Instead of fixing the UI they lowered the default reasoning effort parameter from high to medium? And they "traced this back" because they "take reports about degradation very seriously"? Extremely hard to give them the benefit of doubt here.
We did both -- we did a number of UI iterations (eg. improving thinking loading states, making it more clear how many tokens are being downloaded, etc.). But we also reduced the default effort level after evals and dogfooding. The latter was not the right decision, so we rolled it back after finding that UX iterations were insufficient (people didn't understand to use /effort to increase intelligence, and often stuck with the default -- we should have anticipated this).
UI is UI. It is naive to expect that you build some UI but users will "just magically" find out that they should use it as a terminal in the first place.
For instance:
Is Haiku supposed to hit a warm system-prompt cache in a default Claude code setup?
I had `DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1` in my env and found the haiku requests would not hit a warm-cached system prompt. E.g. on first request just now w/ most recent version (v2.1.118, but happened on others):
w/ telemetry off - input_tokens:10 cache_read:0 cache_write:28897 out:249
w/ telemetry on - input_tokens:10 cache_read:24344 cache_write:7237 out:243
I used to think having so many users was leading to people hitting a lot of edge cases, 3 million users is 3 million different problems. Everyone can't be on the happy path. But then I started hitting weird edge cases and started thinking the permutations might not be under control.
People literally started seeing issues immediately as you changed the defaults: https://x.com/levelsio/status/2029307862493618290 And despite a huge amount of reports you still kept it for a whole month.
And then you shipped a completely untested feature with prompt cache misses and literally gaslit users and blamed users for using the product as advertised.
Oh. Remember this https://x.com/bcherny/status/2024152178273989085? "We move fast but test carefully"?
Now untold umber of people have been hit by these changes, so as an apology you reset usage limits three hours before they would reset anyway.
Good job.
Edit. By the way, a very telling sentence from the report:
--- start quote ---
We’ll ensure that a larger share of internal staff use the exact public build of Claude Code (as opposed to the version we use to test new features); and we'll make improvements to our Code Review tool that we use internally
--- end quote ---
Translation: no one is using or even testing the product we ship, and we blindly trust Claude Code to review and find bugs for us. Last one isn't even a translation: https://x.com/bcherny/status/2017742750473720121
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/36286 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/25018
Anthropic: removes thinking output
Users: see long pauses, complain
Anthropic: better reduce thinking time
Users: wtf
To me it really, really seems like Anthropic is trying to undo the transparency they always had around reasoning chains, and a lot of issues are due to that.
Removing thinking blocks from the convo after 1 hour of being inactive without any notice is just the icing on the cake, whoever thought that was a good idea? How about making “the cache is hot” vs “the cache is cold” a clear visual indicator instead, so you slowly shape user behavior, rather than doing these types of drastic things.
They had droves of Claude devs vehemently defending and gaslighting users when this started happening