8 ms·

I've been doing something a lot like this, using a claude-desktop instance attached to my personal mcp server to spawn claude-code worker nodes for things, and

I've been doing something a lot like this, using a claude-desktop instance attached to my personal mcp server to spawn claude-code worker nodes for things, and for a month or two now it's been working great using the main desktop chat as a project manager of sorts. I even started paying for MAX plan as I've been using it effectively to write software now (I am NOT a developer). Lately it's gotten entirely flaky, where chat's will just stop working, simply ignoring new prompots, and otherwise go unresponsive. I wondered if maybe I'm pissing them off somehow like the author of this article did. Now even worse is Claude seemingly has no real support channel. You get their AI bot, and that's about it. Eventually it will offer to put you through to a human, and then tell you that don't wait for them, they'll contact you via email. That email never comes after several attempts. I'm assuming at this point any real support is all smoke and mirrors, meaning I'm paying for a service now that has become almost unusable, with absolutely NO means of support to fix it. I guess for all the cool tech, customer support is something they have not figured out. I love Claude as it's an amazing tool, but when it starts to implode on itself that you actually require some out-of-box support, there is NONE to be had. Grok seems the only real alternative, and over my dead body would I use anything from "him".

syntaxing 9mo ago
Serious question, why is codex and mistral(vibe) not a real alternative?
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- bastard_op 9mo ago
  I tried codex, using my same sandbox setup with it. Normally I work with sonnet in code, but it was stuck on a problem for hours, and I thought hmm, let me try codex. Codex just started monkey patching stuff and broke everything within like 3-4 prompts. I said f-this, went back to my last commit, and tried Opus this time in code, which fixed the problem within 2 prompts. So yeah, codex kinda sucks to me. Maybe I'll try mistral.
- pixelmelt 9mo ago
  The Claude models are still the best at what they do, right now GLM is just barely scratching sonnet 4.5 quality, mistral isnt really usable for real codebases and gemini is kind of in a weird spot where it's sometimes better then Claude at small targeted changes but randomly goes off the rails. Haven't tried codex recently but the last time I did the model thought for 27 minutes straight and then gave me about the same (incorrect) output that opus would have in 20 seconds. Anthropics models are their only moat as demonstrated by their cutting off of tools other then Claude code on their coding plans.
- deaux 9mo ago
  Codex: Three reasons. I've used all extensively, for multiple months. Main one is that it's ~3 times slower. This is the real dealbreaker, not quality. I can guarantee that if tomorrow we woke up and gpt-5.2-codex became the same speed as 4.5-opus without a change in quality, a huge number of people - not HNers but everyone price sensitive - would switch to Codex because it's so much cheaper per usage. The second one is that it's a little worse at using tools, though 5.2-codex is pretty good at it. The third is that its knowledge cutoff is further in the past than both Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 that it's noticeable and annoying when you're working with more recent libraries. This is irrelevant if you're not using those. For Gemini 3 Pro, it's the same first two reasons as Codex, though the tool calling gap is even much bigger. Mistral is of course so far removed in quality that it's apples to oranges.
  - EnPissant 9mo ago
    Have you tried lower reasoning levels?
    - deaux 9mo ago
      Yes and this makes it faster, but still quite a bit slower than Claude Code, and the tool use gap remains. Especially since the comparison for e.g. 5.2 Codex-Low is more like Sonnet than Opus, so that's the speed you're competing with.
  - dudeinhawaii 9mo ago
    Unpopular opinion but I prefer slow and correct. My experience on Claude Max (still on it till end-of-month) has been frequent incomplete assignments and troubling decision making. I'll give you an example of each from yesterday. 1. Asked Claude to implement the features in a v2_features.md doc. It completed 8 of 10 but 3 incorrectly. I gave GPT-5.1-Codex-Max (high) the same tasks and it completed 10 of 10 but took perhaps 5-10x as long. Annoyingly, with LLM variability, I can't know for sure if I tried Claude again it would get it correct. The only thing I do know is that GTP-5.2 and 5.1 do a lot more "double-checking" both prior to executing and after. 2. I asked Claude to update a string being displayed in the UI of my app to display something else instead. The string is powered by a json config. Claude searched the code, somehow assumed it was being loaded by a db, did not find the json and opted to write code to overwrite whatever comes out of the 'db' (incorrect) to be what I asked for. This is... not desired behavior and the source of a category of hidden bugs that Claude has created in the past (other models do this as well but less often). Max took its time, found the source json file, and made the update in the correct place. I can only "sit back and let an agent code" if I trust that it'll do the work right. I don't need it fast, I need it done right. It's already saving me hours where I can do other things in parallel. So, I don't get this argument. That said, I have a Claude Max and OpenAI Pro subscription and use them both. I instead typically have Claude Opus work on UI and areas where I can visually confirm logic quickly (usually) and Codex in back-end code. I often wonder how much the complexity of codebases affects how people discuss these models.
throwup238 9mo ago
Anthropic has been flying by the seat of their pants for a while now and it shows across the board. From the terminal flashing bug that’s been around for months to the lack of support to instabilities in Claude mobile and Code for the web (I get 10-20% message failure rates on the former and 5-10% on CC for web). They’re growing too fast and it’s bursting the seams of the company. If there’s ever a correction in the AI industry, I think that will all quickly come back to bite them. It’s like Claude Code is vibe-operating the entire company.
- Bombthecat 9mo ago
  Well, they vibe code almost every tool at least
  - tuhgdetzhh 9mo ago
    Claude Code has accumulated so much technical dept (+emojis) that Claude Code can no longer code itself.
    - wwweston 9mo ago
      What’s the opposite of bootstrapping? Stakebooting?
      - irishcoffee 9mo ago
        Hmm... VC funded?
      - outside1234 9mo ago
        Sell to Google and run away
      - fsckboy 9mo ago
        pulling yourself down by your chinstrap
      - PunchyHamster 9mo ago
spike021 9mo ago
> where chat's will just stop working, simply ignoring new prompots, and otherwise go unresponsive I had this start happening around August/September and by December or so I chose to cancel my subscription. I haven't noticed this at work so I'm not sure if they're prioritizing certain seats or how that works.
- sawjet 9mo ago
  I have noticed this when switching locations on my VPN. Some locations are stable and some will drop the connection while the response is streaming on a regular basis.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    The Peets right next to the Anthropic office could be selling VPN endpoint service for quite the premium!
Bombthecat 9mo ago
Have a max plan, didn't use it much the last few days. Just used it to explain me a few things with examples for a ttrpg. It just hanged up a few times. Max plan and in average I use it ten times a day? Yeah, I am cancel. Guess they don't need me
- bastard_op 9mo ago
  That's about what I'm getting too! It just literally stops at some point, and any new prompt it starts, then immediately stops. This was even on a fairly short conversation with maybe 5-6 back and forth dialogs.
hecanjog 9mo ago
> I've been using it effectively to write software now (I am NOT a developer) What have you found it useful for? I'm curious about how people without software backgrounds work with it to build software.
- bastard_op 9mo ago
  I started using claude-code, but found it pretty useless without any ability to talk to other chats. Claude recommended I make my own MCP server, so I did. I built a wrapper script to invoke anthropic's sandbox-runtime toolkit to invoke claude-code in a project with tmux, and my mcp server allows desktop to talk to tmux. Later I built in my own filesystem tools, and now it just spawns konsole sessions for itself invoking workers to read tasks it drops into my filesystem, points claude-code to it, and runs until it commits code, and then I have the PM in desktop verify it, do the final push/pr/merge. I use an approval system in a gui to tell me when claude is trying to use something, and I set an approve for period to let it do it's thang. Now I've been using it to build on my MCP server I now call endpoint-mcp-server (coming soon to github near you), which I've modularized with plugins, adding lots more features and a more versatile qt6 gui with advanced workspace panels and widgets. At least I was until Claude started crapping the bed lately.
  - cyanydeez 9mo ago
    what do you actually do besides build tools to build tools to build tools?
    - bastard_op 9mo ago
      My normal day job is IT consulting, network/security mostly, so I'm using it largely to connect to my workers, sandboxed or not, to make me scripts to do things, modify configurations, and I built out an ansible/terraform integration in my mcp to be able to start doing direct automation tasking them directly via it as well. The whole thing I needed was to let AI reach out and touch things, be my hands essentially. This is why I built my tmux/worker system, I built out an xdg-portal integration to let it screen shot and soon interact with my desktop as a poc. I could let it just start logging into devices and letting them modify configs, but it's pretty dumb about stuff like modifying fortigate configurations at times what it thinks it should do vs what the cli actually let's it do, so I have to proof much of it, but that's why I'm building it to be able to run ansible/terraform jobs instead using frameworks that are provided by the vendors for direct configurations to allow for atomic config changes as much as vendor implementations allow for.
thtmnisamnstr 9mo ago
Gemini CLI is a solid alternative to Claude Code. The limits are restrictive, though. If you're paying for Max, I can't imagine Gemini CLI will take you very far.
- Conscat 9mo ago
  Gemini CLI regularly gets stuck failing to do anything after declaring its plan to me. There seems to be no way to un-lock it from this state except closing and reopening the interface, losing all its progress.
  - genewitch 9mo ago
    you should be able to copy the entire conversation and paste it in (including thinking/reasoning tokens). When you have a conversation with an AI, in simple terms, when you type a new line and hit enter, the client sends the entire conversation to the LLM. It has always worked this way, and it's how "reasoning tokens" were first realized. you allow a client to "edit" the context, and the client deletes the hallucination, then says "Wait..." at the end of the context, and hits enter. the LLM is tricked into thinking it's confused/wrong/unsure, and "reasons" more about that particular thing.
  - dudeinhawaii 9mo ago
    Depending on task complexity, I like to write a small markdown file with the list of features or tasks. If I lose a session (with any model), I'll start with "we were disconnected, please review the desired features in 'features.md', verify current state, and complete anything remaining. That has reliably worked for me with Gemini, Codex, and Opus. If you can get them to check-off features as they complete them, works even better (i.e, success criteria and an empty checkbox for them to mark off).
- andrewinardeer 9mo ago
  Kilocode is a good alt as well. You can plug into OpenRouter or Kilocode to access their models.
- bastard_op 9mo ago
uxcolumbo 9mo ago
Have you tried any of the leading open weight models, like GLM etc. And how does chatGPT or Gemini compare? And kudos for refusing to use anything from the guy who's OK with his platform proliferating generated CSAM.
- Leynos 9mo ago
  I tried GLM 4.7 in Opencode today. In terms of capability and autonomy, it's about on par with Sonnet 3.7. Not terrible for a 10th the price of an Anthropic plan, but not a replacement.
- Balinares 9mo ago
  Giving Gemini a go after Opus did crap one time too many, and so far it seems that Gemini does better at identifying and fixing root causes, instead of piling code or disabling checks to hide the symptoms like Opus consistently seems to do.
- qcnguy 9mo ago
  [dead]
  - user3939382 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - cyanydeez 9mo ago
      Yes, let us create the CSAM generating torment nexus in peace.
unyttigfjelltol 9mo ago
> I'm paying for a service now that has become almost unusable, with absolutely NO means of support to fix it. Isn’t the future of support a series of automations and LLMs? I mean, have you considered that the AI bot is their tech support, and that it’s about to be everyone else’s approach too?
- b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
  Support has been automated for a while, LLMs just made it even less useful (and it wasn't very useful to begin with; for over a decade it's been a Byzantine labyrinth of dead-ends, punji-pits and endless hours spent listening to smooth jazz).
  - georgemcbay 9mo ago
    Yup, the main goal of customer support for almost every Internet-based company for over a decade now is to just be so frustrating that you give up before you can reach an actual human (since that is the point where there is a real cost to the company in giving you that support). I'm not really sure LLMs have made it worse. They also haven't made it better, but it was already so awful that it just feels like a different flavor of awful.
    - dejli 9mo ago
      Thats not really the case here in Europe, where good vs bad support is often what separates companies that build a loyal customer base from those stuck with churn they cant control.
keepamovin 9mo ago
Folks a solution might be to use the claude models inside the latest copilot. Copilot is good. Try it out. Latest versions improving all the time. You get plenty of usage at reasonable price.
ph4evers 9mo ago
The desktop app is pretty terrible and super flaky, throwing vague errors all the time. Claude code seems to be doing much better. I also use it for non-code related tasks.
raptorraver 9mo ago
> Lately it's gotten entirely flaky, where chat's will just stop working This happens to me more often than not both in the Claude Desktop and in web. It seems that longer the conversation goes the more likely it is to happen. Frustrating.
- Rastonbury 9mo ago
  Judging by their status page riddled with red and orange as well as the months long degradation with blog post last Sept, it is not very reliable. If I sense it's responses are crap, I check the status page and low and behold usually it's degraded. For a non deterministric product, silent quality drops are pretty bad
  - Balinares 9mo ago
    It's amusing to observe that Claude works about as reliably as I'd expect for software written by Claude.
Aeolun 9mo ago
I really don’t understand people that say claude has no human support. In the worst case the human version of their support got back to me two day after the AI, and they apologized for being so slow. It really leads me to wonder if it’s just my questions that are easy, or maybe the tone of the support requests that go unanswered is just completely different.
- serf 9mo ago
  They shorted me a day off credit on the first day of offering the 200+ subscription and it took me 6 weeks for a human to tell me "whoops well we'll fix that, cya." I can't be alone . Literally the worst customer experience I've ever had with the most expensive personal dot com subscription I've ever paid for. Never again. When Google sets the customer service bar there are MAJOR issues.
left-struck 9mo ago
Making a new account and seeing doing the exact same thing to see if it happens again… would be against TOS and therefore is something you absolutely shouldn’t do
- 0x9e3779b6 9mo ago
  Claude shows me more than one personal account, as I registered via single signon and then - via e-mail, and I paid once only for one of them. It’s effectively a multi-tenant interface. I also used individual acc but on corp e-mail, previously. You could generate a new multi-use CC in your vibe-bank app (as Revolut), buy burner (e) sim for sms (5 eur in NL); then rewrite all requests at your mitm proxy to substitute a device id to one, not derived from your machine. But same device id, same phone could be perfectly legitimate use case: you registered on corp e-mail then you changed your work place, using the same machine. or you lost access to your e-mail (what a pity) But to get good use of it, someone should compose proper requests to ClickHouse or whatever they use, for logs, build some logic to run as a service or web hook to detect duplicates with a pipeline to act on it. And a good percentage of flags wouldn’t have been ToC violations. That’s a bad vibe, can you imagine how much trial and error prompting it requires?.. They can’t vibe the way though the claude code bugs alone, on time!
steve1977 9mo ago
> Now even worse is Claude seemingly has no real support channel. You get their AI bot, and that's about it This made me chuckle.
cyanydeez 9mo ago
One could, alternatively, come to the conclusion that the value of you as a customer far undersells the value of the product itself, even if it's doing what you expect it to do. That is, you and most of claude users arn't paying the actual cost. You're like a Uber customer a decade ago.
complianceowl 9mo ago
[dead]
xnx 9mo ago
> Grok seems the only real alternative Gemini CLI, Google Antigravity ...?

syntaxing 9mo ago

Serious question, why is codex and mistral(vibe) not a real alternative?

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
bastard_op 9mo ago
I tried codex, using my same sandbox setup with it. Normally I work with sonnet in code, but it was stuck on a problem for hours, and I thought hmm, let me try codex. Codex just started monkey patching stuff and broke everything within like 3-4 prompts. I said f-this, went back to my last commit, and tried Opus this time in code, which fixed the problem within 2 prompts. So yeah, codex kinda sucks to me. Maybe I'll try mistral.
pixelmelt 9mo ago
The Claude models are still the best at what they do, right now GLM is just barely scratching sonnet 4.5 quality, mistral isnt really usable for real codebases and gemini is kind of in a weird spot where it's sometimes better then Claude at small targeted changes but randomly goes off the rails. Haven't tried codex recently but the last time I did the model thought for 27 minutes straight and then gave me about the same (incorrect) output that opus would have in 20 seconds. Anthropics models are their only moat as demonstrated by their cutting off of tools other then Claude code on their coding plans.
deaux 9mo ago
Codex: Three reasons. I've used all extensively, for multiple months. Main one is that it's ~3 times slower. This is the real dealbreaker, not quality. I can guarantee that if tomorrow we woke up and gpt-5.2-codex became the same speed as 4.5-opus without a change in quality, a huge number of people - not HNers but everyone price sensitive - would switch to Codex because it's so much cheaper per usage. The second one is that it's a little worse at using tools, though 5.2-codex is pretty good at it. The third is that its knowledge cutoff is further in the past than both Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 that it's noticeable and annoying when you're working with more recent libraries. This is irrelevant if you're not using those. For Gemini 3 Pro, it's the same first two reasons as Codex, though the tool calling gap is even much bigger. Mistral is of course so far removed in quality that it's apples to oranges.
- EnPissant 9mo ago
  Have you tried lower reasoning levels?
  - deaux 9mo ago
    Yes and this makes it faster, but still quite a bit slower than Claude Code, and the tool use gap remains. Especially since the comparison for e.g. 5.2 Codex-Low is more like Sonnet than Opus, so that's the speed you're competing with.
- dudeinhawaii 9mo ago
  Unpopular opinion but I prefer slow and correct. My experience on Claude Max (still on it till end-of-month) has been frequent incomplete assignments and troubling decision making. I'll give you an example of each from yesterday. 1. Asked Claude to implement the features in a v2_features.md doc. It completed 8 of 10 but 3 incorrectly. I gave GPT-5.1-Codex-Max (high) the same tasks and it completed 10 of 10 but took perhaps 5-10x as long. Annoyingly, with LLM variability, I can't know for sure if I tried Claude again it would get it correct. The only thing I do know is that GTP-5.2 and 5.1 do a lot more "double-checking" both prior to executing and after. 2. I asked Claude to update a string being displayed in the UI of my app to display something else instead. The string is powered by a json config. Claude searched the code, somehow assumed it was being loaded by a db, did not find the json and opted to write code to overwrite whatever comes out of the 'db' (incorrect) to be what I asked for. This is... not desired behavior and the source of a category of hidden bugs that Claude has created in the past (other models do this as well but less often). Max took its time, found the source json file, and made the update in the correct place. I can only "sit back and let an agent code" if I trust that it'll do the work right. I don't need it fast, I need it done right. It's already saving me hours where I can do other things in parallel. So, I don't get this argument. That said, I have a Claude Max and OpenAI Pro subscription and use them both. I instead typically have Claude Opus work on UI and areas where I can visually confirm logic quickly (usually) and Codex in back-end code. I often wonder how much the complexity of codebases affects how people discuss these models.

throwup238 9mo ago

Anthropic has been flying by the seat of their pants for a while now and it shows across the board. From the terminal flashing bug that’s been around for months to the lack of support to instabilities in Claude mobile and Code for the web (I get 10-20% message failure rates on the former and 5-10% on CC for web). They’re growing too fast and it’s bursting the seams of the company. If there’s ever a correction in the AI industry, I think that will all quickly come back to bite them. It’s like Claude Code is vibe-operating the entire company.

Bombthecat 9mo ago
Well, they vibe code almost every tool at least
- tuhgdetzhh 9mo ago
  Claude Code has accumulated so much technical dept (+emojis) that Claude Code can no longer code itself.
  - wwweston 9mo ago
    What’s the opposite of bootstrapping? Stakebooting?
    - irishcoffee 9mo ago
      Hmm... VC funded?
    - outside1234 9mo ago
      Sell to Google and run away
    - fsckboy 9mo ago
      pulling yourself down by your chinstrap
    - PunchyHamster 9mo ago

spike021 9mo ago

> where chat's will just stop working, simply ignoring new prompots, and otherwise go unresponsive I had this start happening around August/September and by December or so I chose to cancel my subscription. I haven't noticed this at work so I'm not sure if they're prioritizing certain seats or how that works.

sawjet 9mo ago
I have noticed this when switching locations on my VPN. Some locations are stable and some will drop the connection while the response is streaming on a regular basis.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  The Peets right next to the Anthropic office could be selling VPN endpoint service for quite the premium!

Bombthecat 9mo ago

Have a max plan, didn't use it much the last few days. Just used it to explain me a few things with examples for a ttrpg. It just hanged up a few times. Max plan and in average I use it ten times a day? Yeah, I am cancel. Guess they don't need me

bastard_op 9mo ago
That's about what I'm getting too! It just literally stops at some point, and any new prompt it starts, then immediately stops. This was even on a fairly short conversation with maybe 5-6 back and forth dialogs.

hecanjog 9mo ago

> I've been using it effectively to write software now (I am NOT a developer) What have you found it useful for? I'm curious about how people without software backgrounds work with it to build software.

bastard_op 9mo ago
I started using claude-code, but found it pretty useless without any ability to talk to other chats. Claude recommended I make my own MCP server, so I did. I built a wrapper script to invoke anthropic's sandbox-runtime toolkit to invoke claude-code in a project with tmux, and my mcp server allows desktop to talk to tmux. Later I built in my own filesystem tools, and now it just spawns konsole sessions for itself invoking workers to read tasks it drops into my filesystem, points claude-code to it, and runs until it commits code, and then I have the PM in desktop verify it, do the final push/pr/merge. I use an approval system in a gui to tell me when claude is trying to use something, and I set an approve for period to let it do it's thang. Now I've been using it to build on my MCP server I now call endpoint-mcp-server (coming soon to github near you), which I've modularized with plugins, adding lots more features and a more versatile qt6 gui with advanced workspace panels and widgets. At least I was until Claude started crapping the bed lately.
- cyanydeez 9mo ago
  what do you actually do besides build tools to build tools to build tools?
  - bastard_op 9mo ago
    My normal day job is IT consulting, network/security mostly, so I'm using it largely to connect to my workers, sandboxed or not, to make me scripts to do things, modify configurations, and I built out an ansible/terraform integration in my mcp to be able to start doing direct automation tasking them directly via it as well. The whole thing I needed was to let AI reach out and touch things, be my hands essentially. This is why I built my tmux/worker system, I built out an xdg-portal integration to let it screen shot and soon interact with my desktop as a poc. I could let it just start logging into devices and letting them modify configs, but it's pretty dumb about stuff like modifying fortigate configurations at times what it thinks it should do vs what the cli actually let's it do, so I have to proof much of it, but that's why I'm building it to be able to run ansible/terraform jobs instead using frameworks that are provided by the vendors for direct configurations to allow for atomic config changes as much as vendor implementations allow for.

thtmnisamnstr 9mo ago

Gemini CLI is a solid alternative to Claude Code. The limits are restrictive, though. If you're paying for Max, I can't imagine Gemini CLI will take you very far.

Conscat 9mo ago
Gemini CLI regularly gets stuck failing to do anything after declaring its plan to me. There seems to be no way to un-lock it from this state except closing and reopening the interface, losing all its progress.
- genewitch 9mo ago
  you should be able to copy the entire conversation and paste it in (including thinking/reasoning tokens). When you have a conversation with an AI, in simple terms, when you type a new line and hit enter, the client sends the entire conversation to the LLM. It has always worked this way, and it's how "reasoning tokens" were first realized. you allow a client to "edit" the context, and the client deletes the hallucination, then says "Wait..." at the end of the context, and hits enter. the LLM is tricked into thinking it's confused/wrong/unsure, and "reasons" more about that particular thing.
- dudeinhawaii 9mo ago
  Depending on task complexity, I like to write a small markdown file with the list of features or tasks. If I lose a session (with any model), I'll start with "we were disconnected, please review the desired features in 'features.md', verify current state, and complete anything remaining. That has reliably worked for me with Gemini, Codex, and Opus. If you can get them to check-off features as they complete them, works even better (i.e, success criteria and an empty checkbox for them to mark off).
andrewinardeer 9mo ago
Kilocode is a good alt as well. You can plug into OpenRouter or Kilocode to access their models.
bastard_op 9mo ago

uxcolumbo 9mo ago

Have you tried any of the leading open weight models, like GLM etc. And how does chatGPT or Gemini compare? And kudos for refusing to use anything from the guy who's OK with his platform proliferating generated CSAM.

Leynos 9mo ago
I tried GLM 4.7 in Opencode today. In terms of capability and autonomy, it's about on par with Sonnet 3.7. Not terrible for a 10th the price of an Anthropic plan, but not a replacement.
Balinares 9mo ago
Giving Gemini a go after Opus did crap one time too many, and so far it seems that Gemini does better at identifying and fixing root causes, instead of piling code or disabling checks to hide the symptoms like Opus consistently seems to do.
qcnguy 9mo ago
[dead]
- user3939382 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - cyanydeez 9mo ago
    Yes, let us create the CSAM generating torment nexus in peace.

unyttigfjelltol 9mo ago

> I'm paying for a service now that has become almost unusable, with absolutely NO means of support to fix it. Isn’t the future of support a series of automations and LLMs? I mean, have you considered that the AI bot is their tech support, and that it’s about to be everyone else’s approach too?

b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
Support has been automated for a while, LLMs just made it even less useful (and it wasn't very useful to begin with; for over a decade it's been a Byzantine labyrinth of dead-ends, punji-pits and endless hours spent listening to smooth jazz).
- georgemcbay 9mo ago
  Yup, the main goal of customer support for almost every Internet-based company for over a decade now is to just be so frustrating that you give up before you can reach an actual human (since that is the point where there is a real cost to the company in giving you that support). I'm not really sure LLMs have made it worse. They also haven't made it better, but it was already so awful that it just feels like a different flavor of awful.
  - dejli 9mo ago
    Thats not really the case here in Europe, where good vs bad support is often what separates companies that build a loyal customer base from those stuck with churn they cant control.

keepamovin 9mo ago

Folks a solution might be to use the claude models inside the latest copilot. Copilot is good. Try it out. Latest versions improving all the time. You get plenty of usage at reasonable price.

ph4evers 9mo ago

The desktop app is pretty terrible and super flaky, throwing vague errors all the time. Claude code seems to be doing much better. I also use it for non-code related tasks.

raptorraver 9mo ago

> Lately it's gotten entirely flaky, where chat's will just stop working This happens to me more often than not both in the Claude Desktop and in web. It seems that longer the conversation goes the more likely it is to happen. Frustrating.

Rastonbury 9mo ago
Judging by their status page riddled with red and orange as well as the months long degradation with blog post last Sept, it is not very reliable. If I sense it's responses are crap, I check the status page and low and behold usually it's degraded. For a non deterministric product, silent quality drops are pretty bad
- Balinares 9mo ago
  It's amusing to observe that Claude works about as reliably as I'd expect for software written by Claude.

Aeolun 9mo ago

I really don’t understand people that say claude has no human support. In the worst case the human version of their support got back to me two day after the AI, and they apologized for being so slow. It really leads me to wonder if it’s just my questions that are easy, or maybe the tone of the support requests that go unanswered is just completely different.

serf 9mo ago
They shorted me a day off credit on the first day of offering the 200+ subscription and it took me 6 weeks for a human to tell me "whoops well we'll fix that, cya." I can't be alone . Literally the worst customer experience I've ever had with the most expensive personal dot com subscription I've ever paid for. Never again. When Google sets the customer service bar there are MAJOR issues.

left-struck 9mo ago

Making a new account and seeing doing the exact same thing to see if it happens again… would be against TOS and therefore is something you absolutely shouldn’t do

0x9e3779b6 9mo ago
Claude shows me more than one personal account, as I registered via single signon and then - via e-mail, and I paid once only for one of them. It’s effectively a multi-tenant interface. I also used individual acc but on corp e-mail, previously. You could generate a new multi-use CC in your vibe-bank app (as Revolut), buy burner (e) sim for sms (5 eur in NL); then rewrite all requests at your mitm proxy to substitute a device id to one, not derived from your machine. But same device id, same phone could be perfectly legitimate use case: you registered on corp e-mail then you changed your work place, using the same machine. or you lost access to your e-mail (what a pity) But to get good use of it, someone should compose proper requests to ClickHouse or whatever they use, for logs, build some logic to run as a service or web hook to detect duplicates with a pipeline to act on it. And a good percentage of flags wouldn’t have been ToC violations. That’s a bad vibe, can you imagine how much trial and error prompting it requires?.. They can’t vibe the way though the claude code bugs alone, on time!

steve1977 9mo ago

> Now even worse is Claude seemingly has no real support channel. You get their AI bot, and that's about it This made me chuckle.

cyanydeez 9mo ago

One could, alternatively, come to the conclusion that the value of you as a customer far undersells the value of the product itself, even if it's doing what you expect it to do. That is, you and most of claude users arn't paying the actual cost. You're like a Uber customer a decade ago.

complianceowl 9mo ago

[dead]

xnx 9mo ago

> Grok seems the only real alternative Gemini CLI, Google Antigravity ...?