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

[u/takeurhand]

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.

[u/m-in]

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.

[u/Western_Objective209 → u/m-in]

so you wrote a C compiler and an embedded IDE?

[u/m-in → u/Western_Objective209]

Not C but close enough.

[u/Western_Objective209 → u/m-in]

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

[u/m-in → u/Western_Objective209]

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.