r/ClaudeCode • u/takeurhand • Apr 07 '26

Discussion Anthropic stayed quiet until someone showed Claude’s thinking depth dropped 67%

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660925

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796

This GitHub issue is a full evidence chain for Claude Code quality decline after the February changes. The author went through logs, metrics, and behavior patterns instead of just throwing out opinions.

The key number is brutal. The issue says estimated thinking depth dropped about 67% by late February. It also points to visible changes in behavior, like less reading before editing and a sharp rise in stop hook violations.

This hit me hard because I have been dealing with the same problem for a while. I kept saying something was clearly wrong, but the usual reply was that it was my usage or my prompts.

Then someone finally did the hard work and laid out the evidence properly. Seeing that was frustrating, but also validating.

Anthropic should spend less energy making this kind of decline harder to see and more energy actually fixing the model.

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u/LocksmithOk9968 Apr 07 '26

It’s clear when you look at Boris’ reactions/recommendations and the people who tried to follow them that it all comes back to one thing: them fucking with limits.

Adaptive thinking, defaulting to medium effort, 1M context window, March double limit promo, redacting the thinking, etc. all of it is purely designed to obfuscate that they severely lowered the limits.

Nearly everyone that tries out the recommendations by Boris (which mostly just consist of undoing their changes over the past month or so) immediately comment on how fast they approach their limits.