Claude the model is still insanely great IF (and perhaps, ONLY IF) you are willing to fork over the money for the API and use a harness like OpenCode.

Claude Code itself is complete trash. They had a massive headstart and now are routinely lapped by open source harnesses and then they STILL double down on not allowing e.g. OpenCode usage with the Max plan. Meanwhile, OpenAI lets you use whatever harness you want and its a beast. I recently did some testing and OpenAI's Pro plan on an opencode harness (GPT 5.5 XHigh) with parallel agent delegation absolutely smokes Claude Code 4.7 Max. These days Claude Code can barely even remember its CLAUDE.MD instructions. I'd say Opus 4.7 Max API is slightly better than GPT 5.5 XHigh, but not nearly enough that the API token price is at all justified.

Claude, I think is still better for business things like document generation, design, etc. especially via claude.ai interface (GDrive integrations and things like that are very useful). But for code generation and dev workflows, Claude Code is dropping the ball so hard its starting to look like a generational fumble.

Due to the copilot nerfing recently I've switched to codex and gpt 5.4 (and now especially 5.5) have been doing pretty great.

But even codex has these super weird time limits. It's really starting to show that these companies must have been losing a ton of money with all the recent limits and degration.

I'm still on the "camp" that most of these unicorns will be F'ed by open and local models in the next few years, at least in these coding/chatbox niches and then they'll just be perpetually (re)searching for AGI :shrug:

It is probably not just you, but I would be careful about blaming the 1M context window specifically.

Anthropic’s recent postmortem described several Claude Code regressions around default reasoning effort, context/thinking retention, and a system prompt change to reduce verbosity. Those seem more likely to explain the “less careful / forgetful / worse follow-through” behavior than the context window alone.

I would compare the same task in a fresh session, with the effort setting fixed, and ideally against a few repeatable tasks from your own codebase. Otherwise it is very hard to tell whether the regression is the model, Claude Code’s harness, context management, or just a stale session.

can't say it become worse, but at some point it stops be so useful as it was before - it looks like magic disapear

It's not just you. It's getting much worse. There is a lot of talk on X about it, along with hypotheses and evidence-based testing.

not just you. I use it daily and the quality has been inconsistent lately. Some sessions are great, others it feels like it forgot how to read my codebase. For 200 euros/month you'd expect to be nothing but awesome.

I can't say which is better, but 4.6 was the most intense

Yeah buddy, Claude Code is honestly getting worse lately. It's been giving me buggy or incorrect code for my projects as well

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