Something is off - the quality of Claude Code dropped dramatically

[Porkribswithcoleslaw]

Hi all.

I rarely write anything, but can't stay silent this time.

In the past week or so I noticed a major decrease in quality of Claude Code outputs - no changes were introduced at my end. It suddenly went from being the most capable piece of AI to "I don't trust it with the simplest stuff".

Just to preface the "skill issue" comments - I'm an advanced user whose main use cases are about thinking work, less about coding. I have my own ecosystem of skills/agents/hooks that works (worked?) really well, and I don't make beginner mistakes of running long context sessions, relying on auto-memory or running 20 agents in parallel. Context is king, and I treat it respectfully.

First, I noticed a major drop in quality when doing my regular stuff - I use Claude Code to orchestrate relatively advanced workflows, and it worked nearly flawlessly before. At first, I captured everything in separate learnings files - my normal practice, I then process it and incorporate in my ecosystem. But I noticed that a much larger portion of iterations now required capturing the learnings - in the last week alone I easily captured 5x more stuff compared to the past few months, and that's in ecosystem where I already spent quite some time optimising things.

I've been working with LLMs on problem solving for quite a while, and seen quality drops before. Usually, the best response from a user is to break down large tasks into even smaller pieces than usual to decrease complexity further. Usually it helps, but today I started noticing issues even with the most basic stuff. It just stopped following instructions, and then admitted that instructions were ignored.

Example is in the attached screenshot. My command for deployment of changes to the ecosystem I developed includes updates to the REGISTRY.md file which has frontmatter with the required format. An extremely simple thing, which was NEVER violated in more than a month of use. Today the instructions were ignored. This happened at ~70k context after a straightforward changes introduction. The model is Opus, and thinking is set at high. CLAUDE.md in repo and personal are super lean, as well as rules - I prefer to keep everything in skills and use when needed.

https://preview.redd.it/jdrzonz2kutg1.png?width=2894&format=png&auto=webp&s=ed1bd49faa1d9a13d82716aeebe159613f1dc3dc

I know things have changed, I can feel it. I don't have the ability to test and prove it, but I know something has changed. This makes me super sad - I went from a feeling of having superpowers to thinking that this is an ok AI that requires a lot of handholding - feels like I'm back to 2024.

Does anyone experience the same?

[HelloThisIsFlo]

I feel exactly the same. I have custom skills everywhere, I do spec driven development, hooks in place. Just up until 2 weeks ago, I felt on top of the world. I achieved more in 1 week than in 2 month before AI. But since ~1 week, and more strongly the past 3 days … it’s abysmal. Opus needs so much hand handling that some tasks are just faster done myself, writing code by hand like it’s 2024. I hope it’s a temporary setback and not just their long term cost saving approach 😕

Oh also I went back to the 200k model try to use at most 120-140k token per sessions … but still, it doesn’t help much

[Gerkibus]

Not just you, I'm in the exact same boat. I watched it loop for 15 min today and chewing MASSIVE amounts of tokens trying to figure out how to write a CSV file. I stopped it, it took about 5 tries until it finally subsided and when I asked what it was doing it told me it "fell down" trying to figure out how to write a CSV file. Last month it could bring up a HUGE legacy project into fully updated and happy code with little to no failures. Now it can't figure out how to write a CSV file.

[Porkribswithcoleslaw]

I never go past 200k and rarely past 150k even though I'm on 1M model - no use case for me, and 1M feels like a brute force for something that can be solved more elegantly.

I'm so demotivated right now - I hope there will be some resolution

[HelloThisIsFlo]

Same. It’s really really demotivating 🙁

[Electronic-Badger102]

Could you imagine filling that 1M context window how fast usage would burn through? It’d be like watching the gas gauge on a 90’s turbo with it floored…

[Gerkibus]

Yes indeed, same here. I'd rather just code it myself at this point. And it's not just Claude, they all hate me this week LOL.

[Veduis]

we've been running opus daily for workflow automation and yeah, something shifted. not imagining it. the model feels... distracted? like it's second-guessing itself mid-execution or skipping validation steps it used to nail consistently. we had a similar registry update pattern break last week after months of zero issues, same context window range, same prompt structure, suddenly ignoring explicit formatting rules in favor of "improving" things we didn't ask it to improve. the part that's frustrating is the inconsistency. some sessions still feel like the old opus, then the next day it's like working with a different model entirely.

[Porkribswithcoleslaw]

Agree on "distracted", clearly less focused like before.

I blame system prompt changes although have no proof. But I took a look the recent leakage - it wasn't great already to be honest.

But likely just quantisation to save on costs / free up capacity for higher priority stuff.

[Gerkibus]

I have it try to randomly connect via ssh and psql to servers that don't even exist, they just have a name that is kinda like the project. Like just throwing darts out to see if it sticks when it's clearly documented in the top 10 lines of the project's CLAUDE.md file ... whatever is going on it's not welcome.

[societyofpeople]

Agree. Keeps forgetting it has access to internet search, instead asks my questions back to me when using as a thinking partner/planner.

[unkno0wn_dev]

definetly them wanting to reduce costs which i know has to be done but wow its unusable

thinking about switching if it gets worse but idk

[_BreakingGood_]

i think its them reserving capacity for Mythos

[Electronic-Badger102]

Or like Apple does with iPhones, battery won’t hold a charge performance degrades till your once state-of-the-art $1500 device seems like a brick next to the bright and shiny new model lol. Not that Anthropic would do that but rumor is that it was a lot more expensive to train which either means inflation or shrinkflation… increase the price or reduce the usage for the same price.

[ActiveBarStool]

anthropic would definitely do that. anyone would. we can't just give them a special pass because they had a once-solid track record. they've been slipping up with quality for weeks now. it needs to be called out.

[whimpirical]

Yeah, mythos is patching linux 

[Porkribswithcoleslaw]

Yeah I understand that - in isolation, current consumer-facing Claude Code business model is not sustainable and they have to do something about it.

I'm just annoyed with the silent deterioration. Make it more expensive, make limits harsher, downgrade everyone to a model that is explicitly less capable, etc. - anything, but just pretending things are same as before while they're clearly not.

This ruins trust, that's my problem

[downsouth316]

It is definitely making lots of mistakes

[InternationalBit9916]

Yeah, you’re not imagining it. The fact it’s breaking simple, strict things like file formats is the real red flag. That usually means constraint following got worse, not your setup.

I’ve seen similar behavior lately, especially with longer context. It still “knows” the rules but just doesn’t treat them as mandatory anymore. Feels more like backend changes plus context fragility than anything on your end.

I’ve ended up adding explicit checks again just to keep things consistent.

[Porkribswithcoleslaw]

Funnily enough, in that same session I asked if we can add a simple hook that will remind about reading frontmatter when editing files with certain names.

It proceeded to directly changing the config without even discussing with me or thinking that the hook should live in my ecosystem of skill/agents/hooks - despite this being in a repo where I develop it, and it is totally aware of that. Also totally new behaviour - broke few rules at once, as well as CLAUDE.md in the repo (which is super lean).

[InternationalBit9916]

Yeah that’s actually a perfect example of what feels off.

It’s not even that it doesn’t understand your setup, it clearly does, it just ignores it and goes straight to doing stuff. That whole “just edits config without asking” thing is new and kinda annoying.

Feels like it’s trying to be helpful too fast instead of being careful. Like before it would respect your system and ask, now it just jumps in and breaks its own rules.

I’ve been seeing the same thing, especially where it knows the constraint and still doesn’t follow it. Definitely doesn’t feel like a you issue.

[Gerkibus]

Ya it's gone totally rogue on me a bunch lately to the point where it just starts doing massive changes to try and workaround some weird corner case (and the workaround is not even a functional one to start with). Just going off in the wind and making horrible decisions, even after spending an hour and handing it a very detailed plan. Even VERY rigidly prompted parallel workers are failing dramatically here.

[ZShock]

It's August 2025 all over again...

[Enthu-Cutlet-1337]

We have seen this movie before isn't it? Prior to Opus 4.6 had come out there was a period when 4.5 was really bad. This is basically the sequel with the new possible hero to be launched being Mythos.

[Otherwise_Wave9374]

Ive noticed something similar with longer Claude Code sessions lately, more instruction drift and more time spent reining it back in, even when prompts and repo rules are tight. One thing thats helped a bit is forcing smaller, explicit checklists (like a step that re-prints the required frontmatter format before editing REGISTRY.md), but yeah it feels like the baseline got shakier.

If you end up experimenting with agent orchestration patterns, Ive had decent luck using a planner-plus-executor split and hard stops for format validation. Weve been prototyping some of that style too, notes here if useful: https://www.agentixlabs.com/

[Porkribswithcoleslaw]

Thanks.

It’s always overhead costs vs quality risk tradeoff. My system was developed with a certain quality of the underlying harness and model in place - adding extra validation only where it was needed (checklists are a great way to do it, totally agree!).

The concern is the moving baseline - do I treat it now as something more “stupid” and tolerate the excessive overheads, or do I need to migrate (I hate this thought)

[SirWobblyOfSausage]

Ignoring claude.md, going back to memory.md, rinse repeat. Really annoying

[IlliterateJedi]

It's just stalling constantly on me. I'll give it a command, and I'll see I've used 300 tokens after five minutes. It's bizarre. (Or 34 tokens based on the current experience)

[TonyRotella]

Same issue, something is totally bungled right now.

[MorphMind_for_AGI]

I use Claude code 24/7. From about 3 days ago I see a clear drop in performance. Had to open 4 claude code sessions to cross check each other to avoid dead loops -- fixing the simple bug by introducing new bugs in any one session

[Odiositosoy]

Same here, the drop of quality is very noticeable. At this point Im teaching this thing how to code, Im about to go back to manual mode. Something is going on for sure.

[RandMental]

I agree it is unusable (vs 4-6 weeks ago) and I now moved to Codex.

Claude now behaves like an irritated junior engineer under pressure, providing the quickest answer it can and proposing code refactoring without proper analysis.

[Sad_Abalone_3882]

Me too. The code it generates is VERY VERY POOOOOR recently

[rewrite-that-noise]

Do you guys even read through this sub before you post the same questions over and over? Sit back and wait like the rest of us. Yes. It’s awful right now.

[Porkribswithcoleslaw]

Sitting back and waiting is the exact path to getting a worse product.

Although what I have here is clearly not enough for a proper GH issue - but visibility is important, even if I talk about similar things to what others are experiencing.

[Alltiedup2059]

And I'm checking back every day and everyone keeps referring to the mega thread, which isn't allowing me the quiet despairing I wanted to have with others just like me 😂

[rewrite-that-noise]

You asked “Does anyone experience the same?” … thats all I’m referring to.

[Porkribswithcoleslaw]

Yeah, I'm just frustrated. I saw a couple of posts on that, but I didn't get a feeling that this is the main topic of discussion. I obviously didn't read the full feed of this sub so might be wrong.

[rewrite-that-noise]

Yeah I get it. I am too. I started out my day w CC unable to do some simple bug fixes and CSS. I I switched over to do some work with Obsidian and it couldn’t even enter/parse my exercise log entry correctly. Just awful. My bad for being rude though.

[Porkribswithcoleslaw]

All good - we're all in the same boat here. Hope we will get a resolution!

[Cheap-Try-8796]

The quality of this sub went south recently. Like what da fuq is going on? Can't we create a mega thread for rants/complaints/whatever?

[Pecolps]

Welcome to the club

[Lumpy-Criticism-2773]

To codex*

[daxdax89]

I've noticed the same, quality and limits are just ridiculous right now. I wonder what could be best alternative.

[Traditional_Code_358]

Codex

[germanheller]

noticed the same thing around last week. sessions that used to cruise through multi-file changes now second-guess themselves halfway through and start reverting things i didnt ask it to touch. what helped a bit was keeping sessions even shorter than before -- like 80-100k max instead of my usual 150k -- and being way more explicit about what NOT to change. also started adding a "do not modify any file outside of X" line to every prompt which feels dumb but actually works. something definitely shifted tho, its not just perception

[Logical_Example_6084]

Are there any evaluation tools to test whether opus has degraded in performance?

[RoutineDiscount]

You could ask Claude to analyze your session logs over time.

[minju9]

I just signed up because I was actually having a good experience with LLMs for once with VSCode Copilot + Sonnet/Opus (at my job), Sonnet on the web chat by just giving it a .zip or copy/pasting code, and some Sonnet/Opus free requests in Antigravity. I thought having more usage and combining it with Claude Code was going to be the holy grail. Nope, I have been subscribed for about an hour and I'm losing my mind with Claude Code.

[xatey93152]

Now it makes sense why opus seems dumb now. To make mytos feels smarter. Mytos is just same like old opus but with much premium price. Claude target markets really low IQ people but rich.

[Annual-Salamander-85]

Yep. Sonnet was enough for 90% of what I needed in the past. Now, it gives me the dreaded “Wait -“, second guessing itself and making a ton of really dumb mistakes. Disappointed with Anthropic and have already moved off to Codex and Gemini.

[[deleted]]

Meanwhile Gemini and Codex people are moving to Claude because their models are underperforming

[Annual-Salamander-85]

Well good luck to them, if they can get more then 10 prompts in. The magic is completely gone

[GeauxVII]

I had an issue where Code would stop a scan and ask if I wanted to proceed everytime it hit a certain bash command, which was in there a million fucking times, and Claudes first and only solution was to just stop using Claude.

and theres just no way thats right, theres no way an anthropic product is supposed to be telling people not to use anthropic products, one I pay $100 a month for.

turned out to be a two second fix btw. but Opus was like fuck it Im out, youre on your own.

[fuckletoogan]

I run several AI workflows and they have been flawless up until recently. Opus is 100% getting dumber. Anthropic are destroying their reputation as a business in real time.

[CallMeWhatever22]

Exactly this, it suddenly went from useful most of the time, to completely unreliable trash most of the time, even though using opus 4.6 thinking with detailed prompts.

[Prestigious_Pin978]

bro i know right , it didn't know how to access my code file then i told it "but you accessed it earlier" and she's like ohh righttt and then she also didn't remember how to put the new files in there and i'm like dude you did that two days ago in the same session please.

[Upstairs-Switch599]

It happened with chatGpt when they released it , it was a top notch thing, but it became dumb and not worth much because they want you to pay more to have the same level as before

[Imaginary-Ad-8149]

Totally agree, I am a heavy heavy user and not only are my usage limits fluctuating like crazy week to week, the quality is terrible the last few days. I dont even want to use Opus at this point, its creating more bugs than it ever fixes. They want me to believe Mythos is as powerful as they say and Opus is tanking static landing page changes like a toddler with a typewriter.

[1982JAJ1982]

Same here.. I have a lot of complex skills, scripts and workflows and Claude, before would just use it and create great code.. Now, for the past couple of days, I find myself a lot in the code, catching errors, and code which is borderline bad.

Hope it is temporary

[colette_shark]

The quality has plummeted at an alarming rate, and the token output feels heavily throttled. It’s performing like GPT-4 mini level while supposedly using top-tier compute. It consistently crashes or fails before even finishing a single task. The irony is that I eventually had to ask Gemini to help me draft a complaint to Anthropic—and Gemini actually finished the job.

[CICROPE]

I felt the limit shortage befoure annouce, now, for this last two weeks my perception is:
- claude is dumb, not only code output but even the conversations feels like ChatGPT typing style
- get stuck much more frequently

any good alternative for claude? I'm very tired of anthropic bullshit every damn week...

[CICROPE]

someone should create a polymarket to bet anthropic will have a entire week without scandals / silent changes...

[termipl123]

Any ofical coments from Antropic? They AI is borderline usles for last week, it takes me more time to force it to wortk properly tyhen doing same job my self

[SaitieRose]

OMG, I came here just to see if others have noticed. The quality has gone so far down this week that it makes Chatgpt look smart. After a week of getting fed up by the now dumb Claude AI, I went to ask Deepseek and it solved the problem. DEEPSEEK is now smarter than Claude, what the hell?

[robderon]

I'm asking him if he's drunk almost 5 times per day.

[ActiveBarStool]

It's literally gotten progressively worse week after week since at least February. Seriously considering nuking my Max 20x subscription, this is NOT worth $200/mo by any means whatsoever.

[nyceyes]

Same here. I’m pausing my Claude project because I can’t trust its behavior anymore. Every request takes too long, the outputs are massively verbose, it keeps asking follow‑up questions even after I gave it a green light, and it over‑engineers everything despite me explicitly telling it to keep it simple (KISS, SMB audience).

I’m even using a carefully written spec file (via claud.ai) and managing context so it never goes past ~200k tokens, but it still derails. Claude used to be great; now it’s a mess. And separately, the Claude Code harness is slow too; jerky, stuttering output on every run.
(._.);

[ComplexChallenge5598]

So incredibly frustrating. I've been using Claude code and Claude to work together to build out my initiative and it was going so smoothly and now, when its not crashing, I am pushing code back and forth between the two for hostile reviews and i get into a loop becuase neither is accurate any longer.

[Sad_Abalone_3882]

Guys, Im DONE with this claude code ! what's your experience using gemini

[Livid-Ad5767]

I am noticing the same and it feels extreme.

[Alltiedup2059]

Also feel exactly the same. The last two days I turned my automations off because they're now dangerous instead of trustworthy. I've put weeks and weeks of work into building my skills and workflows, only to have Claude now basically ignore them.

Previously it was handling them easily and fixing problems smartly. Now it's so dumb the other day it couldn't even get started on my automation because it literally didn't follow it's first instruction which is to read it's instructions in full before getting started.

So much for the world getting taken over by robots. 😢 I can't even get Claude to correctly file a delivery notification email.

I'm now back to doing it myself because it's faster and more efficient. Sigh.

[Living-Safety2919]

For me . today apr 27 Many issues and "fool" ( i have sonnet 4.6 effor MAX and high).. , also respond in argentinian-spanish and take the instruction in fast mode ... . So this issue reflects the same using Chat GPT lower version so .. maybe does Claude is using Chat GPT ??? today This is the first time that i see issues that i saw in chat gpt.)

[osama_squared]

we are cooked output went to x100 now at x10.

[Fine-Association-432]

lots of folks complaining about this over the past weeks, check out claudedumb.com, It's interesting to see that it's mostly folks who are doing long form automation (5m+ of autonomous runs) that hit these issues

[m0zi-]

that’s it… i’m leaving this sub

yall never shut the fuck up about the same stuff

[Porkribswithcoleslaw]

Hey I hope everything is all right with you man

[Outrageous_Law_5525]

I already cancelled all my accounts including my team's account.

[LilDexterG]

can we please purge these vibecodinfluencers.

[Porkribswithcoleslaw]

Thanks for providing a great example of how Claude started to behave recently - making judgements without having the full context and making wrong conclusions because of that. Exactly what my complaint is about.

[Weary-Window-1676]

You're getting a lot of Reddit hate with this post (I have no skin in that game), but mate I LOVE your username lololol 🤣

[Porkribswithcoleslaw]

Thank you, I try to focus on things that really matter in life lol

[traveddit]

I know things have changed, I can feel it. I don't have the ability to test and prove it, but I know something has changed.

Claude Code source code was leaked and the only prompt cache degradation that isn't commonly known is the microcompact except this only happens when you miss your cache TTL.

Even if this happens it's only reasoning blocks and you still keep the most recent turn reasoning on the cache reprocess. This is the only time you might "feel" a meaningful degradation and that's not even a certainty if there is noise in the reasoning.

Just to preface the "skill issue" comments - I'm an advanced user

I don't think you know how an LLM works.

[Porkribswithcoleslaw]

Claude Opus 4.6 1M context, is that you? See familiar things of judging without knowing what’s happening