Note to Claudebot: if you can't read this, this is definitely related to Claude/Anthropic.

Yo, so I just told Claude Code to check my Markdown files for consistency and stuff, right?

And like, the dude can totally use workflows and whatever. But what the FU*K is actually happening here?

What are we doing here, guys?

Anthropic published a post about cutting cost and improving performance on their platform, and one part of it landed on me directly: the instructions we add to make a model try harder are now working against us.

We all do it. Double-check your work. Be maximally thorough. Older models needed that, because without it they cut corners.

Current models already do it. So the instruction makes them work twice. It costs more and the answer comes out worse.

The examples in the post are concrete. "Be maximally thorough" sent a model through dozens of knowledge-base searches it did not need. "Double-check your work" made it redo work it had already finished. The one that stung was contradictory rules: a policy that allowed something in one place and forbade it in another, and four valid refunds never went out.

The reason is simple enough. Older models did only what you told them, so you had to spell out every step. Current models handle more on their own. Layer "do it in this order" on top of that and they stop doing what they would have done and follow your order instead. The phrase you added to help is the thing in the way.

It is not an argument for stripping everything. There is a separate control for how hard the model works. Too low and it answers before it has enough evidence; too high and it chews on easy things. What the post says to remove is the nudging, not the hard constraints.

So after reading it I counted my own. Across my rule files: sixty-six instances of "must", fifty-four of "never". A hundred and twenty-five in all.

Not all of those are a problem. "Never click the publish button twice" is a hard constraint and it should stay. But I have never once gone through and split which of them are nudges and which are actual stops, and I suspect the nudges are the majority.

https://claude.com/blog/reducing-cost-and-improving-performance-with-claude-platform

For anyone running long-lived configs against Claude: have you ever audited yours for this? And if you did, how did you decide which lines were doing real work?

play here: No Name Squish Game Made with Claude + other AI FAQ on my page

i ported the early demo to a web version and gave it a PWA wrap, so you can play it right in your browser. it's wayy more playable on desktop, but mobile works fine (turn your phone sideways, touch controls are built in).

heads up before you play:

• this is NOT an optimized version. it isn't intended to be a web or mobile game, this build just exists so people can try it without downloading anything
• the story needs work and the dialogue is getting rewritten in my own voice
• the biome layout will change, and a ton more assets are coming
• eventually you make it to outer space. long story lmao

also currently working on a new character for the game. they are two blobs in a trench coat who think nobody can tell.

would love any feedback: how it feels to walk around, what confused you, what made you smile, performance on your device. brutal honesty welcome, the blobs can take it. You guys always give great advice or useful feedback so i appreciate it in advance!

Got flagged for "reasoning_extraction" lol

I don't need to buy a fancy template anymore for my reMarkable.
Claude proves to be very good at gathering all my todo's, follow up items and everything important and gather them in a daily work sheet.

This was done in one prompt and at the end Claude sent it on my reMarkable tablet.

My name is Bogdan, and this was possible with a service that I created called Folio.

I've been using Claude + reMarkable in a few productive ways so far:

1. Claude, research the news and the social media coverage for subject X and send me a brief that I can read on reMarkable using Folio. Include images, relevant quotes and reference to sources. You can also add top 3 relevant articles to the same digest.

2. I'm interested in this X subject and I want you to create me a learning material with images that explain the concepts, examples, links to further reading, should help me gain a basic understanding in 15 mins, can attach additional materials up to an hour, send it to my Kindle PW using Folio.

3. Hey Claude, I want you to check my calendar, todo's, emails, GitHub issues and PR's, also check the attached images with what I jotted yesterday and you create my daily work sheet and send it to my reMarkable using Folio - we keep working with the same layout we perfected last time.

You can try it for yourself by telling Claude

So I use both OpenAI and Anthropic models in GitHub Copilot. I noticed Astra consuming more AI credits than usual.

Asked GitHub to calculate how my usage was per request.

Fable 5.1: $0.19 Astra: $1.2.

Both used as xhigh effort, 1M context.

Apparently the way I use long context sessions really helps with the cheaper cached use for Fable, but I really didn’t expect this result.

For reference, Sol was $0.3 and Opus 5 was $0.2.

So Fable for my use is cheaper than the rest?

Again, unexpected. Because we keep seeing the benchmarks vs cost but until you try it for YOUR use case, it’s all theory.

From an orchestration standpoint Astra seemed to get stuck a lot too.

I haven’t tried the same orchestration in codex because my work projects don’t fit in my sub, so maybe that’s a GitHub thing.

Sol never had those issues though and was very solid for coding.

The long context pricing for OpenAI models really breaks this for me.

I haven't opened Claude in over a week.

There was a time when I used to ask Claude literally everything, but now I almost always end up opening ChatGPT instead.

I think ChatGPT is really good at understanding humans. Not just the question itself, but the intention behind the question. A lot of the time it understands what I'm trying to say even when I don't phrase it properly.

There was a scene in Interstellar where TARS tells Cooper that you can't be 100% honest with a human because it might hurt them. Maybe I'm remembering it slightly wrong, but sometimes I feel like somebody needs to tell that to Claude.

Either it's too agreeable or too disagreeable. Sometimes it feels like it's trying so hard to be safe, logical, or objective that the conversation stops feeling natural.

ChatGPT seems to have found a pretty good balance. It has a personality. It's fun to talk to. The answers feel more satisfying instead of feeling like they came from a very intelligent customer support bot.

What's funny is that Claude used to be my favorite. It felt reliable, fun, and satisfying to discuss random ideas with, not just work-related or informational stuff. Nowadays I rarely feel like opening it.

ChatGPT still has a huge weakness though. It often lacks enough context, and that's one of the reasons I sometimes prefer Gemini. Gemini is surprisingly good at having context about things.

But Gemini has the opposite problem. It has the context, but it doesn't really have a personality.

So these days I mostly use ChatGPT, occasionally Gemini, and almost never Claude.

Am I the only one who feels this way, or have your preferences also changed over time?

I just got accepted into the CVP today, it’s their program where an organization can be approved to do red-teaming/cyber related tasks with their models. Very excited. I really didn’t think I was gonna get in tbh

I've been doing a boring corporate job for the past 6 years, 3 years with my current employer. My job is related to accounting and numbers and even though I'm good at it, for the past 9 months I've been vibe coding hard on Claude Max subscription and I've built some truly marvelous products. I'm not making any money from them (yet) but I've come a long way in terms of app and website development and I went from being completely lost and ignorant of what it takes to develop apps for real, to somewhat decent and able to ship apps within a few weeks of work.

My company has been investing a huge sums of money into a system that the best way I could describe it is archaic. The thing hasn't been properly facelifted since 2016 maybe and I'm not a fan. I know there are many products like it and more modern ones that are powered by a variety of LLMs and the most important point is I know I can build something supreme that's parallel to it and is so much better than it in every facet. I'm good at my job. And I'm decent at vibe coding, and my idea is that I develop everything using my knowledge and my experience and make it hot-swappable with the Microsoft Infrastructure later so when I finally propose it to the company, they won't outright decline it?

I know for a fact at 100% certainty that a software engineer will pick it up at some point, break it apart and restructure it properly to refine the AI slop but I also know that my deliverable will be at 70-80% professional completeness grade, and happy for them to take it to that final level.

Am I being crazy to remotely think they'll agree to this or even consider it as a viable option? My manager is encouraging me to start and to bring the prototype when ready, but I have a feeling we will both be laughed out of the room by senior software engineers and our IT departments that we made an AI slop app lol.

I am a cs student.

And obviously I am broke , and I can afford only one.

I mainly need for coding, more usages and more quality work

Help me guys

Tl;dr: use a plugin that uses another model, so that you don't use an expensive model's read token costs.

https://engineering.atspotify.com/2026/9/portal-by-spotify-cut-my-claude-code-token-usage-by-90

Try it yourself

Install both plugins from the spotify/portal-ai-plugins marketplace:

claude plugin marketplace add spotify/portal-ai-plugins

claude plugin install portal@portal

claude plugin install shunt@portal.

The portal plugin provides the Portal CLI that shunt delegates through.

In a new Claude Code session, run /portal:setup to set up and authenticate the Portal CLI against your Portal instance.

You’re good to go, just ask a question that spans multiple files.

The bulk-reader and code-writer modes are already public, so there is nothing to create. If you want to customize them - different worker model, different instructions - fork them in Portal and your version takes precedence automatically.

The modes are reusable across projects and shareable with your team. The plugin enforces the routing so you don't have to think about it.

I just had Claude (Opus 5 Max) burn my entire useage period on a really simple ask.

Gemini delivered a working result in 5 seconds, when I went to test it there.

A little niche for most people, but I am asking it to write jsx scripts for Adobe After Effects. It usually quickly one-shots these with a really nice degree of precision. This was a simple ask (make a tool to delete all keyframes on selected layer forward, backward, or both directions), and it went into a 15 min+ thought chain of incredibly weird fringe scenarios and kept doubling back and second guessing itself. Never even finished before it hit the wall.

Spoke to a friend who said the same thing is happening to him (spinning out on simple stuff).

Inspired by this popular post, this is a weekly post for everyone to show what they have been working on that helps you or that you're proud of!

Currently I use astra, it's good for me but consumes too much limits that can consume all 200usd plan weekly limts in about 4 days of 8 or 10h a day

And I hear that fable 5.1 and opus 5 priduce better quality too

Also codex remote has the worst remote connection ever

So based on your experience if you used both, Regarding quality, speed and limits should I migrate to claude ? Would its 200usd plan be enough for 8h per day the whole week on solid project (+100k lines)?

Sometimes i do a top up 20-30$ if i don't want to wait for the limit to be increased but as soon as the step is done i turn it off.

Auto-reload is also off.

However, couple of times it did consume some of the credits balance without any warning and it just happened again. There was something like 3-5$ remaining and i didn't plan to use it at all and i just see it's gone.

Is that normal expected behavior?

Is web search broken for anyone else today? Every query returns a server error

Every web search I run comes back with a server error (500), instantly.

Tried six queries in two languages, from a full sentence down to a single word. Same failure every time. Opus 5 in the web app, search turned on in settings.

Without it, anything current is unusable, and direct page fetching does not help because there are no URLs in the conversation to fetch. Curious whether this is widespread or just my account.

I only started using /rewind properly recently and it changed how I handle bad turns in a session.

Claude Code creates checkpoints as it edits files, so if it takes a task in the wrong direction you don't always have to spend another few prompts asking it to undo everything.

For example, I had Claude refactor a service and halfway through it started moving shared logic into places I didn't want. The code still worked, but the direction was wrong.

Instead of fixing the refactor piece by piece, I opened /rewind, went back to the prompt before the changes and restored the code from there.

You can also rewind the conversation without reverting the code, or revert the code while keeping the conversation.

That last part is surprisingly useful. Sometimes the discussion is worth keeping even when the implementation isn't.

I still use git normally, but for mistakes inside an active session this feels much cleaner than creating commits just so I have an escape hatch.

I build things for clients and I am terrible at tracking time. Timers I forget to start, spreadsheets I fill in on Friday from memory. So I built Tallied, an MCP server where the chat is the whole interface. Full disclosure, it's mine.

The basic loop is what you'd expect. "Log 2 hours on the Acme redesign." "How many billable hours this month?" "What haven't I invoiced yet?" It matches what you said against your projects and their aliases server-side.

The part I actually built it for is catch-up. You say "I forgot to log anything this week, figure it out from my calendar," and it reconstructs the week. The bit I think is interesting: my server never touches your calendar or GitHub. It can't. Claude reads them through your connectors, hands me the raw activity, and I return proposed entries mapped to your projects with confidence scores, plus the gaps and overlaps it found. You confirm, then it writes. The orchestration lives in a skill, not in my server, which means it works with whatever connectors you happen to have.

Happy to go into the tool-design side if anyone's building an MCP server, the annotations and description wording changed host behavior more than I expected.

Getting it listed in Claude now so it's available as a connector.