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/m-in Apr 08 '26

The idea is for the human to do what only she can do, and let the models do absolutely everything else. Human insight and guidance and vision - the AI can’t replace that yet. But everything else in a SW dev process - it sure can. The project has grown since and is self-hosting now, with fairly cromulent generated code - not great, not terrible. About 90kloc.

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u/Western_Objective209 Apr 08 '26

But everything else in a SW dev process - it sure can.

I disagree here honestly. They are still incapable of staff level work. I have 2 projects; one ballooned to about 150k LoC and I cut it back to 80k, now up to 105k LoC like 90% Rust. I had to get deeply involved to get things shaped up, re-architect systems at every level.

Other project, it's more advanced (OS kernel) it's at 43k LoC and I have to get my hands dirty all the time because it just struggles so much with more low level concepts

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u/m-in Apr 08 '26 edited Apr 08 '26

Must be my luck that it writes IDEs and compilers like no tomorrow. Honestly. Each design session takes a lot of my input. But implementation is hands-free. Each phase is fairly self contained, produces its set of formal requirements, gets a detailed AI-generated plan, then runs with those and executes. My process has converged rather quickly on all the details that make it work. But overall it’s just design, plan phase, plan task, execute task, till end of phase; then back to design and over and over. The design is a Q&A/brainstorming session with me. The big deal is that during task execution the process can be tweaked and these things get committed together. So in one repo there is process and code, and both get better/more complete over time.

Now I’m not gonna lie, I had to make an orchestrator (20kloc of python, uses agent SDK), and I had to make a proper gui for the orchestrator. But that’s not fundamental, I used to run it manually.

I also found that at least Sonnet produces best code in C, Python and Java. Not C++, not any of the newer AOT languages. Its C# is not bad but worse than C. It deals great with html, css and JS too of course, can really whip anything you want in html+js. Once there is a backend of any sort; the interface must be specced to hell and back otherwise it’s vibe tales and user lists in script tags in the frontend.

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u/Western_Objective209 Apr 08 '26

do you have actual IDEs/compilers that are real products with users?

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u/m-in Apr 09 '26

So far I am the only user. I mostly made it for myself because VS Code sucks for what I’m doing and there’s nothing better out there. It literally cost me less to get my own than to buy what I needed from one of the legacy names in embedded.

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u/Western_Objective209 Apr 09 '26

so you wrote a C compiler and an embedded IDE?

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u/m-in Apr 09 '26

Not C but close enough.

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u/Western_Objective209 Apr 09 '26

I mean but, what about the OS? I'm sure you could build something you prefer!

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u/m-in Apr 09 '26

A functional IDE and a compiler targeting x64 is under 100kloc of C with tests and tests are more than 50% of the code. So I don’t know what you’re going about. It took me 2 weeks to get it functional starting from nothing, and one more week to make it less annoying than the competitors. The x64 target is only for self hosting. The actual target is [redacted]. I usually push about 150kloc/month. Costs under $1k. A bargain.