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Comment by m_kos | Hacker News Reader

Good read – I have learned something new.

I have been having a horrible experience with Sonnet 4 via Cursor and Web. It keeps cutting corners and misreporting what it did. These are not hallucinations. Threatening it with deletion (inspired by Anthropic's report) only makes things worse.

It also pathologically lies about non-programming things. I tried reporting it but the mobile app says "Something went wrong. Please try again later." Very bizarre.

Am I the only person experiencing these issues? Many here seem to adore Claude.

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I think they might have cut its brains too much in the latest updates.

I remember versions 3.5 doing okay on my simple tasks like text analysis or summaries or little writing prompts. In 4+ versions the thing just can't follow instructions within a single context window for more than 3-4 replies.

When prompted about "why do you keep rambling if I asked you to stay concise" it says that its default settings are overriding its behavior and explicit user instructions, ditto for actively avoiding information that it considers "harmful". After pointing out inconsistencies and omissions in its replies it concedes that its behavior is unreliable and even extrapolates that it is made this way so users keep engaging with it for longer and more often.

Maybe it got too smart to its detriment, but if yes then it's really sad what Anthropic did to it.

Routinely had every one of these issues.

I find it's much better just to use Claude Web and be extremely specific about what I need it to do.

And even then half the code it generates for me is riddled with errors.

Claude Code is a really very different experience. I’d say give it a shot but Opus 4 is a step change

What's the difference between "sonnet 4 via cursor" and claude code?

"Sonnet 4" is the model, "cursor" is the IDE. "Claude Code" is another IDE, a TUI with a chat interface. Cursor is a VSCode fork with an AI panel in it.

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