another thing that worked like magic prior to Feb/Mar was how likely Claude was to load a skill whenever it deduced that a skill might be useful. I personally use [superpowers][1] a lot, and I've noticed that I have to be very explicit when I want a specific skill to be used - to the point that I have to reference the skill by name.
[1]: https://github.com/obra/superpowers