5 ms·
That analysis is pretty brutal. It's very disconcerting that they can sell access to a high quality model then just stealthily degrade it over time, effectively
by matheusmoreira 7mo ago
That analysis is pretty brutal. It's very disconcerting that they can sell access to a high quality model then just stealthily degrade it over time, effectively pulling the rug from under their customers.
- tmpz22 7mo ago> effectively pulling the rug from under their customers. This is the whole point of AI. Its a black box that they can completely control.
- matheusmoreira 7mo agoI hope local models advance to the point they can match Opus one day...
- addandsubtract 7mo agoWe said this since ChatGPT 3. People will never be content with local models.
- NinjaTrance 7mo agoConsidering the advances in software and hardware, I would expect that in 2 or 3 years. And I hope we will eventually reach a point where models become "good enough" for certain tasks, and we won't have to replace them every 6 months. (That would be similar to the evolution of other technologies like personal computers and smartphones.)
- zozbot234 7mo agoIf OP is correct, Opus has regressed to a point where local models are already on par with it.
- aveao 7mo agoHaving tried GLM-5 and Minimax M2.5, alongside regularly using Opus 4.6 (on default thinking): Opus is still much, much better at writing non-garbage code. I haven't yet tried GLM-5.1 though.
- nyeah 7mo agoIt's disconcerting. But in 2026 it's not very surprising.
- 01284a7e 7mo agoSeems like the logical conclusion, no matter what.
- mikepurvis 7mo agoDisconcerting for sure, but from a business point of view you can understand where they're at; afaiui they're still losing money on basically every query and simultaneously under huge pressure to show that they can (a) deliver this product sustainably at (b) a price point that will be affordable to basically everyone (eg, similar market penetration to smartphones). The constraints of (b) limit them from raising the price, so that means meeting (a) by making it worse, and maybe eventually doing a price discrimination play with premium tiers that are faster and smarter for 10x the cost. But anything done now that erodes the market's trust in their delivery makes that eventual premium tier a harder sell.
- willis936 7mo agoThey'll never get anyone on board if the product can't be trusted to not suck. And idk about the pricing thing. Right now I waste multiple dollars on a 40 minute response that is useless. Why would I ever use this product?
- matheusmoreira 7mo agoYeah. I've been enjoying programming with Claude so much I started feeling the need to upgrade to Max. Then it turns out even big companies paying API premiums are getting an intentionally degraded and inferior model. I don't want to pay for Opus if I can't trust what it says.
- FiberBundle 7mo agoThis could also be a marketing strategy. Make your models perform worse towards the end of a model's cycle, so that the next model appears as if more progress has been made than there actually has been.
- aurareturn 7mo agoafaiui they're still losing money on basically every query Source?
- thatxliner 7mo ago
- riskassessment 7mo agoStealthily degrade the model or stealthily constrain the model with a tighter harness? These coding tools like Claude Code were created to overcome the shortcomings of last year's models. Models have gotten better but the harnesses have not been rebuilt from scratch to reflect improved planning and tool use inherent to newer models. I do wonder how much all the engineering put into these coding tools may actually in some cases degrade coding performance relative to simpler instructions and terminal access. Not to mention that the monthly subscription pricing structure incentivizes building the harness to reduce token use. How much of that token efficiency is to the benefit of the user? Someone needs to be doing research comparing e.g. Claude Code vs generic code assist via API access with some minimal tooling and instructions.
- nrds 7mo agoI've been using pi.dev since December. The only significant change to the harness in that time which affects my usage is the availability of parallel tool calls. Yet Claude models have become unusable in the past month for many of the reasons observed here. Conclusion: it's not the harness. I tend to agree about the legacy workarounds being actively harmful though. I tried out Zed agent for a while and I was SHOCKED at how bad its edit tool is compared to the search-and-replace tool in pi. I didn't find a single frontier model capable of using it reliably. By forking, it completely decouples models' thinking from their edits and then erases the evidence from their context. Agents ended up believing that a less capable subagent was making editing mistakes.
- jfim 7mo agoOut of curiosity, what can parallel tool calls do that one can't do with parallel subagents and background processes?
- weird-eye-issue 7mo agoHow would you do a parallel subagent if you don't have parallel tool calls? Sub agents are tools.
- 7mo ago
- halfcat 7mo agoIf you think that’s brutal, wait until you hear about how fiat currency works
- the__alchemist 7mo agoChatGPT has been doing the same consistently for years. Model starts out smooth, takes a while, and produces good (relatively) results. Within a few weeks, responses start happening much more quickly, at a poorer quality.
- beering 7mo agopeople have been complaining about this since GPT-4 and have never been able to provide any evidence (even though they have all their old conversations in their chat history). I think it’s simply new model shininess turning into raised expectations after some amount of time.
- quietsegfault 7mo agoI agree with you. I too complain about this same phenomenon with my colleagues, and we always arrive at the same conclusion: it’s probably us just expecting more and more over time.
- gherkinnn 7mo agoI would have thought so too. But my n=1 has CC solving pretty much the same task today and about two weeks ago with drastically degraded results. The background being that we scrapped working on a feature and then started again a sprint later. In my cynicism I find it more likely that a massively unprofitable LLM company tries to reduce costs at any price than everyone else suffering from a collective delusion.
- redhed 7mo agoIt seems likely to me they are moving compute power to the new models they are creating,
- ambicapter 7mo agoFirst time interacting with a corporation in America?
- matheusmoreira 7mo agoWith an AI corporation, yes. I subscribed during the promotional 2x usage period. Anthropic's reputation as a more ethical alternative to OpenAI factored heavily in that decision. I'm very disappointed.
- satvikpendem 7mo agoEthics don't mean anything when talking about corporations. Their good guy persona is itself a marketing stunt. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633396#47635060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633396#47635060
- NinjaTrance 7mo ago[dead]
- SpicyLemonZest 7mo agoI still think it's a live possibility that there's simply a finite latent space of tasks each model is amenable to, and models seem to get worse as we mine them out. (The source link claims this is associated with "the rollout of thinking content redaction", but also that observable symptoms began before that rollout, so I wouldn't particularly trust its diagnosis even without the LLM psychosis bit at the end.)
- quikoa 7mo agoPerhaps the subscription part of the business is so heavily subsidized that they have no choice but to reduce the cost.
- vitaflo 7mo agoOr they don’t have enough compute to handle the recent influx of traffic. I’m guessing it’s a bit of both.
- vips7L 7mo agoDid anyone ever expect anything different from modern tech companies? This will only ever get more expensive and worse in quality.
- nativeit 7mo agoI don't think humanity has fully reckoned with the idea of a product that can manipulate us unilaterally like this.
- otabdeveloper4 7mo agoYou just got used to slop and peeked behind the curtain when the wow factor wore off.
- hacker_homie 7mo agoThis was always the plan, it’s always the plan. If you can’t self host they will change the rules.
- zamber 7mo agoIt's not rug pulling, it's simple price anchoring. They'll degrade when it makes financial sense for them. You will pay for it. There's no way around it besides self hosting or using reality metered endpoints like openrouter.