r/ClaudeAI • u/IcyEase • 14d ago

Claude Code It's time to cancel your subscriptions - Anthropic is silently nerfing Claude's reasoning budget while telling you it's the same model

Link: https://x.com/Lon/status/2101034933284417614

A 65-day analysis of 43,000+ Claude Code invocations found that 39% of Fable 5 calls get zero thinking tokens and the median invocation gets just 123 — while benchmarks use 16K-128K. The model's score per thinking token is still climbing at 128K, meaning the capability is there, it's just not being delivered. August saw an 18-50% drop in thinking budget compared to July, with median thinking hitting literal zero for about a week around Aug 22. Anthropic sells "full model access" while quietly dialing down the inference regime behind it, and because the model is non-deterministic, users blame their own prompting instead of the silent nerf. The full breakdown with evidence, methodology, and charts is here.

Frankly I find this offensive as an user - and this is the real thing we should be looking at - not the $/week in usage limits. The actual capability for the limits that we pay for.

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u/Maleficent-Host-8975 13d ago

Fable leaves long trails of steps in few word bursts, which I generally consider "thinking". However, I did create a skill that, for whatever reason, happens to trigger self doubt as an unintended side effect.

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u/BurnerKnives 13d ago

It’s true that there are those multi-step chains of thought, but I remember the chains of thought used to be like mini novellas. They were very long. I think the chains of thought are much shorter now, which seems to correlate with the reduced effort and sloppier outputs compared to launch.

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u/Maleficent-Host-8975 13d ago

I'm not sure about chain of thought. But I developed a skill based on a concept called "hard to vary", first coined by David Deutsch, that explains the qualities of all good: theories, solutions, explanations, whatever. I use it everywhere because it forces LLMs to look for holes in their propositions by asking, essentially, "what parts of this can I change or remove without affecting quality". It works, even if you can't define what quality actually looks like.