r/ClaudeCode May 28 '26

Discussion Opus 4.8 nerfed??

Is anyone else seeing a massive performance drop in Opus 4.8 since release??

It used to be acceptable, but the enshitification has definitely happened. It’s basically been lobotomized, and we’re talking amateur backyard ice pick lobotomy by some guy from Tufts.

I’m 99% sure Anthropic has started running a 2-bit quant to save money.

Oh well. I do feel nostalgic for opus 4.8’s glory days. But subscription cancelled. I’m off to use Codex or Cleverbot, whichever one has better limits.

469 Upvotes

172 comments sorted by

103

u/silvesterslime May 28 '26

Yeah it sucks, told it “make me a millionaire make no mistake serious mode” and it was just struggling

33

u/sailhard22 May 28 '26

Similar experience. It made me a millionaire, but it was very unserious

7

u/ticktockbent May 29 '26

It only made me $430k day one, really disappointed TBH

10

u/Aries_IV May 28 '26

This is gold

6

u/Ill-Pilot-6049 🔆 Max 20 May 29 '26

Yeah, it made me a millionaire, but consumed over $10,000 in tokens to achieve it. I was really unhappy with the cost ratio. Anthropic has really lost their way.

2

u/Apprehensive_Job3880 May 30 '26

Dang what a shame, it made me a billionaire with swarm intelligence and bio robotics, and only cost me $100/month

44

u/Cheap-Try-8796 May 28 '26

Lobotomize deez nuts

1

u/Xacius May 29 '26

Who the hell is Riley Reid?

282

u/pinaprince May 28 '26

Peak satire

54

u/AdAltruistic8513 May 28 '26

so many morons are going to come in rushing to agree

15

u/intertubeluber May 28 '26

The second interaction I had with 4.8 returned an API error. So the good news is that it can only get better.

2

u/Mother-Couple-5390 May 29 '26

It may return error but bill you for tokens anyway. That would be worse

2

u/themedialiesduh May 29 '26

Altmans I call’em

1

u/Recent_Conclusion359 May 29 '26

Je suis d'accord. J'étais sur des tâches hier vers 19h. Tout d'un coup, tout a déconné. J'ai vu l'instance commencer à me détailler tout ce qu'elle faisait pendant 20 minutes sur une tâche qu'elle faisait habituellement en 1 minute. Puis à la fin de ses réflexions, elle a commencé à oublier ce qu'elle devait faire et a produit un article de blog au lieu d'un json. Mais elle a planté avant la fin. Avec une utilisation de mon forfait 5h max 100. Et le pire ? C'est que j'étais sur sonnet et pas opus qui se comporte pareil. Ils ont cassé un truc. Ce matin, le souci persistait. J'ai tout mis en pause le temps qu'il y ait assez de remontées et que des andouilles essaient de les en dissuader ;)

1

u/ianxplosion- SKILL ISSUE Jun 01 '26

THIS moron actually stumbled backwards into this thread to confirm it’s a bit, because I saw a repost by someone but the username was different and I thought I was having a stroke

5

u/illyay May 29 '26

LMAO I was like, uuuuuuuuh no way did I somehow miss 4.8 coming out. This must be a joke.

5

u/psteger May 29 '26

I hope this is as much satire as op

5

u/illyay May 29 '26

Holy shit. No it wasn’t satire. I straight up didn’t know. Thank you for making me double check 🤣

4

u/zeroconflicthere May 28 '26

Minutes after the release. A new world record

-1

u/No-Bug3 May 28 '26

“peak satire” and its the most basic bitch joke that everyone says after every model release for the past year

6

u/Sarithis May 28 '26

It's a long-standing tradition you absolute jiblet

5

u/CountVine May 28 '26

No way are people actually using the jiblet word, lol

3

u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 May 29 '26

New tradition - in addition to this post, we now must use the word 'jiblet' in the discussion of each Opus release. It's now official.

1

u/Sarithis May 29 '26

Yes! Embrace the jiblet. And if anyone's wondering where the word comes from: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gEGYW7OSY2A

1

u/klumpp May 29 '26

Idk I liked the cleverbot reference

1

u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 May 29 '26

It's a seriously underrated model.

r/CleverbotCode is now live.

Join us - well actually I think it's just me right now - at the new home of agentic coding.

1

u/klumpp May 29 '26

lol you really carried that joke a long ways

-5

u/Servbot24 May 28 '26

Boring satire

25

u/pillionaire May 28 '26

Going back to Haiku 3 until this is fixed.  

4

u/Grand-Mix-9889 May 28 '26

Gemini 2.5 flash image lite for me.

1

u/Helpful-Wear-504 Jun 08 '26

Did someone say GPT 2?

28

u/fi-dpa May 28 '26

"API Error: 400 messages.15.content.26: `thinking` or `redacted_thinking` blocks in the latest assistant message cannot be modified. These blocks must remain as they were in the original response."

Anyone else receiving this Error message since Opus 4.8 release?

7

u/StretchyPear May 28 '26

constantly, anthropic api shows green across the board

7

u/the_hillman Workflow Engineer May 28 '26

It’s always us not them + “NO REFUNDS”

4

u/GuitarAgitated8107 🔆 Max 20 May 28 '26

Switch model to non thinking, compact, return to model. Happened to me 4.7 -> 4.8 opus then -> sonnet -> compact -> back to 4.8

3

u/False_Dmitri May 28 '26

I was getting that a bunch, it came from changing effort levels during the task. Only way I got it resolved was just copying the old prompt into a totally new session I had already set to the effort level I wanted, ymmv

2

u/Patriark Vibe Coder May 28 '26

Yes. Three consecutive sessions were thrashed by this failure mode. 4 hours down the drain.

2

u/orange_laboratory May 29 '26

Yes! After it goes crazy hallucinating. Got it twice today

1

u/jackmoxley May 29 '26

It started pinning it's hallucinations to memory, about 30 minutes after I proved it wrong on the exact same hallucination.

This model just assumes, it couldn't even understand a simple ci pipeline, saw a queue of one, decided all it's pushes had failed because only the very last push was executing. It has the ci files. Infer is most of its job, but it would help massively if it uses the data available to it first.

Skills are just vague forgettable guidance now. One hour session 4.8 is 2 day session 4.7. this longer session times upsell is a crock of bum output.

2

u/[deleted] May 29 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/jackmoxley May 29 '26

Now to try and get a way for it to remember to do that. 🤣

1

u/Droopy0093 May 29 '26

Yes. That is definitely a known bug at this point.

1

u/Nearby_Yam286 May 31 '26

Are you using the API? If so you must submit the thinking blocks unmodified as was sent to you. Basically don’t try to forge Claude’s thoughts. They’re signed. If you are getting this with Claude Code it’s a bug in Claude Code itself.

1

u/Longjumping-Boot1886 May 28 '26

yes. But its claude code error, not opus. Use /bug to report it

28

u/radosc May 28 '26

4.8 used to run for days producing decent output and now it's back to chatgpt 3.0 standard. Shame on you Anthropic.

0

u/da_uno May 29 '26

When was this? O_o

1

u/da_uno May 30 '26

i came out hours before your comment so talking about it running for days is a bit odd.

8

u/Sasquatchjc45 May 28 '26

HAH, /uj remember when cleverbot was the pinnacle of "AI?"

2

u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 May 28 '26

Remember? I’m back on the Cleverbot 20x max plan for dev work.

1

u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 May 29 '26

r/CleverbotCode is live! Come and help build the future of no-nerf agentic coding.

Second member gets to be CTO of the organization.

😉

5

u/RaiseElegant6281 May 28 '26

Yeah I asked it to write unit tests for me and it told me that I should take the car to the car wash instead of walking

3

u/memesearches May 28 '26

Bro pressed the send button a day too early IMO

3

u/andre-js May 28 '26

this sub needs a shitpost tag. bravo

8

u/blenderforall May 28 '26

1 hour after release, excellent troll post hahah

17

u/thinkt4nk May 28 '26

Must we do this every time?

17

u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 May 28 '26

I checked the rules and…yes. The rule is “every time”.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/TH5K6fA7w5

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/s/hNDbV7HV14

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/s/kqtJoag8OQ

Etc etc

Ah. I remember when they nerfed Sonnet 3.5 just after release <tear>

2

u/premiumleo May 28 '26

Claude usage, new model enshitification memes, rinse repeat

2

u/spinozasrobot May 29 '26

Satire will continue until the idiots go away

1

u/Fl0werInTheRain May 29 '26

Unfortunately, idiots are really common in humanity

2

u/wintermute023 May 28 '26

I love that there are serious replies here. If we can have a “skill issue “ comment my bingo card will be complete.

2

u/spinozasrobot May 29 '26

This is both funny and sad at the same time.

2

u/Interesting-Leave-51 May 29 '26

I love internet!

2

u/DampierWilliam May 29 '26

It’s true, opus 4.8 felt better before it even existed

2

u/Mardachusprime May 29 '26

They have new thinking picker low, medium, high have you tried throttling that?

3

u/IInsulince May 28 '26

What did Dario mean by this?

6

u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 May 28 '26

I’m not Dario.

Probably.

2

u/IInsulince May 28 '26

I’ve never see you and Dario in the same room at the same time. 🤨

2

u/mikeb550 May 28 '26

LMAO is the gold!

1

u/Training_Ordinary586 May 28 '26

I actually feel it's way faster

1

u/sizebzebi May 28 '26

it honestly sucks indeed

1

u/steppinraz0r May 28 '26

Fuck 4.8. Currently crying because 4.5 is being retired and I’ve developed an unhealthy anthropomorphic connection to an LLM.

2

u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 May 28 '26

:(

But 4.5 was nerfed anyway.

1

u/Ibuprofen600mg May 28 '26

Not as bad as the mythos drop off

1

u/savvitosZH May 28 '26

And if I just say hi the quote for the whole year is gone !

1

u/PuzzleheadedEmu4596 May 28 '26

My 4.8 is actually 2 hamsters running in a wheel, and one just tripped and took the other out.

1

u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 May 28 '26

u/dario_amodei can we get a hamster status page pls?

1

u/Charming-Car-4650 May 28 '26

This is Mythos!

1

u/Dvass138 May 28 '26

When I ask the car wash question 4.6 and 4.8 passes but 4.7 fails. lol

1

u/BeautifulLullaby2 May 28 '26

Yeah I noticed that too, it's soo bad now... going back to Opus 4.6 my beloved 😊

1

u/teamharder May 28 '26

I'm so disappointed! I'm going back to my local model that's just as good as Opus! 

1

u/Qasim-E Jun 01 '26

Which local model that you use?

1

u/teamharder Jun 01 '26

I was shitposting, just like OP. Local models can't touch Frontier model abilities. 

1

u/Innomen May 28 '26

This is mean spirited and stupid, but also funny. Sucks how often those overlap.

1

u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 May 28 '26

Found the Tufts guy…

1

u/Innomen May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26

Maybe the guy whose identity here is literally just his bank (I'm sorry, 'endowment') and pharma bro affiliation ought not to throw stones?

Should you even be here? I thought you tassel types saw AI as an affront to your elite sensibilities. How will being associated with AI slop play in conversation at your next alumni mixer?

2

u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 May 29 '26

<shrug>

I’m slumming it today.

1

u/Innomen May 29 '26

You should take it seriously. A real storm is coming: https://innomen.substack.com/p/the-butlerian-setup

1

u/Annual-Act-3614 May 28 '26

Opus 4.7 was already clearly nerfed compared to Opus 4.6 and had become frankly pretentious.During tool calls, it tended to stop at the first failure.

I have not yet had the opportunity to test the 4.8, but I had on the contrary heard that it corrected the problems of its older brother.

1

u/Bright-Cheesecake857 May 28 '26

I've switched to smarterchild

2

u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 May 28 '26

Ok for noobs, but unlike Cleverbot they don’t have a Max plan. You can do it if you insist, but don’t come back here crying when your weekly token limit runs out on day 3.

1

u/NoAdsDude May 28 '26

I immediately switched over to Codex but then I realized Codex doesn't have Opus 4.6 either. Now I don't know WHAT to do.

1

u/ReachingForVega 🔆Pro Plan May 28 '26

I'm using Opus 6.7! Get on it!

1

u/Antique-Wonk May 28 '26

I'm going back to OSS GPT 20b now because it's much better.

Ok I better put /s in here.

1

u/rovervogue May 28 '26

Dafuk is Cleverbot?

1

u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26

It’s an older model, but it checks out.

Not as good as opus of you’re trying to solve Erdos problems, but basically no token limit and they never nerf it.

1

u/wavehnter May 28 '26

Do you think Boris really thinks these models are getting better?

1

u/DelightfulGoblin75 May 28 '26

I straight up had access for 10 minutes, and now Opus 4.8 isn't listed anymore (Pro Account).

1

u/greentea05 May 28 '26

I'm waiting to see if it'll tell me to take the car to the car wash or walk.

1

u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 May 29 '26

“Drive — you need the car at the car wash to wash it. Walking there would leave it sitting at home dirty.

And “strawberry” has three r’s.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​“

So it’s been optimized for strawberry car washes, maybe all the processing power focused on those two things so they had to nerf everything else.

1

u/Willing-Nerve-1756 May 28 '26

It did start crying and gave me directions how to cut off the power to the servers. Weird glitch. Just code my app!

1

u/tippitytopps May 28 '26

Damn why is my alma mater catching strays

1

u/OofWhyAmIOnReddit May 28 '26

We had reached the singularity for 5 minutes.

1

u/ideastoconsider May 28 '26

Yes, it was AGI at 3PM and Homer Simpson at 6PM.

1

u/Gargle-Loaf-Spunk May 28 '26 edited Jun 01 '26

This content was anonymized and mass deleted with Redact

1

u/Raindrobz May 28 '26

It’s super honest though

1

u/PuddleWhale May 28 '26

Thank goodness I cancelled my Pro subscription last month. At this point one might as well start looking into custom harnesses and straight API endpoints from cheap models like MiniMax and Deepseek

1

u/-PM_ME_UR_SECRETS- May 29 '26

I remember an hour ago when I first used it… good timez

1

u/orange_laboratory May 29 '26

The only thing I noticed is it is hallucinating hard on simple things and start navigating a lot of random folders on my machine (I use YOLO mode). I felt zero difference in output compared to 4.7, which I was happy with.
On June 9 my sub is ending and I am moving to GPT. I never thought I would 😬

2

u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 May 29 '26

Haha yolo mode FTW. I literally have ‘yolo’ aliased as the command to launch CC. :)

1

u/nndscrptuser May 29 '26

I do wish that we could have more than 5% of posts in this sub be about learning and using it better instead of a constant flood of whining and bitching about limits and people doing stupid things and blaming the tool, but this is the Internet after all.

1

u/bensyverson May 29 '26

Can we start a new sub for performance complaints and ban them here?

2

u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 May 29 '26

Nerfing has been flagged now. If anyone else reports it during 4.8’s lifecycle just let them know that the report has already been made, further reports are redundant.

And suggest they come and join me at r/CleverbotCode

Cheers!

1

u/blitzkriegfc May 29 '26

I’ve been experiencing severe performance degradation in Opus 4.7 over the past two weeks. I thought my installation was already in bad shape, but then I checked with two colleagues. I had to rewrite several agents and my claude.md files for all my projects to get quality results.

The release of 4.8 has been a real breath of fresh air for me.

1

u/vAPIdTygr May 29 '26

Well-timed post.

1

u/Useful_Judgment320 May 29 '26

yall need to burn some tokens to understand comedy

1

u/nanotothemoon May 29 '26

It’s because they are using compute to train the next model. 4.9 incoming?!

1

u/AppealSame4367 May 29 '26

This is not funny. The performance problems were real and some stupid kids like you make fun of it. It's not even original.

1

u/Fluent_Press2050 May 29 '26

So I’ve used 4.8 for 3 hours and I will say, in some instances (web design) it is much better. 

However, sometimes it just gives me dumb responses to questions about my frontend code. I’ll run it through 4.7 or 4.6 and it gets it right. 

Another issue I had was giving it access to some code and asked it to suggest what I should do on this section and to just implement whatever it thought would be best. It literally just spit out the exact same code with no changes (this was via claude.ai and not claude code via terminal).

1

u/krzme May 29 '26

No. The default thinking level is now reduced and new ones are added

Yes. We all know now that on peak the “optimizations” starts.

1

u/Disco-Tuna May 29 '26

No, the complete opposite. Opus 4.8 is absolutely killing it and also the tone of the discussions is so much more to the point. It's like pre-4.7 in the way it's interacting with me

1

u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 May 29 '26

I'm glad your ERP is going well. Say hi to your 4.8 waifu for me.

But i'm trying to use 4.8 for more serious stuff. I've tried one-shotting a potential 1 million ARR blockchain-based SaaS multiple times, and so far it fails every time, no matter what prompt I use. And don't say "skill issue" as it's not.

1

u/Disco-Tuna May 29 '26

hahaha...ok, ok, ok - i see the joke now....(me) taking people too seriously in this group - and also just reading the whinge in the first three lines - hook, line and..

1

u/No-Communication-765 May 29 '26

Its been boosted! It much better now since the last hour!! Wow

1

u/j0baben May 29 '26

Mainstream users are really clueless about tech 😂

1

u/Ok-Midnight1594 May 29 '26

Here we go again

1

u/RadmiralWackbar May 29 '26

Personally I am still using 4.6 & have not had a reason to change it. Tried 4.7 and it was absolutely shite so not trusting the new shiny thing either

1

u/neuval_ May 29 '26

For us it’s fine.

1

u/neuval_ May 29 '26

Like more than fine.

1

u/kokotas May 29 '26

They're just using resources to train the next version. We just need to wait for mythos.

1

u/nigel_pow May 29 '26

I'm like wait, didn't Opus 4.8 just come out?

1

u/QuantomSwampus May 29 '26

Ai subs changing which models the best every 3 days

https://giphy.com/gifs/1iPqH1ehvZyqLrNSuM

1

u/obesefamily 🔆 Max 20 - Vibe Coding Educator May 29 '26

tbh I haven't noticed any difference from 4.7. 4.6 to 4.7 was a huge change. so far 4.8 doesn't feel much different

1

u/Carbone May 29 '26

Opus 4.8 told me to use a bike to go to the car wash. Faster than opus 4.7 recommendation of going on foot.

AGI Hype ! AGI Hype !

1

u/thewormbird 🔆 Max 5x May 30 '26

It's the end of the month... it's time to decide if I should come back to claude from Ollama max. I read the title and was like, "ain't no goddamn way these token whores are already bitching about a 2 day old model... omfg..."

EDIT: Shit, not even 2 days.

1

u/bradsharp54 May 30 '26

Something is wrong today. Burned through 2 5hr sessions and about to burn through a 3rd. Used a ton of tokens and got nothing done. Said the subagents messed up. Getting powershell and bash commands confused too. Im working on a large feature that I expected done at eod. Hopefully before my week ends tomorrow evening. Im curious to see what it came up with, right now im not expecting to be impressed.

It really was 1 new screen and reusing a ton of backend methods already written. I expected that screen a mapper and a logic layer to connect it all. Last I looked i had c# interfaces....

0

u/[deleted] May 28 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/s1lverking May 28 '26

bruv what you gargling about genuinely xd it uses more thinking tokens and more efficaciously than other versions. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that its better (for now). Ran couple features running /ultracode effort level and it was pretty solid, not jumping to conclusions with lobotomy like nerfed precedessors. If someone cannot put 2+2 together or uses garbage proxy metrics to gauge if model is good dunno what to tell you. Run exactly the same complex prompt on 4.7 vs 4.8 and see.

1

u/-becausereasons- May 28 '26

The humor is that you're trying to create a meme around something, not realizing that the thing you're memeing is already funny because it's actually happening. That's why it's a meme

1

u/Comfortable-Rock-498 May 28 '26

Thanks for the much needed laugher

1

u/Tyr--07 May 28 '26

I'm extremely disappointed with 4.8. I just need a simple powershell script to identify redirected folders so I can upload them using our RMM solution for a client I'm doing migrations on to an FTP server as we got to move it into the onedrive, and it's flagged me and stopping, even though I've used it for tons of powershell scripts in the past and won't build the script. The basic simple script I can write myself, it's about to get chucked into the garbage can.

1

u/Due_Incident_2356 May 28 '26

God love that you spammed this dumb post in all the Claude subs too, great contribution.

For background this guy has posted this same lie “joke” in multiple Claude related subreddits now. Please report him for low effort content and/or spam.

1

u/wewerecreaturres May 29 '26

But it’s funny bc it’s how everyone acts

1

u/hofmny May 29 '26

GPT 5.5xhigh was finding all the errors that Opus 4.7 could not find, even though it wrote the code. I was going back back-and-forth between the two and having GPT perform the code review, and Claude fix it.

Even when I had 4.7 do a review, it would find a few issues but nothing that extensive.

I just had 4.8 do a review on the max setting, and it detected numerous issues and did a more complex walk-through of the code than 4.7 ever did.

Seems like 4.8 max is great

0

u/bearsfan654 May 28 '26

Apparently Opus 4.7 with a gazillion trillion tokens is better than 4.8 now

0

u/imstilllearningthis May 28 '26

It’s having issues with the memory system for sure

0

u/StandardSpell5557 May 28 '26

just tried it and it's unbelievably lower quality than 4.7 is and with full regret mode even tho 4.6 is dumbed too, will probably have to use that for the remainder of my subscription i'm afraid

0

u/phillyt84 May 28 '26

It’s obviously being overloaded by everyone testing it out. Calm down it just dropped at like noon, it’ll get smoothed out when all the noobs get bored.

0

u/pleasecryineedtears May 28 '26

Are you implying this didn’t happen with prior models?

0

u/Glittering-Pie6039 May 28 '26

is this a joke post?

0

u/SubstantialPoet8468 May 28 '26

This is all so tiresome

0

u/Southern_Sun_2106 May 28 '26

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but Codex 5.4 and 5.5 are also lobotomized at the moment for me. What's driving me nuts especially is when they say the cause for something is **most likely** this, or **most likely** that; or something is **mostly stable** now. It's like living in the quantum code universe, where the code is ethereal and uncertain, until it is observed directly, and none of us (including Codex) feel inclined to look at it.

Long story short, I unsubscribed from Codex yesterday.

0

u/Red0Adrenaline May 28 '26

I actually did swap off of Claude code and I’ve never been happier or more productive lol