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.
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.
Make the application configurable. Developers like to tinker with their tools.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
If Claude Code can replace an engineer, it should cost just a bit less than an engineer, not half as much.
Autocorrect hall of famer, there.
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?
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!
edit: Fuck I'm getting trolled
To other actors who want to train a distilled version of Claude, more likely.
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.
1: https://blog.devgenius.io/you-might-be-breaking-claudes-tos-...
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.
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.
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
Or, it could serve as a textbook example how to make your real future long term customers (=fluent coders) angry… what a strategy :)
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.
There is a reason why nowadays games start to help massively if the player gets stuck.
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.
just 6 months more and like $200B in capex and we’ll be there, trust the process
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Use the pi coding agent. Bare-bones context, easy to hack.
Yesterday "I don't know about you, but I benefit so much from using Claude at work that I would gladly pay $1,500-$2,000 per month to keep using it."
Thanks for that, and it's worth nothing FYI.
LLMs are probably the most impressive machine made in recorded human existence. Will there be a better machine? I'm 100% confident there will be, but this is without a doubt extremely valuable for a wide array of fields, including software development. Anyone claiming otherwise is just pretending at this point, maybe out of fear and/or hope, but it's a distorted view of reality.
By this do you mean there isn't much more room for future improvement, or that you feel it is not useful in its current form for software development? I think the latter is hard position to defend, speaking as a user of it. I am definitely more productive with it now, although I'm not sure I enjoy software development as much anymore (but that is a different topic)
I don't expect that LLM technology will improve in a way that makes it significantly better . I think the training pool is poisoned, and I suspect that the large AI labs have been cooking the benchmark data for years to suspect that their models are improving more quickly than they are in reality.
That being said, I'm sure some company will figure out new strategies for deploying LLMs that will cause a significant improvement.
But I don't expect that improvements are going to come from increased training.
> [Do] you feel it is not useful in its current form for software development?
IME using LLMs for software development corrodes my intuitive understanding of an enterprise codebase.
Since the advent of LLMs, I've been asked to review many sloppy 500+/1000+ line spam PRs written by arrogant Kool-Aid drinking coworkers. If someone is convinced that Claude Code is AGI, they won't hesitate to drop a slop bomb on you.
Basically I feel that coding using LLMs degrades my understanding of what I'm working on and enables coworkers to dominate my day with spam code review requests.
I feel you there, I definitely notice that. I find I can output high quality software with it (if I control the design and planning, and iterate), but I lack that intuitive feel I get about how it all works in practice. Especially noticeable when debugging; I have fewer "Oh! I bet I know what is going on!" eureka moments.
It seems so gross.
But I guess with all of the trillions of investor dollars being dumped into the businesses, it would be irresponsible to not run guerrilla PR campaigns
I think this takes away from the main thrust of your argument which is the marketing campaign and to me makes you seem conspiratorial minded. LLMs can be both useful and also mass astroturfing can be happening.
Personally I have witnessed non coders (people who can code a little but have not done any professional software building) like my spouse do some pretty amazing things. So I don’t think it’s useless.
It can be all of:
1. It’s useful for coding
2. There’s mass social media astroturfing happening
3. There’s a massive social overhype train that should be viewed skeptically
4. Theres some genuine word of mouth and developer demand to try the latest models out of curiosity, with some driven by the hype train and irrational exuberance and some by fear for their livelihoods.
IN MY GENUINELY HELD OPINION, LLMs generate shit code and the people who disagree don't know what good code looks like.
Yes they are. This is true.
> which is a time consuming and tedious part of programming.
In my experience, this is a tedious part of programming which I do not spend very much time on.
In my experience LLM generated API boilerplate is acceptable, yet still sloppier than anything I would write by hand.
In my experience LLMs are quite bad at generating essentially every other type of code, especially if you are not generating JS/TS or HTML/CSS.
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!
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.
> 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
> ...
> 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
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
True vibe coders don't care about this.
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.
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 :)
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.
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)
Our theory is that Claude gets limited if you meet some threshold of power usage.
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.
That said, Cursor Composer is a lot faster and really nice for some tasks that don't require lots of context.
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.
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.
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.
Codex/Claude would like you to ignore both the code AND the process of creating the code.
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.
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.
What’s wrong with you, people? Are you stupid?
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.
https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator
It integrates with the CLI through hooks. completely local.
Ah, the old "you're holding it wrong."
If you are talking about a CLI editor, then micro has hit the nail on quality UX
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.
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,
What if you hit ctrl+o?
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.
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.
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
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.
But FYI the blog post is not about the actual model being dumbed down, but the command line interface.
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.
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.
> 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.
The alternatives are alienating users or dumbing down the software, both of which are worse for any serious professional product.
> 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.
I mean I get it I guess but I'm not nearly so passionate as anyone saying things about this
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.
"docker sandbox run claude" in a recent version of docker is a super easy way to get started.