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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
An upcoming IPO increases pressure to make financials look prettier.
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.