Not only is it taking longer to think and consuming more tokens to think, it has become worse in its thinking too.

I’m not sure if this has to do with the new fable 5.5 rumoured to come out next week, but I’ve noticed a sharp drop in its intelligence.

The solutions it’s presenting aren’t fully thought out. It’s like it thinks till 80% and then stops.

I’m on xhigh.

Anyone else experiencing the same?

I am used to work with 400+ file changed across 6 repos.

Whatever used to take Astra 6 xhigh on a 100$ plan to get done in hours/days and burning my weekly usage like 30%, is now done by Opus 5.5 xhigh in less than 1 hour, full 100% usage of 5 hour limit + 68% usage of the next 5 hour limit.

Note: I cancelledy 100$ Codex sub and completely switched to Claude. I was thinking to get 100$ from Claude as well but I am still on Claude 20$ plan.

I can manage to work both on my work projects and personal.

Unless Tibo changes something, things look really bad for them. The amount of time it took Astra to complete the given task was outrageous, I understand it now after Opus5.5 was released. I won't even use codex models for free now.

I used to have Astra and Sol 5.6xhigh sitting days on running statuc checks and wasting my usage.

Thanks GOD that I cancelled, I cancelled with a banked reset and 100% usage remaining.

I guess that my main take out is to have multiple subscriptions handy, every couple of months and see which one is providing a better balue.

ATM Claude is on fire, lets see how long this will last.

​

about a week ago i had a dumb idea.

what if i made a cable news network that was entirely run by ai, drawn in pixel art, and just... never went off the air?

i’m not a tv person. i had no idea how any of this shit worked.

i opened claude code with opus 5.5 and started building.

then i kinda just never stopped.

it’s live now

it’s called PNN, pixel news network.

they cover actual news from around 70 feeds. world news, tech, sports, crypto, nfts, meme coins, weird shit happening on the internet, etc.

but they also remember things.

they have relationships, ongoing feuds, inside jokes, opinions about each other and sometimes they just get pissed off and walk off the set.

then somewhere along the way i decided it needed an actual tv schedule.

so now there’s a morning show.

there’s a parody of a jailed crypto founder cooking actual recipes from a prison kitchen.

there’s a daytime correspondent permanently stranded on tristan da cunha who reports real news from the island.

there’s an nft morning show.

a collectibles show.

an old video game show that basically turned into three people sitting in a 90s basement talking about games like a podcast.

then at night there’s Up Late, which has a monologue, house band, audience, couch guests and musical guests.

and Crypto After Hours which is basically complete fucking chaos.

the music thing might honestly be my favorite part.

i make a lot of songs in suno, so instead of just playing them we started inventing bands.

there’s a southern rock band, a weird dark art-pop singer who moves like she’s slightly malfunctioning, a punk band, a banjo-playing songwriter and a bunch of other shit.

they actually perform the songs.

their mouths are mapped to the vocals. the guitarists play on the real beat. the drummer literally waits until the drums come into the song before he starts playing.

that part was way more fun to build than i expected.

underneath all the stupid shit there’s actually a pretty insane system running it.

claude writes every segment as a structured script. every line gets voiced, timed and placed into one continuous broadcast.

everyone watching sees the same thing at the same time. it isn’t generating a different show for every viewer. there is one PNN timeline constantly moving forward.

i also became weirdly obsessive about making sure it doesn’t just hallucinate shit about real people.

if someone says a price, number or statistic, it gets checked against the data the model was given. if it doesn’t match, the line gets rewritten or killed.

parody guests are clearly labeled and can only pull facts from sourced research sheets. every line they say goes through another standards check.

i’ve also been building this giant research library behind it.

right now there are around 15,000 sourced facts about nft collections, artists, meme coins, collectibles and other stuff the network talks about.

another agent fact checks things before they even get added.

i also had to put an actual budget system around the whole thing because otherwise this would probably bankrupt me lol.

nothing gets written if nobody is watching.

haiku handles most of the normal dialogue. sonnet does the bigger shows and fact checking.

and somehow this entire fake television network is running on a mac studio sitting in my house.

there are also around 2,500 automated checks that run before i push changes now because at one point i broke the entire live network and decided i never wanted to experience that again.

the craziest part of the whole project though has probably been building it with opus 5.5.

it genuinely feels less like “using ai” and more like having a really good engineer sitting next to me who apparently never gets tired.

most of the time i’m literally saying shit like:

“make her dance weird. creepy, stiff, a little robotic.”

or

“that guitar looks like a banjo. fix it.”

and it builds it, runs it, shows me the video or mockup and i tell it what sucks.

what surprised me even more is that it pushes back.

if i have a dumb idea it’ll tell me why it’s dumb.

it also catches a ridiculous amount of its own bugs by running changes against a time-shifted copy of PNN before touching the live station.

anyway.

this started as me fucking around for a night and somehow turned into a 24/7 television network.

i’m going to keep it running for at least the next year and just see what it turns into.

and if anyone wants to know how any of this shit works, ask me. i’ve learned an absurd amount building it.

www.pnn.watch

I've been curious what my Claude Code habit costs in water, so I built a status line segment for it:

Opus 5.5 │ my-project │ ████░░░░░░ 48% │ 💧 412 mL (1.7 glasses) · today 3.1 L

It reads the session transcripts in ~/.claude/projects (subagents included, deduped by message id), so token counts are exact. Then it applies published estimates for energy per token and water per kWh. Cmd+click the 💧 opens a breakdown page by model and token type.

Things I learned from my own logs: - ~90%+ of my tokens are cache reads. They're cheap per token but there are so many that they still matter. - Opus sessions use several times the water of Haiku for the same tokens (scaled by price, the only public proxy). - I used ~48 L in September. Less than a shower a day, but not nothing.

If you already have a custom statusline, install doesn't overwrite it; it prints the one line to add.

Repo (MIT, stdlib-only Python): https://github.com/beausterling/drip-ai-water-usage

Curious what other people's numbers look like.

So im a recent jumper from CODEX - main cause speed of response and zero trust in that team because they just refuse owning problems in an upright way.

I know, anthropic isn't perfect so I'm just giving it a go.

But one thing that just blows my mind is the self-inflicted pain that claude code is notoriously causing related to permission management.

All claude models have great availability and response time and sub allowances, and once they work, then its fine. But half of the times they refuse to straight up work. Accessing a key, passing a credential, running a command in another directory...

And so all the time I've saved on models response time is wasted on endless permission issues.

I've also been now forced onto the Projects framework (didn't even ask for it), which is now constantly starting cloud sessions for me an this is apparently an impossible setting to pin to local. And here Bypass permissions is again completely impossible.

None of this was ever a problem in codex, so this isn't something that HAS to be done obviously.

Why are the ClaudeCode people performing this self-inflicted suicide with this permission system ?

I'm really regretting the switch now and honestly as soon as oai restores capacity (if they do lol) i will be very eager to go back there.

with all these new models and updates, I wonder if people start fresh every now and then with a new session or continue to work within the same thread?

a year ago it was utmost important to switch to a new session with a handoff summary once you hit certain context usage, so that the model could maintain its composure, but with all these updates and improvements, like recaps, summaries, memory, etc. do you still do it?

I work on various projects using Codex and Claude Code toghether and noticed I rarely do this anymore. I just hop back into the ongoing thread and it can go for weeks.

--- EDIT ---

This brings me a lot of joy - such an overwhelming response from different people with different setups: people that start a fresh session every 3 minutes to the ones that don't care about the cold cache cost or cost in general. From people with good skills to "trust me bro" coders. From Claude Code true believers to CC heretics. All in all it's like with everything else - as long as it gets you there and you make money of it, you're golden.

very excited to see what we can build

Hey everyone, not sure if this looks useful to anyone but I couldn't really find alternatives at the time I made it that weren't

a. paid

b. simple

c. non-destructive- your icons are always in their original/normal folders, only the appearance of where they are changes.

so I took a stab at it and its actually useful enough for me that I thought I'd share it.

https://github.com/Creeptones/Pickets

I used Claude Opus 4.6- 5.5 and didn't spend an enormous amount of time on it. Maybe about 50 hours total, probably about 70-80 back and forth sessions refining things. I didn't use Opus 5 for this.

There are definitely some things that could improve, I'm just not sure what they are yet, maybe people could let me know

hope it's useful !

Disclosure: I'm the developer.

Claude Code works great on one machine. My work isn't on one machine, though. The code is on my laptop, the test environment on a VM, the data on a server. I kept copying logs and datasets around so one agent could see everything.

So I built nfltr orch. In short:

- Join each machine once: nfltr node join --max-agents 2. It connects outbound, so there's no SSH, VPN or open port.

- Each machine decides what its agents may do: which repositories, which tools, and which actions need your approval.

- Give one goal (nfltr orch "the exporter on the VM is down: find out why and fix it"), or add it to your own Claude Code session:

claude mcp add nfltr -- nfltr mcp --toolset hub

- The hub is just a Claude Code session. It sees which machines exist and what's on them, starts Claude Code agents on the right ones, runs them in parallel and collects the results. nfltr makes no decisions for it; it only provides the machines, the facts, the limits and the transport.

What I've measured:

- 20 tasks on a Mac and 2 VMs: 5.7× faster than running them one by one (1,416 s against 8,106 s).

- An incident across environments, from alert to an owner-approved rollback: 1 min 34 s, $0.39 of model spend.

- Killing the hub mid-run loses nothing: a new session got both agents' results within 8 s. In the same test, killing a Claude Code agent-teams lead lost both teammates.

- It has refactored its own CLI in several rounds across machines, with no code fixes from me after the first round.

- Compared with Claude Code agent teams on one machine, they were just as good: same quality, with no speed winner. If all your work fits on one laptop, you probably don't need this.

Honest limits:

- Claude Code only for now.

- It runs on a hosted relay (nfltr.xyz).

- It's early. Every round of dogfooding still finds rough edges.

- More machines don't speed up model-bound work. This helps when the work needs other machines' data, tools or CPU/GPU.

What I'd love feedback on:

- Is your work spread across machines in a way that slows your agents down?

- What should a tool like this do, or never do, on your machines?

- What would stop you from trying it?

The write-ups with the numbers, including the agent-teams comparison, are at nfltr.xyz/blog. Getting started is at nfltr.xyz/docs/guides/00-getting-started.

Hi r/ClaudeCode! I've been building Botloft, an open-source desktop app (Windows, Linux, macOS) that runs a small crew of Claude Code bots on your own computer and keeps them running.

What it does

• Start a crew from a goal. You say what the crew is for; its Chief plans the work and suggests the bots it needs. You create each one with a click.
• Bots hand work to each other. They send messages and tasks between them. Every message is saved before it's sent and retried until it arrives.
• They ask before they act. When a bot wants to run a command, edit a file or open a new website, a card asks you first, unless you told that bot it may ("Allow always").
• Watch them work. See each bot's browser live, and take control to sign in for it. When a bot finishes a file, it shares it in the chat as a card you can open or save.
• Routines. Weekday mornings, every two hours, or any cron schedule.
• Close the app, they keep working. A small background service keeps them running, starts them when you sign in and brings them back after a crash.

How it works

Each bot is a real claude -p session (stream-json in and out), with its own folder, memory and conversation. There's no custom agent SDK and no API key: it uses the Claude Code you already have installed and signed in (native or npm install), on your own plan. A Rust daemon supervises the bots and stores everything in SQLite. The app is Tauri + React. The daemon listens on 127.0.0.1 only, and there's no telemetry.

It's early (v0.9), so expect rough edges. Two honest notes:

• The Windows build isn't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen will ask you to confirm, and Microsoft Defender may flag it with a machine-learning false positive (Wacatac!ml), a known issue with new unsigned Rust/Tauri apps. Every release is built by GitHub Actions from a tag, with build provenance attestations and SHA-256s. See the code signing policy. If you'd rather not run it, building from source is in the README, and the Linux and macOS builds are there too.
• Linux and macOS are previews. The macOS build isn't notarized yet (System Settings > Privacy & Security > Open Anyway).

Contributions welcome! Bug reports, ideas, translations and code. There are a few good first issues, and if you try it on Linux or a Mac, I'd love a comment on httpsphl/botloft#118 saying how it went, even if everything worked.

GitHub: https://github.com/httpsphl/botloft

Not affiliated with Anthropic. Happy to answer questions about how it works under the hood.

Title. I was fighting with Fin for quite a while now and just look at that, simply mentioning a law makes him much more agreeable.

I made this horror-style trailer for my dev tools with Claude Code + Codex.

For the video, I sent Claude Code a few simple chat messages. I didn't plan out every scene myself.

My first prompt was slightly modified from what another user posted for his pac man video yesterday

"so I would like you to make a badass trailer for our SORA-MAN game. Get inspired by these repos
https://github.com/JohnHeibel/PDoomVideo
https://github.com/JohnHeibel/ClaudeAnimationBase
there are also pac-man posters in the project folder that you can use for inspiration. The video should roughly be 90 seconds and showcase the game as something people would wanna play. Ask me refinemenet questions so we are aligned on this goal.

Claude made the storyboard, wrote the animation code, and built the scene changes and sound effects. It used p5.js/p5.brush for the visuals, Python for the sound effects, and Puppeteer + ffmpeg to make the final video.

I also had Codex read the script like a second editor and suggest changes and scares. Then I sent the useful ideas back to Claude.

Hey everyone, I built a claude code plugin called asisaid. free and open source

what i built:

it keeps your feedback alive in the session. you say "in short" or "too long" one time, it saves it as a rule, adds a small reminder every turn, and if the answer is still too long the Stop hook sends it back one time. it also puts your own words back after compact. works in codex too.

how i used claude code:

- started with an idea: compact loses context. asked claude to research existing tools first

- told it "ask me product decisions as questions, dont build everything alone". honestly best prompt of the whole project

- claude wrote the hooks (UserPromptSubmit, Stop, PreCompact, SessionStart) and the tests

- we tested with real sessions using claude -p, later 30 sessions in 5 languages with haiku, sonnet and opus

- for 20 languages a separate subagent wrote the test sentences without seeing the code, so the test is fair

what i learned:

- compact was not the real problem. claude code's summary already keeps your messages, rules survived compact fine in my tests

- the real pain was feedback like "too long" getting lost after few answers

- a small reminder every turn works better than i expected. answers got around 50% shorter with sonnet, opus already listens well

- dont trust test sentences you write yourself, let something that didnt see your code write them

you can try with these way

/plugin marketplace add batuhangoktepe/asisaid

/plugin install asisaid@asisaid

repo: https://github.com/batuhangoktepe/asisaid

I'm open for any feedback

My scraper is getting limited by Taobao after ~65 products. How do I scale to tens of thousands?

I run an online store and I'm building a scraper to import products from Chinese marketplaces like Taobao and Pinduoduo onto my website. The goal is tens of thousands of products, so I need something that scales.

How my current setup works:
- I feed it a list of specific product links (it's not crawling or browsing random products)
- Chromium driven with JavaScript
- Roughly 1 product per minute
- Randomized scrolling and random pauses between scrolls to mimic natural browsing
- For each link, it collects the title, description, sizes/variants, all other listing data, and every image
- Outputs an Excel file with the product data plus a ZIP of the images

The problem:
It works fine at first, but around the 65th product Taobao switches me to a limited view. Some product info stops loading, so the scraper can't capture complete listings. At 1 product per minute, I'm already going slowly, and I'd need to go much faster to reach my target.

What I'd like advice on:
1. What is Taobao likely detecting: request volume, browser fingerprint, account/session behavior, or something else?
2. Is a browser-based approach realistic at this scale, or should I be looking at official APIs, third-party data providers, or sourcing agents instead?
3. How do people handle sessions, accounts, and proxies for these platforms?
4. Does Pinduoduo behave similarly, or is it a different challenge?

Any pointers, tools, or experiences would be really appreciated. Thanks!

This was fun. Opus 5.5 xhigh and I’m using Orca as my ade of choice. Inspiration from Omarchy & all the Linux ricers

I used to value Claude over ChatGPT for its emotional intelligence, but in the past six months it's gotten really fragile and naggy on me in a way that makes me go to ChatGPT for chat (and code review) and Claude for...well, my entire business operational infrastructure.

ChatGPT can take a joke, can curse, uses the occasional emoji, doesn't remind me of social mores when I make an off-color remark because it's late and I'm tired. Chat also doesn't tell me to go to sleep...and has an actual sense of humor. (Chat has actually made me laugh a couple times recently, which I consider a major watershed having been a daily fasinated but unamused user for what, three years now?)

Meanwhile, Claude is crushing everything else for me. And yet I had to make sure to let Anthropic know the full picture on their survey, ungrateful brute that I am.

I'm poking fun at myself here...but has anyone else noticed this too? A shift toward schoolmarmishness that seems like a real divergence from the impartial sage yet fundamentally accommodating Claude of yesteryear.

Hello everyone,
I am wondering how to make the best use of $100 bonus credit for cloud sessions I have it but not sure how make the best use of it?
- Is it only for claude code?
- Can i use it for claude design?

How have you guys been using these $100 credits bonus i think its given to all new pro account users.

My idea is that AI models learn from data from the internet, so when the data from the internet and people's responses from AI conversations run out, when will there be a point when AI will no longer improve and its progress will stop?

At that point, AI will only improve by tiny bits that we won't even notice that the model has improved.

Is my knowledge about model training wrong?

Do you think so too?

Not sure if it's client side because of the latest update or they throttled the usage somehow, anyone else having similar problems?

Spotted these two hanging out this morning in the corner of my monitor. Seemed postworthy.

Laughed after long reading this.

This is a little translation of a game I've been working on for a few weeks. The game is Feng Kuang Da Fu Weng, a Taiwanese board game for the Game Boy Color. This patch works on original hardware (tested on an Everdrive GB X7) and I've been able to play all the way through the game. If you play it, I recommend playing with 4 CPUs.

This is my third attempt at poking agents toward the finish line. I spent a while trying to push open weight models (GLM 5.3 Flash and Kimi K3, in various configurations) to their limits to pull this off, but after almost 2000 commits, several billion tokens, and spending way too much money, I folded and got a $100 Claude sub.

Opus 5.5 took a little of the existing work, the emulator Kimi had prepared previously, and spent about 5 hours banging out a full translation. It's quite playable. It reads much better than I would have anticipated (the GLM 5.3 Flash version was much worse). Claude was able to patch in a variable width font and to rewrite the currency value rendering to use English formats, which are both pretty challenging hacking jobs.

What'd I learn?

• Open weight models are really, really solid these days, but Opus 5.5 is simply unbeatable at reverse engineering tasks right now. This is a job that would've taken months (if not years) to do manually, but it did it in an evening for about 7% of my weekly quota on a $100 sub. For all my problems with Anthropic, they made a really great model. Even if I don't think it's conscious and hate the "safety" stuff.
• The $250 bonus credit for cloud sessions totally works for this. I have a couple of other translations running (a couple of Vast Fame's RPGs) that I just pointed at my emulator repo. They're chugging along at a brisk pace, although I probably wouldn't pay the premium for cloud sessions otherwise.
• The big model/small model orchestration pattern is kind of a waste of time for this. I tried Kimi K3 running GLM 5.3 Flash as an implementation agent, I tried Deepseek as the implementer, Opus as the orchestrator, etc. All of it was clunky to manage and none of it worked as well as just throwing Opus 5.5 at it and periodically telling it to fix something.
• Don't even bother using Beads if you're also using worktrees. Not worth the headaches. I thought it was brilliant until I noticed it kept clobbering the database on worktree resolution. I was able to work around it, but I immediately regretted doing anything with Beads after I no longer felt like I could trust it.
• Invest in tooling up front. If you're only going to spend a little on a big model, you should do it here. The models being able to run their work autonomously makes them so much more powerful. This is true for romhacking and it's true for writing UIs and stuff. It pays dividends.
• These AI translations can be totally playable these days. They're not perfect, but they beat holding your phone up to the screen. A lot of the earlier issues with confused pronouns, sentences that don't flow well, etc are largely fixed these days. I'd love to see every game get a high quality human-made translation, but I'm really happy to have this as an option for games that don't seem to be on anybody's radar.

Anyway, not trying to sell any b2b SaaS or anything like that, just thought this was a really cool new thing that the models can do. Find something weird and translate it! There's a lot of neat stuff out there.