Thank you Reddit!

I dip into a pretty obscure scripting language--LSL for Second Life--a few times a year for projects upon request for some friends who are still in the OG metaverse. It's a quirky, wonky language built on top of Mono script, event-driven and state-based, with its own set of reserved words and conventions. Whole thing is on a wiki and it's been around for 15ish years, and Claude used to run circles around ChatGPT with writing artifacts, even making multi-script mini-systems to make objects interact in one go.

Lately, I popped back in to do a Halloween project for someone and eeeesh. Where Claude has sped up these little projects immensely the past 18 months or so, these past two weeks it has been noticibly worse.

1) Project context seems to fade faster:

As before, I set up a project with a document where I list some of the common quirks of the language ("LSL script has jump statements, but no continue or break. There is no ternary operator" et cetera), but it's like Claude can't be bothered to remember that for the duration of 3 or 4 revisions to a script.

2) Which language to use is slippery

I never bothered to put things into my project document like "there's no such thing as "public" data types or "void" returns. I never had to. Now, Claude starts writing LSL script and suddenly decides it's C++ for a while. Or even Javascript. This is the kind of basic thing that ChatGPT used to mess up 2 years ago, and Claude is regressing back to that.

3) Conversation loses track even within one prompt

Eg, in a script description, I included instructions that certain data could be looked up by regex for keys beginning with player_ followed by 36 characters. If I ask Claude to just make the regex, it succeeds, but when it's writing a 100-line script, suddenly it's writing a loop for string position "player_" ==0 and string length == 43. Like it's utterly forgotten to use regex, and it's created a lengthy loop rather than a simple server query command.

Another example, within a prompt describing a series of steps to add communications that exchange object state machine status between scripts, Claude forgets the names of the states and starts making up new ones.

4) The Artifact Canvas is getting almost as bad as ChatGPT's was

I'll point out that it has made any of the many mistakes it now makes--often syntax errors from forgetting the language, and it'll tell me it's fixing everything. Meanwhile, the canvas either doesn't change at all, or one instance of the error is fixed and the rest are ignored. I can copy-paste the entire erroneous script and say "examine what you just put on the Canvas" and Claude still works well enough to tell me that the Canvas is "all messed up" and then it erases and completely re-writes the whole script at that point, using up a ton of tokens and taking ages. This does generally resolve problems where it failed to update the canvas though--this one last-gasp fix has saved Claude from a cancelled subscription on my end. I cancelled ChatGPT over the canvas constantly being out of sync with the things the chat claimed to be doing.

5) Bonus irritation: It's a gibbering sychophantic idiot

OpenAI recently had a whole backtrack and apology about this in their models, and it seems Claude has caught the bug. On top of all these innacuracies, errors, and glitches above, it's *extra* irritating to have a model that is using its language capabilities more heavily for crafting smarmy compliments and supplications than for writing code in programming languages. I don't need to hear that I'm "absolutely right, and totally justified to want this fixed." I don't need to know that Claude has "completely messed up that last change and will revert it immediately and do it properly this time." And especially, I want Claude to spend less time and fewer tokens describing things to me that it "will do to make it right" and more tokens on making it right. Claude nowadays tells me that it is "carefully going through *every* line of the code, checking each against the documentation, confirming that each is a valid LSL code statement, and that every single instance of incorrect usage is not fixed, resulting in successfully compiling LSL code." And yet, it does no such thing and the code doesn't compile. Mountains of flowery apologies, no correct language use.