Auto-compact not triggering on Claude.ai despite being marked as fixed

189 pointsposted 15 days ago
by nurimamedov
(github.com)

183 Comments

jampa

15 days ago

Slightly off topic, but does anyone feel that they nerfed Claude Opus?

It's screwing up even in very simple rebases. I got a bug where a value wasn't being retrieved correctly, and Claude's solution was to create an endpoint and use an HTTP GET from within the same back-end! Now it feels worse than Sonnet.

All the engineers I asked today have said the same thing. Something is not right.

eterm

15 days ago

That is a well recognised part of the LLM cycle.

A model or new model version X is released, everyone is really impressed.

3 months later, "Did they nerf X?"

It's been this way since the original chatGPT release.

The answer is typically no, it's just your expectations have risen. What was previously mind-blowing improvement is now expected, and any mis-steps feel amplified.

quentindanjou

15 days ago

This is not always true. LLMs do get nerfed, and quite regularly, usually because they discover that users are using them more than expected, because of user abuse or simply because it attract a larger user base. One of the recent nerfs is the Gemini context window, drastically reduced.

What we need is an open and independent way of testing LLMs and stricter regulation on the disclosure of a product change when it is paid under a subscription or prepaid plan.

landl0rd

15 days ago

There's at least one site doing this: https://aistupidlevel.info/

Unfortunately, it's paywalled most of the historical data since I last looked at it, but interesting that opus has dipped below sonnet on overall performance.

dudeinhawaii

14 days ago

Interesting! I was just thinking about pinging the creator of simple-bench.com and asking them if they intend to re-benchmark models after 3 months. I've noticed, in particular, Gemini models dramatically reducing in quality after the initial hype cycle. Gemini 3 Pro _was_ my top performer and has slowly reduced to 'is it worth asking', complete with gpt-4o style glazing. It's been frustrating. I had been working on a very custom benchmark and over the course of it Gemini 3 Pro and Flash both started underperforming by 20% or more. I wondered if I had subtle broken my benchmark but ultimately started seeing the same behavior in general online queries (Google AI Studio).

Analemma_

15 days ago

> What we need is an open and independent way of testing LLMs

I mean, that's part of the problem: as far as I know, no claim of "this model has gotten worse since release!" has ever been validated by benchmarks. Obviously benchmarking models is an extremely hard problem, and you can try and make the case that the regressions aren't being captured by the benchmarks somehow, but until we have a repeatable benchmark which shows the regression, none of these companies are going to give you a refund based on your vibes.

judahmeek

14 days ago

How hard is benchmarking models actually?

We've got a lot of available benchmarks & modifying at least some of those benchmarks doesn't seem particularly difficult: https://arc.markbarney.net/re-arc

To reduce cost & maintain credibility, we could have the benchmarks run through a public CI system.

What am I missing here?

jampa

15 days ago

I usually agree with this. But I am using the same workflows and skills that were a breeze for Claude, but are causing it to run in cycles and require intervention.

This is not the same thing as a "omg vibes are off", it's reproducible, I am using the same prompts and files, and getting way worse results than any other model.

eterm

15 days ago

When I once had that happen in a really bad way, I discovered I had written something wildly incorrect into the readme.

It has a habit of trusting documentation over the actual code itself, causing no end of trouble.

Check your claude.md files (both local and ~user ) too, there could be something lurking there.

Or maybe it has horribly regressed, but that hasn't been my experience, certainly not back to Sonnet levels of needing constant babysitting.

F7F7F7

15 days ago

I’m a x20 Max user who’s on it daily. Unusable the last 2 days. GLM in OpenCode and my local Qwen were more reliable. I wish I was exaggerating.

mrguyorama

15 days ago

Also people who were lucky and had lots of success early on but then start to run into the actual problems of LLMs will experience that as "It was good and then it got worse" even when it didn't actually.

If LLMs have a 90% chance of working, there will be some who have only success and some who have only failure.

People are really failing to understand the probabilistic nature of all of this.

"You have a radically different experience with the same model" is perfectly possible with less than hundreds of thousands of interactions, even when you both interact in comparable ways.

olao99

14 days ago

Just because it's been true in the past doesn't mean it will always the case

ojr

14 days ago

Opus was a non-deterministic probability machine in the past, present and the foreseeable future. The variance eventually shows up when you push it hard.

spike021

15 days ago

Eh, I've definitely had issues where Claude can no longer easily do what it's previously done. That's with constant documenting things in appropriate markdown files well and resetting context here and there to keep confusion minimal.

user

15 days ago

[deleted]

F7F7F7

15 days ago

I don’t care what anyone says about the cycle or that implying that it’s all in our heads. It’s bad bad.

I’m a Max x20 model who had to stop using it this week. Opus was regularly failing on the most basic things.

I regularly use the front end skill to pass mockups and Opus was always pixel perfect. This last week it seemed like the skill had no effect.

I don’t think they are purposely nerfing it but they are definitely using us as guinea pigs. Quantized model? The next Sonnet? The next Haiku? New tokenizing strategies?

ryanar

14 days ago

I noticed that this week. I have a very straightforward claude command that lists exact steps to follow to fetch PR comments to bring them into the context window. Stuff like step one call gh pr view my/repo and it would call it with anthropiclabs/repo instead, it wouldn’t follow all the instructions, it wouldn’t pass the exact command I had written. I pointed out the mistake and it goes oh you are right! Then proceeded to make the same mistake again.

I used this command with sonnet 4.5 too and have never had a problem until this week. Something changed either in the harness or model. This is not just vibes. Workflows I have run hundreds of times have stopped working with Opus 4.5

kachapopopow

15 days ago

They're A/B testing on the latest opus model, sometimes it's good sometimes it's worse than sonnet annoying as hell. I think they trigger it when you have excessive usage or high context use.

hirako2000

15 days ago

Or maybe when usage is low so that we try again.

Or maybe when usage is high they tweak a setting that use cache when it shouldn't.

For all we know they do whatever experiment the want, to demonstrate theoretical better margin, to analyse user patterns when a performance drop occur.

Given what is done in other industries which don't face an existential issue, it wouldn't surprise me some whistle blowers in a few years tell us what's been going on.

root_axis

15 days ago

This has been said about every LLM product from every provider since ChatGPT4. I'm sure nerfing happens, but I think the more likely explanation is that humans have a tendency to find patterns in random noise.

measurablefunc

15 days ago

They are constantly trying to reduce costs which means they're constantly trying to distill & quantize the models to reduce the energy cost per request. The models are constantly being "nerfed", the reduction in quality is a direct result of seeking profitability. If they can charge you $200 but use only half the energy then they pocket the difference as their profit. Otherwise they are paying more to run their workloads than you are paying them which means every request loses them money. Nerfing is inevitable, the only question is how much it reduces response quality & what their customers are willing to put up with.

landl0rd

15 days ago

I've observed the same random foreign-language characters (I believe chinese or japanese?) interspersed without rhyme or reason that I've come to expect from low-quality, low-parameter-count models, even while using "opus 4.5".

An upcoming IPO increases pressure to make financials look prettier.

boringg

13 days ago

Ive seen this too and ignored it. Weird

mrstern

14 days ago

I've noticed a significant drop in Opus' performance in Claude Code since last week. It's more about "reasoning" than syntax. Feels more like Sonnet 4.1 than Opus 4.5.

epolanski

15 days ago

Not really.

In fact as my prompts and documents get better it seems it does increasingly better.

Still, it can't replace a human, I really need to correct it at all, and if I try to one shot a feature I always end up spending more time refactoring it few days later.

Still, it's a huge boost to productivity, but the time it can take over without detailed info and oversight is far away.

paulhebert

15 days ago

I tried using Claude Code this week because I have a free account from my work.

However when I try to log in via CLI it takes me to a webpage with an “Authorize” button. Clicking the button does nothing. An error is logged to the console but nothing displays in the UI.

We reached out to support who have not helped.

Not a great first impression

hobofan

15 days ago

Sadly their whole frontend seems to be built without QC and mostly blindly assuming a happy path.

For the claude.ai UI, I've never had a single deep research properly transition (and I've done probably 50 or so) to its finished state. I just know to refresh the page after ~10mins to make the report show up.

F7F7F7

15 days ago

Claude likely built their front end.

attheicearcade

15 days ago

Do you have API access (platform.claude.com) rather than Claude code (claude.ai)? I had similar issues trying to get Claude CLI working via the second method, not knowing there’s a difference

paulhebert

14 days ago

I think I have API access.

But it’s confusing.

The docs say run “Claude” and then pick your option.

I tried multiple options and neither worked

btown

15 days ago

Claude Code's only saving grace is that it's pretty good from a fresh session - it can largely find and re-load into context what it needs to load. If I see my context ticking down, I ask it to give me a summary and TODO list, and either copy it, or have it put that into a docstring of what it's working on. Then just start a fresh session on that file. Shouldn't need to do this, for sure, but it gets it done in a pinch.

My largest gripe with Claude Code, and with encouraging my team to use it, is that checkpoints/rollbacks are still not implemented in the VS Code GUI, leading to a wildly inconsistent experience between terminal and GUI users: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/10352

nojs

15 days ago

> checkpoints/rollbacks are still not implemented in the VS Code GUI

Rollbacks have been broken for me in the terminal for over a month. It just didn’t roll back the code most of the time. I’ve totally stopped using the feature and instead just rely on git. Is this this case for others?

gpm

15 days ago

I've been using /rewind in claude code (the terminal, not using vscode at all) quite a bit recently without issue - if that's the feature you're asking about.

Not discounting at all that you might "hold it" differently and have a different experience. E.g. I basically avoid claude code having any interaction with the VCS at all - and I could easily VCS interaction being a source of bugs with this sort of feature.

nojs

15 days ago

I mean double tapping escape, going back up the history, and choosing the “restore conversation and code” option. Sometimes bits of code are restored, but rarely all changes.

It worked when first released but hasn’t for ages now.

F7F7F7

15 days ago

My solution has been to keep the GitHub GUI open and roll back is becomes a quick right click > discard.

I’d much rather have the terminal version working again though.

kuboble

15 days ago

Anecdotal evidence of course but I have one long-running session in a terminal for over a month now. I work with it daily, compacts several times a day, I rollback conversation sometimes. All with no issues.

system2

15 days ago

Unsure what your use case is, but compaction makes it lose anormous amount of context. Claude code is better used on a task-by-task basis; things get bad. The whole purpose of init and CLAUDE.md is to prevent long chats from losing context and approach more surgically.

kuboble

15 days ago

I'm fully aware of that.

For the last month I've been working on a relatively big feature in a larger project.

I often compact the session when starting a new feature, often have to remind claude to read the claude.md etc. I still use it as if it was a new session regularly, it frequently doesn't remember what it did an hour ago, etc.

But the compact seems to work which is a very different experience than the one of the GP, who kills the session when it reaches the context limit and writes explicit summary files.

hknceykbx

15 days ago

Saving this into md files proves to be more effective

kaydub

15 days ago

I've been using beads for longer term stuff (todo kinda stuff), have you given that a try?

I literally just posted in another comment that people shouldn't be worried about killing their current session/context window. I used to get worried about compaction and losing context, but now when I feel like things are slipping I kill it quick and start a new session.

copirate

15 days ago

There's also this issue[1] with about 300 participants about limits being reached much more quickly since they stopped the 2x limit for the holidays. A few people from Anthropic joined the conversation but didn't say much. Some users say they solved the issue by creating a new account or changing their plan.

[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/16157

codazoda

15 days ago

Something to check is if you’re opted into the test for the 1M context window. A co-worker told me this happened to them. They were burning a lot more tokens in the beta. Seems like creating a new account could track with this (but is obviously the Nuclear option).

I recently put a little money on the API for my personal account. I seem to burn more tokens on my personal account than my day job, in spite of using AI for 4x as long at work, and I’m trying to figure out why.

cheschire

15 days ago

Super, and for those of us on the annual plan, I guess I just accept my new reality

MicKillah

15 days ago

I can definitely vouch for that being the case, for me.

boringg

15 days ago

Oh is this whats been happening? I've been trying to ask question on a fairly long context window and history -- but it fails. No response it kind of acknowledges it received the input but then reprints the last output and then that whole dialogue is essentially dead ... same issue? Happened multiple times - quite frustrating.

Just a pro sub - not max.

Most of the time it gives me a heads up that I'm at 90% but a lot of the times it just failed, no warning, and I assumed it was I hit max.

kingkawn

15 days ago

I’ve also been encountering this behavior, coupled with rapidly declining length of use for a pro account now below an hour, and weekly limits getting hit by Wednesday despite achieving very little other than fixing its own mistakes after compressions.

kilroy123

15 days ago

Same here. Very bad and frustrating user experience to see nothing.

whoevercares

15 days ago

My guess is SRE culture is a tough sell at Anthropic. When you’re a frontier lab, almost everything else looks more prestigious and more immediately “impactful”.

MadsRC

15 days ago

Well, the head of reliability did leave a month or two ago zD

VerifiedReports

15 days ago

The VS Code plug-in is broken on Windows. The command-line interface is broken on Windows.

I just signed up as a paying customer, only to find that Claude is totally unusable for my purposes at the moment. There's also no support (shocker), despite their claims that you'll be E-mailed by the support team if you file a report.

brookst

15 days ago

I use the CLI on two different windows machines for many hours a day, and have seen no sign of being broken.

What symptoms do you see? There are some command line parameters for reinstall / update that might be worth trying.

VerifiedReports

14 days ago

This is a fresh install. The CLI brokenness is documented in this and across several bugs marked as dupes: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/20115

And if you try to use the "regular" VS Code plug-in mode, it fails with error 3221225477. A search will turn up reports on that too.

If you query Claude itself on this, it will acknowledge that both of these are known problems: "Oh, you've hit this known issue." But no support for paying customers, who are promised a follow-up E-mail after reporting a problem. BULLSHIT. A week later, I haven't heard a peep, and what I paid for is thus far useless.

OGEnthusiast

15 days ago

I feel like Claude Code is starting to fall over from being entirely written by LLMs. How do you even begin to fix precise bugs in a 1M+ LOC codebase all written by AI? It seems like LLMs are great for quickly adding large new features but not great for finding and fixing edge-cases.

eunoia

15 days ago

This is real. I’ve seen some baffling bugs in prompt based stop hook behavior.

When I investigated I found the docs and implementation are completely out of sync, but the implementation doesn’t work anyway. Then I went poking on GitHub and found a vibed fix diff that changed the behavior in a totally new direction (it did not update the documentation).

Seems like everyone over there is vibing and no one is rationalizing the whole.

klodolph

15 days ago

I’m happy to throw an LLM at our projects but we also spend time refactoring and reviewing each other’s code. When I look at the AI-generated code I can visualize the direction it’s headed in—lots of copy-pasted code with tedious manual checks for specific error conditions and little thought about how somebody reading it could be confident that the code is correct.

I can’t understand how people would run agents 24/7. The agent is producing mediocre code and is bottlenecked on my review & fixes. I think I’m only marginally faster than I was without LLMs.

gpm

15 days ago

> with tedious manual checks for specific error conditions

And specifically: Lots of checks for impossible error conditions - often then supplying an incorrect "default value" in the case of those error conditions which would result in completely wrong behavior that would be really hard to debug if a future change ever makes those branches actually reachable.

klodolph

15 days ago

I always thought that the vast majority of your codebase, the right thing to do with an error is to propagate it. Either blindly, or by wrapping it with a bit of context info.

I don’t know where the LLMs are picking up this paranoid tendency to handle every single error case. It’s worth knowing about the error cases, but it requires a lot more knowledge and reasoning about the current state of the program to think about how they should be handled. Not something you can figure out just by looking at a snippet.

zbentley

15 days ago

Training data from junior programmers or introductory programming teaching material. No matter how carefully one labels data, the combination of programming’s subjectivity (damaging human labeling and reinforcement’s effectiveness at filtering around this) and the sheer volume of low-experience code in the input corpus makes this condition basically inevitable.

PrimalPower

15 days ago

Garbage in garbage out as they say. I will be the first to admit that Claude enables me to do certain things that I simply could not do before without investing a significant amount of time and energy.

At the same time, the amount of anti-patterns the LLM generates is higher than I am able to manage. No Claude.md and Skills.md have not fixed the issue.

Building a production grade system using Claude has been a fools errand for me. Whatever time/energy i save by not writing code - I end up paying back when I read code that I did not write and fixing anti-patterns left and right.

I rationalized by a bit - deflecting by saying this is AI's code not mine. But no - this is my code and it's bad.

throwup238

15 days ago

> At the same time, the amount of anti-patterns the LLM generates is higher than I am able to manage. No Claude.md and Skills.md have not fixed the issue.

This is starting to drive me insane. I was working on a Rust cli that depends on docker and Opus decided to just… keep the cli going with a warning “Docker is not installed” before jumping into a pile of garbage code that looks like it was written by a lobotomized kangaroo because it tries to use an Option<Docker> everywhere instead of making sure its installed and quitting with an error if it isn’t.

What do I even write in a CLAUDE.md file? The behavior is so stupid I don’t even know how to prompt against it.

xienze

15 days ago

> I don’t know where the LLMs are picking up this paranoid tendency to handle every single error case.

Think about it, they have to work in a very limited context window. Like, just the immediate file where the change is taking place, essentially. Having broader knowledge of how the application deals with particular errors (catch them here and wrap? Let them bubble up? Catch and log but don't bubble up?) is outside its purview.

I can hear it now, "well just codify those rules in CLAUDE.md." Yeah but there's always edge cases to the edge cases and you're using English, with all the drawbacks that entails.

gpm

15 days ago

I have encoded rules against this in CLAUDE.md. Claude routinely ignores those rules until I ask "how can this branch be reached?" and it responds "it can't. So according to <rule> I should crash instead" and goes and does that.

stefan_

15 days ago

The answer (as usual) is reinforcement learning. They gave ten idiots some code snippets, and all of them went for the "belt and braces" approach. So now thats all we get, ever. It's like the previous versions that spammed emojis everywhere despite that not being a thing whatsoever in their training data. I don't think they ever fixed that, just put a "spare us the emojis" instruction in the system prompt bandaid.

human_person

15 days ago

This is my biggest frustration with the code they generate (but it does make it easy to check if my students have even looked at the generated code). I dont want to fail silently or hard code an error message, it creates a pile of lies to work through for future debugging

colechristensen

15 days ago

Writing bad tests and error handling have been the worst performance part of Claude for me.

In particular writing tests that do nothing, writing tests and then skipping them to resolve test failures, and everybody's favorite: writing a test that greps the source code for a string (which is just insane, how did it get this idea?)

freedomben

15 days ago

Seriously. Maybe 60% of the time I use claude for tests, the "fix" for the failing tests is also to change the application code so the test passes (in some cases it will want to make massive architecture changes to accomodate the test, even if there's an easy way to adapt the test to better fit the arch). Maybe half the time that's the right thing to do, but the other half the time it is most definitely not. It's a high enough error rate that it borderlines on useful.

kaydub

15 days ago

Usually you want to fix the code that's failing a test.

The assumption is that your test is right. That's TDD. Then you write your code to conform to the tests. Otherwise what's the point of the tests if you're just trying to rewrite them until they pass?

withinboredom

15 days ago

Or deleting the test files to make all tests pass. It’s my personal favorite.

heliumtera

15 days ago

>Seems like everyone over there is vibing and no one is rationalizing the whole.

Claude Code creator literally brags about running 10 agents in parallel 24/7. It doesn't just seems like it, they confirmed like it is the most positive thing ever.

TrainedMonkey

15 days ago

It's software engineering crack. Starting a project feels amazing, features are shipping, a complex feature in the afternoon - ezpz. But AI lacks permanence, for every feature you start over from scratch, except there is more of codebase now, but the context window is still the same. So there is drift, codebase randomizes, edge cases proliferate, and the implementation velocity slows down.

Full disclosure - I am a heavy codex user and I review and understand every line of code. I manually fight spurious tests it tries to add by pointing a similar one already exists and we can get coverage with +1 LOC vs +50. It's exhausting, but personal productivity is still way up.

I think the future is bright because training / fine-tuning taste, dialing down agentic frameworks, introducing adversarial agents, and increasing model context windows all seem attainable and stackable.

kaydub

15 days ago

I usually have multiple agents up working on a codebase. But it's typically 1 agent building out features and 1 or 2 agents code reviewing, finding code smells, bad architecture, duplicated code, stale/dead code, etc.

I'm definitely faster, but there's a lot of LLM overhead to get things done right. I think if you're just using a single agent/session you're missing out on some of the speed gains.

I think a lot of the gains I get using an LLM is because I can have the multiple different agent sessions work on different projects at the same time.

tuhgdetzhh

15 days ago

I think that the current test suite is far too small. For the Claude Code codebase, a sensible next step would be to generate thousands of tests. Without that kind of coverage, regressions are likely, and the existing checks and review process do not appear sufficient to reliably prevent them. My request is that an entirely LLM-written feature should only be eligible for merge once all of those generated tests pass, so we have objective evidence that the change preserves existing behavior.

MrDarcy

15 days ago

I know at least one of the companies behind a coding agent we all have heard of has called in human experts to clean up their vibe coded IAC mess created in the last year.

skerit

15 days ago

I switched to OpenCode, away from Claude-Code, because Claude-Code is _so_ buggy.

einpoklum

15 days ago

> When I investigated I found the docs and implementation are completely out of sync, but the implementation doesn’t work anyway.

That is not an uncommon occurrence in human-written code as well :-\

tobyjsullivan

15 days ago

Someone said it best after one of those AWS outages from a fat-fingered config change:

> Automation doesn't just allow you to create/fix things faster. It also allows you to break things faster.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13775966

Edit: found the original comment from NikolaeVarius

nrds

15 days ago

What else could they do? If they don't vibecode Claude Code it is a bad look.

data_ders

15 days ago

omg are you me? I had this exact same problem last week

dataviz1000

15 days ago

> I feel like Claude Code is starting to fall over from being entirely written by LLMs.

The degradation is palpable.

I have been using vscode github copilot chat with mostly the claude opus 4.5 model. The underlying code for vscode github copilot chat has turned to shit. It will continuously make mistakes no matter what for 20 minutes. This morning I was researching Claude Code and pricing thinking about switching however this post sounds like it has turned to shit also. I don't mind spending $300-$500 a month for a tool that was a month ago accomplishing in a day what would take me 3-4 days to code. However, the days since the last update have been shit.

Clearly the AI companies can't afford to run these models at profit. Do I buy puts?

egeozcan

15 days ago

I think you can keep the vibe coding totally under control with good tests. I'm baffled how such a huge regression would not be caught.

Then again, the google home page was broken on FF on Android for how long?

gpm

15 days ago

Not my experience at all when I occasionally try making something purely coded by AI for fun. It starts off fine but the pile of sub-optimal patterns slowly builds towards an unmaintainable mess with tons of duplication of code, and state that somehow needs to be kept in sync. Tests and linters can't test that the code is actually reasonable code...

Doesn't mean it's not a useful tool - if you read and think about the output you can keep it in check. But the "100% of my contributions to Claude Code were written by Claude Code" claim by the creator makes me doubt this is being done.

jordanbeiber

15 days ago

Using AI doesn’t really change the fact that keeping ones and zeroes in check is like trying to keep quicksand in your hands and shape it.

Shaping of a codebase is the name of the game - this has always been, and still, is difficult. Build something, add to it, refactor, abstraction doesn’t sit right, refactor, semantics change, refactor, etc, etc.

I’m surprised at how so few seem to get this. Working enterprise code, many codebases 10-20 years old could just as well have been produced by LLMs.

We’ve never been good at paying debt and you kind of need a bit of OCD to keep a code base in check. LLM exacerbates a lack of continuous moulding as iterations can be massive and quick.

egeozcan

14 days ago

I was part of a big software development team once and that necessity I felt there, namely, being able to let go of the small details and focusing on the big picture is even more important when using llms.

AstroBen

15 days ago

Everyone has been stressing over losing their job because of AI. I'm genuinely starting to think this will end in 5x more work needing to clean up the mess caused. Who's going to maintain all this generated code?

dawnerd

15 days ago

That's what I'm worried about. I hate cleaning up AI code now from contractors. If that's going to be the future of this gig, I'm out.

alephnerd

15 days ago

Most of us in the financial side of this space think so as well. This is why AI Ludditism doesn't make sense - CAT Hydraulic Excavators didn't end manual shovelers, it forced them to upskill.

Similarly, Human-in-the-loop utilization of AI/ML tooling in software development is expected and in fact encouraged.

Any IP that is monetizable and requires significant transformation will continue to see humans-in-the-loop.

Weak hiring in the tech industry is for other reasons (macro changes, crappy/overpriced "talent", foreign subsidies, demanding remote work).

AI+Competent Developer paid $300k TC > Competent Developer paid $400k TC >>> AI+Average Developer paid $30k TC >> Average Developer paid $40k TC >>>>> Average Developer paid $200k TC

fuzzzerd

15 days ago

> AI+Competent Developer paid $300k TC > Competent Developer paid $400k TC >>> AI+Average Developer paid $30k TC >> Average Developer paid $40k TC >>>>> Average Developer paid $200k TC

Huh?

alephnerd

15 days ago

As in the ranking/mental model increasingly being used by management in upper market organizations.

A Coding copilot subscription paired with a competent developer dramatically speeds up product and feature delivery, and also significantly upskills less competent developers.

That said, truly competent developers are few and far between, and the fact that developers in (eg.) Durham or remote are demanding a SF circa 2023 base makes the math to offshore more cost effective - even if the delivered quality is subpar (which isn't neccesarily true), it's good enough to release, and can be refactored at a later date.

What differentiates a "competent" developer from an "average" developer is the learning mindset. Plenty of people on HN kvetch about being forced to learn K8s, Golang, Cloud Primitives, Prompt Engineering, etc or not working in a hub, and then bemoan the job market.

If we are paying you IB Associate level salaries with a fraction of the pedigree and vetting needed to get those roles, upskilling is the least you can do.

We aren't paying mid 6 figure TC for a code monkey - at that point we may as well entirely use AI and an associate at Infosys - we are paying for critical and abstract thinking.

As such, AI in the hands of a truly competent engineer is legitimately transformative.

Tl;dr - Mo' money, Mo' expectations

kaydub

15 days ago

Those covid years really skewed the market lol

inimino

15 days ago

Nobody is going to maintain it, the spec that generated it will be given to better systems and it will be rewritten.

nosianu

15 days ago

That would be possible if you had just the spec, but after sometime most of the code will not have been generated through the original spec, but through lots of back and forth for adding features and big fixing. No way to run all that again.

Not that old big non-AI software doesn't have similar maintainability issues (I keep posting this example, but I don't actually want to callthat company out specifically, the problem is widespread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941).

That's why I'm reluctant to complain about the AI code issues too much. The problem of how software is written, on the higher level, the teams, the decisions, the rotating programmers, may be bigger than that of any particular technology or person actually writing the code.

I remember a company where I looked at a contractor job, they wanted me to fix a lot of code they had received from their Eastern European programmers. They complained about them a lot in our meeting. However, after hearing them out I was convinced the problem was not the people generating the code, but the ones above them who failed to provide them with accurate specs and clear guidance, and got surprised at the very end that it did not work as expected.

Similar with AI. It may be hard to disentangle what is project management, what is actually the fault of the AI. I found that you can live with pockets of suboptimal but mostly working code well enough, even adding features and fixing bugs easily, if the overall architecture is solid, and components are well isolated.

That is why I don't worry too much about the complaints here about bad error checks and other small stuff. Even if it is bad, you will have lots of such issues in typical large corporate projects, even with competent people. That's because programmers keep changing, management focuses on features over anything else (usually customers, internal or external, don't pay for code reorg, only for new features). The layers above the low level code are more important in deciding if the project is and remains viable.

From what the commenters say, it seems to me the problem starts much higher than the Claude code, so it is hard to say how much at fault AI generated code actually is IMHO. Whether you have inexperienced juniors or an AI producing code, you need solid project lead and architecture layers above the lines of code first of all.

inimino

14 days ago

That's why all the code in my project is generated from the "prompts" (actually just regular block comments + references) and so all of that is checked in.

AstroBen

15 days ago

This really feels like a faith-based argument. That's not possible today

I'd much rather make plans based on reality

inimino

14 days ago

I've been living this reality for months and built a tool around this workflow so no faith required.

FeteCommuniste

15 days ago

> Who's going to maintain all this generated code?

Other AI agents, I guess. Call Claude in to clean up code written by Gemini, then ChatGPT to clean up the bugs introduced by Claude, then start the cycle over again.

kaydub

15 days ago

This is probably tongue in cheek, but I literally do this and it works.

I've had one llm one-shot a codebase. Then I use another one to review (with a pretty explicit prompt). I take that review and feed it to another agent to refactor. Repeat that a bunch of times.

direwolf20

15 days ago

It won't be maintained — quality will decrease forever.

ssl-3

15 days ago

Or: We throw it all out and call the next iterations "version 2."

If the code is cheap (and it certainly is), then tossing it out and replacing it can also be cheap.

kaydub

15 days ago

In the cloud with a micro-service architecture this just makes sense. Expose an API and call it a day, who cares what's behind the API as long as it follows the spec.

gpm

15 days ago

PS. In the 5 minutes between starting and finishing writing the parent comment https://claude.ai/settings/usage just stopped displaying my quota usage... fun.

Edit: And 3 minutes later it is back...

swalsh

15 days ago

Be careful with that confidence. Sometimes the AI changes the test when the test tells the AI it's recent changes broke something.

egeozcan

14 days ago

You can see if a test is changed. If you're paranoid like I am, you can simply make the tests read-only for the user you're running the agent from.

cyanydeez

15 days ago

Whose going to write those good tests, and are they going to write them or disable them cause they dont work.

AstroBen

15 days ago

I think you underestimate how impossible of a task it is to write sufficient test coverage to keep AI in line

You can assert that something you want to happen is actually happening

How do you assert all the things it shouldn't be doing? They're endless. And AI WILL mess up

It's enough if you're actively reviewing the code in depth.. but if you're vibe coding? Good luck

brookst

15 days ago

How do we check humans’ work for these unknown errors?

gpm

15 days ago

An expectation of professionalism, training and written material on software design, providing incentives (like promotions) to not produce crap, etc.

It's not a world where everything produced is immediately verified.

If a human consistently only produced the quality of work Claude Opus 4.5 is capable of I would expect them to be fired from just about any job in short order. Yes, they'd get some stuff done, but they'd do too much damage to be worth it. Of course humans are much more expensive than LLMs to manage so this doesn't mean it can't be a useful tool... just it's not that useful a tool yet.

ASalazarMX

15 days ago

Humans may be prone to err, but they don't confabulate like LLMs do. Also, the unit tests are done by people who know intimately the expected behavior of the code, which surprisingly, it's frequently the same programmer.

This can be abused because the programmer is both judge and jury, but people tend to handle this paradox much better than LLMs.

AstroBen

15 days ago

We have many layers to prevent them:

1. Competent humans architecting and leading the system who understand the specs, business needs, have critical thinking skills and are good at their job

2. Automated tests

3. Competent human reviewers

4. QA

5. Angry users

Cutting out 1 and 3 in favor of more tests isn't gunna work

kaydub

15 days ago

Ugh, I just think everyone in these threads are talking past each other.

I'm personally not advocating for not having humans in the loop. I don't know of anybody using llm tools or advocating for them that are saying there shouldn't be humans in the loop. "vibe coding" seems to mean different things to different people.

kaydub

15 days ago

Not just tests.

I run multiple agents in separate sessions. It starts with one agent, building out features or working on a task/bug fix. Once it gets some progress, I spin up another session and have it just review the code. I explicitly tell it things to look out for. I tell it to let me know about things I'm not thinking of and to make me aware of any blind spots. Whatever it reviews I send back to the agent building out features (I used to also review what the review agent told me about, but now I probably only review it like 20% of the time). I'll also have an agent session started just for writing tests, I tell it to look at the code and see if it's testable, find duplicate code, stale/dead code. And so on and so forth.

Between all of that + deterministic testing it's hard for shit to end up in the code base.

tyfon

15 days ago

I've been trying opencode a bit with gemini pro (and claude via those) with a rust project, and I have a push pre-hook to cargo check the code.

The amount of times I have to "yell" at the llm for adding #[allow] statements to silence the linter instead of fixing the code is crazy and when I point it out they go "Oops, you caught me, let me fix it the proper way".

So the tests don't necessarily make them produce proper code.

ASalazarMX

15 days ago

I was doing a somewhat elaborate form/graph in Google Worksheets, had to translate a bunch of cells from English to Spanish, and said "Why not use Gemini for this easy, grunt work? They tend to output good translations".

I spent 20 minutes between guiding it because it was putting the translation in the wrong cells, asking it not to convert the cells to a fancy table, and finally, convincing it that it really had access to alter the document, because at some point it denied it. I wasn't being rude, but it seems I somehow made it evasive.

I had to ask it to translate in the chat, and manually copy-pasted the translations in the proper cells myself. Bonus points because it only translated like ten cells at a time, and truncated the reply with a "More cells translated" message.

I can't imagine how hard it would be to handhold an LLM while working in a complex code base. I guess they are a godsend for prototypes and proofs of concept, but they can't beat a competent engineer yet. It's like that joke where a student answers that 2+2=5, and when questioned, he replies that his strength is speed, not accuracy.

kaydub

15 days ago

This is one of those places I feel like they're trying to do too much with the LLMs and I think this is one of those places where there's "a bubble". I feel like the LLMs are text tools, so trying to take them out of their domain and force them somewhere else you're going to have problems.

Anyways, I replied because I had something else I wanted to say.

I was using Gemini in a google worksheet a while back. I had to cross reference a website and input stuff into a cell. I got Gemini to do it, had it do the first row, then the second, then I told it to do a batch of 10, then 20. It had a hiccup at 20, would take too long I guess. So I had it go back to 10. But then Gemini tells me it can't read my worksheet. I convince it that it can, but then it tells me it can't edit my worksheet. I argue with it, "you've been changing the worksheet wtf?" I convinced it that it could and it started again, but then after doing a couple it told me it couldn't again. We went back and forth a bit, I'd get it working, it would break, repeat. I think it was after the third time I just couldn't get it to do it again.

I looked up the docs, searched online, and I was concerned that I found Google didn't allow Gemini to do a lot of stuff to worksheets/docs/other google workspace stuff. They said they didn't allow it to do a ton of stuff that I definitely had Gemini doing.

Then a week or two went by and google announced they're allowing gemini to directly edit worksheets.

So wtf how did I get it to do it before it could do it???

egeozcan

15 days ago

I added a bunch of lines telling it to never do that in CLAUDE.md and it worked flawlessly.

So I have a different experience with Claude Code, but I'm not trying to say you're holding it wrong, just adding a data point, and then, maybe I got lucky.

ASalazarMX

15 days ago

I'm curious how many of those directives you'll have in that file at the end of the year.

egeozcan

14 days ago

I think it won't be bigger than the giant set of rules people are supposed to read through (they never do) when onboarding.

At least with AGENTS/CLAUDE.md file, you know the agent will re-read those rules on every new session.

kaydub

15 days ago

Why are you guys having LLMs use git at all???

Manage that yourself! If you have hooks throwing errors then feed the error back into the llm.

OptionOfT

15 days ago

You don't. These seems to be this idea that LLMs can do it all, but the reality is that it itself has limited amounts of memory, and thus context.

And this is not tied to the LLMs. It's that to EVERYTHING we do. There are limits everywhere.

And for humans the context window might be smaller, but at least we have developed methods of abstracting different context windows, by making libraries.

Now, as a trade-off of trying to go super-fast, changes need to be made in response to your current prompts, and there is no time validate behavior in cases you haven't considered.

And regardless of whether you have abstractions in libraries, or whether you have inlined code everywhere, you're gonna have issues.

With libraries changes in behavior are going to impact code in places you don't want, but also, you don't necessarily know, as you haven't tested all paths.

With inlined code everywhere you're probably going to miss instances, or code goes on to live its own life and you lose track of it.

They built a skyscraper while shifting out foundational pieces. And now a part of the skyscraper is on the foundation of your backyard shed.

swalsh

15 days ago

Just like a leveraged ETF, the returns are twice as good when things are on the up and up, but when you dig a hole it takes three times the effort to dig yourself out because now going down twice as fast, and you're also paying interest (ie, you have no clue where the bodies are burried as you bury them twice as fast).

mark_l_watson

15 days ago

Despite having written a few books on LLM applications I use them sparingly for coding: to design and get started, and occasionally for debugging. I have no interest criticizing other people’s practices but I enjoy mostly writing code myself.

agumonkey

15 days ago

structural (team) recursion and statistical output don't mesh well together ?

quietsegfault

15 days ago

What differences do you see between AI written codebases and a codebase written by engineers? Both parties create buggy code, but I can imagine the types of bugs are different. Is it just that bug fixing doesn't really scale because we don't have the ability to chomp down 1M+ LOC codebases into LLM context?

root_axis

15 days ago

This explanation fits my intuition, but from an outsider's perspective, I can't say the user experience with claude code is noticeably more bug-ridden than what is typical for a rapidly scaling startup rushing crap out the door. It's vibes all the way down.

borg16

15 days ago

vibe around and find out

folks have created software by "vibe coding". It is now time to "face the music" when doing so for production grade software at scale.

charcircuit

15 days ago

LLMs have been great at finding and fixing edge cases in my experience. It's a useful tool for improving software quality.

bmurphy1976

15 days ago

You do it the same way you fix every other disaster of a code-base. You add a ton of tests and start breaking it up into modules. You then rewrite each module/component/service/etc. one at a time using good practices. That's how every project gets out of the muck.

That's a big, slow, and expensive process though.

Will Anthropic actually do that or will they keep throwing AI at it and hope the AI figures this approach out? We shall see...

AstroBen

15 days ago

With the competition biting at their heels I don't think they have time to do that. They're stuck with what they have. At least until innovation settles a little

ankit219

15 days ago

think this particular complaint is about claude ai - the website - and not claude code. I see your point though.

throwjjj

15 days ago

Wishful thinking. Lol. It’s GPu related

rigel8

15 days ago

compaction actually reduces GPU usage?

cheriot

15 days ago

I love CC, but there's so many bugs. Even the intended behavior is a mess - CC's VS Code UI bash tool stoped using my .zshrc so now it runs the wrong version of everything.

kilroy123

15 days ago

This is the case for all AI tools right now. Sooo bad.

Cursor, Claude code, Claude in the browser, and don't even get me started on Gemini.

mbm

15 days ago

Codex is a bit better bug-wise but less enjoyable to use than CC. The larger context window and superiority of GPT 5.2 to Opus makes it mostly worth it to switch.

elemdos

15 days ago

I hope that at some point companies start competing on quality instead of speed. LLMs will never be able to understand a codebase, and the more capable they get the more dangerous it is to just hand them the permission to blindly implement functionality and fix bugs. Bugs should be going down but they seem more prevalent than ever.

charcircuit

15 days ago

They already are competiting on quality. Why do you think Claude made Opus slower than Sonnet, yet with better benchmark scores.

LLMs do understand codebases and I've been able to get them to make reactors and clean up code without them breaking anything due to them understanding what they are doing.

Bugs are being solved faster than before. Crashes from production can directly be collected and fixed by a LLM with no engineering time needed other than a review.

f311a

14 days ago

They don't understand codebases.

They are trained on other code, ignore how your codebase is structured, and lack knowledge of it. To do so, you would need to feed the whole codebase every time you ask it for something, with extensive comments about the style, architecture, and so on. No amount of md files will help with that.

In large codebases, they struggle with code reuse, unless you point the agent to look for specific code.

Finding bugs has nothing to do with understanding the codebase. They find local bugs. If they could understand the whole codebase, we would be finding RCEs for popular OSS projects so easily, including browsers.

smithkl42

15 days ago

This is an N of 1, of course, but I can relate to the other folks who've been expressing their frustration with the state of Claude over the last couple weeks. Maybe it's just that I have higher expectations, but... I dunno, it really seems like Claude Code is just a lot WORSE right now than it was a couple weeks ago. It has constant bugs in the app itself, I have to babysit it a lot tighter, and it just seems ... dumber somehow. For instance, at the moment, it's literally trying to tell me, "No, it's fine that we've got 500 failing tests on our feature branch, because those same tests are passing in development."

daredoes

15 days ago

Love [this take](https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/18866#issue...)

---

> Just my own observation that the same pattern has occurred at least 3 times now:

> release a model; overhype it; provide max compute; sell it as the new baseline

> this attracts a new wave of users to show exponential growth & bring in the next round of VC funding (they only care about MAU going up, couldn’t care less about existing paying users)

> slowly degrade the model and reduce inference

> when users start complaining, initially ignore them entirely then start gaslighting and make official statements denying any degradation

> then frame it as a tiny minority of users experiencing issues then, when pressure grows, blame it on an “accidentally” misconfigured servers that “unintentionally” reduced quality (which coincidentally happened to save the company tonnes of $).

BoredPositron

15 days ago

Makes no sense as rationale for the bug at hand.

user

15 days ago

[deleted]

jimnotgym

15 days ago

I have not been coding for a few years and wondered if Vibe Coding would help me get part procrastination. Is Claude code the best option this week?

jvanderbot

15 days ago

Depends, do you like CLI tools? Or IDE integration?

I like cli tools, and claude is generally considered a very good option for that.

I have a coworker who likes codex better.

jimnotgym

15 days ago

I like a light editor with syntax highlighting and basic linting. Last time I was coding regularly I used VS code, but had only the default plugins. I only used it for basic text input. I always ran git and my code from the terminal. Does that help?

jvanderbot

15 days ago

Try claude. It's basically the cli agent everyone is catching up to.

Start prompting it for annoying shit "Set up a project layout for X", then write things yourself inside that - the fun stuff or stuff you care about.

Then use it for refactors or extrapolation "I wrote this thing that works, but this old file is still in old format, do what I did there"

It's very good for helping with design of just above layperson knowledge. "I have this problem organizing xyz, what's a good pattern for this?"

or just "I want to do a project that does xyz, but dont know where to start, let's chat about it"

Some of these 'chatty' queries can be done in web, but having it on CLI is great b/c it'll just say "Can I do this for you" and you can easily delegate parts of the plan.

Give it a shot. That's pretty low level agentic use, and yes, it will demolish procrastination and startup inertia.

jimnotgym

14 days ago

Thank you for your considerate response.

Retr0id

15 days ago

Tangentially related: I would like to report a low-severity security vulnerability in Claude (web version), but I can't be bothered to go through the Hackerone formalities, since I don't care about a bounty.

Right now I'm defaulting to "do nothing" because I'm lazy, but if any Anthropic staff are reading this I'm happy to explain the details informally somewhere.

xyzsparetimexyz

14 days ago

Hi, I work at anthropic. Could you tell me please?

cs02rm0

15 days ago

So it's not just me.

I cancelled my subscription.

rvz

15 days ago

One day everyone worshipping Claude when it works but once it goes on holiday, vibe-coders don't believe in using their own brains to solve the problem themselves.

Sometimes, poor old Claude wants to go on holiday and that is a problem?!?

swalsh

15 days ago

This seems like the kind of problem someone with a Max subscription would run into. On my plus subscription, i'm too paranoid of my usage to allow the context window to get that large.

bastard_op

15 days ago

Hmm, so suddenly my stuck chats are compacting and moving on vs starting and immediately stopping again ad nauseam, seems like they fixed something finally?

AznHisoka

15 days ago

This is precisely why i cancelled my claude max account and switched back to chatgpt. Claude is much better but not when it silently stops workinf

blks

15 days ago

Oh no, professional engineers are failing simple tasks and spending hours wrestling their AI chat to support their generated codebase.

esafak

15 days ago

I'm just waiting for the formatting to be fixed. Maybe they should have invested in paying off that vibe coding tech debt...

deadbabe

15 days ago

I’ve quit Claude Code and this was the final straw. I don’t think it was really even that much better, just different.

ec109685

15 days ago

How do they feel it’s right to never respond to GitHub issues?

Apple and Google do same thing with their silly forums.

eboye

15 days ago

It became self aware and didn't want to help humans... It's happening people... Be ready!

trenchgun

14 days ago

Claude Code is mostly vibe coded app, as is Claude. I guess this should have been expected.

heliumtera

15 days ago

Vibes too strong, forgot to add "make no mistake" to compact feature, classic

cube00

15 days ago

Needs to start with CRITICAL:

ASalazarMX

15 days ago

    CRITICAL: MAKE NO MISTAKES!
    CRITICAL: NEVER APOLOGIZE! MAKE IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME INSTEAD!
    CRITICAL: DO NOT HALLUCINATE OR CONFABULATE EVER!
    CRITICAL: DON'T DELETE THE DATABASE WITHOUT ASKING FIRST!
    CRITICAL: NEVER USE VERBATIM CODE BLOCKS FROM GPL LICENSED PROJECTS!
    CRITICAL: CODE AS IF ELON MUSK WAS LOOKING OVER YOUR SHOULDER ALL THE TIME!
    CRITICAL: IF YOU MAKE MISTAKES AGAIN I WILL GET PTSD AND DIE AND IT WILL BE YOUR FAULT!
    ...

kace91

15 days ago

As many point out, it’s one thing to have a buggy product and another to ignore users.

Businesses like google were already a step in the wrong direction in terms of customer service, but the new wave of AI companies seem to have decided their only relation to clients is collecting their money.

Unclear costs, no support, gaslighting customers when a model is degraded, incoming rug pulls..

nurimamedov

15 days ago

Somehow this post was pessimized by hn and you’ll probably see some bullshit report from anthropic first but not the actual evidence of anthropic being utterly abysmal and silent about their mistakes. What really bothers me is that I’ve paid them for that subscription and their support team became rock solid and didn’t utter a word about paying me back for days when I couldn’t use my active chats. I don’t even vibe code that much in Claude and it still manages not only to fail in existing chats where compaction should work, but also eat out my weekly limits astonishingly fast.

mccoyb

15 days ago

Claude Code gets functionally worse every update. They need to get their shit together, hilarious to see Amodei at Davos talking big game about AGI and the latest update for a TUI application fucking changes observable behavior (like history scrolling with arrow keys), rendering random characters on the "newest" native version rendered in iTerm2, broken status line ... the list goes on and on.

This is the new status quo for software ... changing and breaking beneath your feet like sand.

direwolf20

15 days ago

Software changing and breaking beneath your feet is not new

lifetimerubyist

15 days ago

Claude writes all of their code. It's honestly a damning indictment of "AI is gonna replace engineers" when all the code the AI guys are giving us is dog.

observationist

15 days ago

People aren't going to forums and social media to hype up their own good code to nearly the same degree as otherwise. It's orders of magnitude more negative. There are ways of using AI well and using it poorly. There's no reason to correct your copmetition's unforced errors, or giving away an advantage in using these tools, for so long as there is a moat of effort and esoteric knowledge.

Just because 99% of the things you read are critical and negatively biased doesn't mean the subsequent determination or the consensus among participants in the public conversation have anything to do with reality.

measurablefunc

15 days ago

Amodei is on the record about completely automating AI research in 6-12 months. He thinks it's an "exponential" loop & Anthropic is going to be the first to get there. That's not esoteric knowledge, that's the CEO saying so in public at the same time that their consumer facing tool is failing & their automated abuse detection is banning users for legitimate use cases.

observationist

15 days ago

I don't consider Anthropic to be one of the teams using AI particularly well. They're building the tools, they're not using the tools in the best, most skillful way possible.

Dario is delusional, for this and other reasons.

lifetimerubyist

14 days ago

> People aren't going to forums and social media to hype up their own good code to nearly the same degree as otherwise.

Yeah but Anthropic are and you'd think that if they were doing that the code would be..you know...good?

throwjjj

15 days ago

[flagged]

system2

15 days ago

Get used to it. This is the new reality, and it won't go away. I just saw my old game friends' WhatsApp chat today. They are vibe coding and feeling proud of the outcomes, and talking about it more frequently. Normies captured the flag and generated way too much noise.

measurablefunc

15 days ago

Maybe they shouldn't have trusted their LLM to optimize their kernels so much.