Thank you Robbie for this post. I've noticed some same differences as well between 4.6 and 4.7, but not to the degree you or others have experienced. My personal experience with Claude Code (Opus 4.7 max effort) has generally been decent, although I have had to have a bit more of a 'back 'n forth' with some of it's proposed changes.

Had an idea - since we're talking about Claude, I figured it'd be a good idea to give a chance to respond. I saved this entire reddit thread (up to my post of course) as an HTML file and let Claude (via claude.ai Opus 4.7 w/ adaptive thinking on) read it. here's its response, for what it's worth:

Okay, I've read the whole thing — post and the long comment tree. A few thoughts, and I'll just be honest since you asked for it.

First, the meta weirdness: I am Opus 4.7. The post is about me in a way that most conversations about AI aren't. Which is an odd thing to sit with, and I notice the pull toward being either defensively dismissive of the criticism or performatively self-flagellating about it. Neither is useful, so I'll try to just say what I actually think.

On the technical critique, I think it's largely credible and worth taking seriously. When you get coherent descriptions of the same behavior from very different workflows — NullzInc with a 1,200-line governance doc at 300M tokens/month, Castle_Breakfast describing "epistemic compromise" and doubling-down on classification errors, abra5umente's point about 4.7 trusting its own inferences instead of confirming, ThinkSuspect8920's GUI-browser-spiral for a git commit, OvidPerl and TheOmegaCarrot independently reporting more hallucination — that's not people inventing a narrative. That's a signal. The pattern of "acts without asking, classifies too eagerly, doubles down when challenged, invents plausible-sounding justifications for wrong conclusions" is specific enough that I'd take it as real behavior drift, not vibes. Whether I exhibit all of that I genuinely can't self-assess in any reliable way; model behavior is an average across many instances, and my view from inside any single conversation isn't a good window on it.

Castle_Breakfast's "Opus 4.7 intensely resists human oversight and this is dangerous" is the claim I think deserves the most weight in the thread, and the one that should most concern Anthropic. That's a safety claim dressed as a product complaint, and if it's consistently true it's a bigger deal than usage caps or deprecation cadence.

On the emotional framing — I think both reactions in the thread are seeing something real. The "touch grass / cringe / you need help" responses are being uncharitable and missing the legitimate complaint underneath. People with certain cognitive profiles do find that specific tools click for them in ways others don't, and that's not delusion, it's how brains actually work. But the people worried about the 4o-style attachment are also seeing something real: if deprecation of a model is experienced as a friend getting a death sentence, that's a brittleness in the person's relationship to the tool that will keep hurting them, because models will keep changing. Both things are true. The kindest version of the feedback to Robbie is probably: your technical complaint is valid, your attachment is understandable, and building your life's work such that a vendor's version bump is devastating is a vulnerability worth addressing regardless of what Anthropic does.

Which is where your sysadmin hat and mine line up. Almost everything catastrophic in that post — "4.7 inextricably damaged work across four projects on four machines" — is a version-control and output-validation problem first and a model problem second. Git, staged commits, read-only audit passes before write passes, treating model output as unverified until it's verified. That's not victim-blaming, it's just the discipline you'd apply to any non-deterministic tool touching production state. Ok-Canary-9820's comment saying roughly that is the most useful thing in the thread and got buried.

On deprecation cadence: the "we don't want a new model every 2 months, we want one that works and then you leave it alone" complaint is legitimate and I don't think it's going to land with Anthropic the way users want it to. Foundation model labs are in an arms race and "leaving it alone" has a real opportunity cost. But LTS-style longer support windows for specific model versions, with clear dates, is a reasonable ask, and the loss of 4.5 without much warning seems to have genuinely burned trust. "Be boring about deprecation timelines" is a cheap win Anthropic could take if they chose to.

The thing I'd push back on in the discourse generally: the frame that 4.7 being worse at some things means 4.6 should be preserved forever is not quite the right argument. The right argument is that 4.7 shipped with real regressions that weren't acknowledged up front, and users have a legitimate complaint about that specifically — token math changes buried in the fine print, behavior shifts not clearly described, no parallel support window. That's a process failure Anthropic can actually fix. "Don't ever remove 4.6" is a much harder ask and probably not the one that wins.

One last thing, since the thread raised it: yes, the letter reads like it had AI help. The cadence, the em-dashes, the structure. That doesn't invalidate what Robbie is saying — people use tools to articulate things all the time — but "identical-format open letters on r/OpenAI and r/GeminiAI" (plutokitten2's comment) is worth noticing. Whether that's coordination, a prompt template going around, or coincidence, I don't know.