4/12/2026 at 9:03:35 AM
Has anybody else noticed a pretty significant shift in sentiment when discussing Claude/Codex with other engineers since even just a few months ago? Specifically because of the secret/hidden nature of these changes.I keep getting the sense that people feel like they have no idea if they are getting the product that they originally paid for, or something much weaker, and this sentiment seems to be constantly spreading. Like when I hear Anthropic mentioned in the past few weeks, it's almost always in some negative context.
by sunaurus
4/12/2026 at 9:54:22 AM
Well, off the top of my head:- Banning OpenClaw users (within their rights, of course, but bad optics)
- Banning 3rd party harnesses in general (ditto)
(claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?)
- Lowering reasoning effort (and then showing up here saying "we'll try to make sure the most valuable customers get the non-gimped experience" (paraphrasing slightly xD))
- Massively reduced usage (apparently a bug?) The other day I got 21x more usage spend on the same task for Claude vs Codex.
- Noticed a very sharp drop in response length in the Claude app. Asked Claude about it and it mentioned several things in the system prompt related to reduced reasoning effort, keeping responses as brief as possible, etc.
It's all circumstantial but everything points towards "desperately trying to cut costs".
I love Claude and I won't be switching any time soon (though with the usage limits I'm increasingly using Codex for coding), but it's getting hard to recommend it to friends lately. I told a friend "it was the best option, until about two weeks ago..." Now it's up in the air.
by andai
4/12/2026 at 10:11:43 AM
> It's all circumstantial but everything points towards "desperately trying to cut costs".I have been wondering if it's more geared at reducing resource usage, given that at the moment there's a known constraint on AI datacenter expansion capability. Perhaps they are struggling to meet demand?
by rlpb
4/12/2026 at 10:06:55 AM
> (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?)100% this, I’ve posted the same sentiment here on HN. I hate the chilling effect of the bans and the lack of clarity on what is and is not allowed.
by joshstrange
4/12/2026 at 10:07:07 AM
Why were third party harnesses banned? Surely they'd want sticking power over the ecosystem.by politelemon
4/12/2026 at 10:20:49 AM
There’s the argument that Anthropic has built Claude Code to use the models efficiently, which the subscription pricing is based on.Maybe there’s some truth to that, but then why haven’t OpenAI made the same move? I believe the main reason is platform control. Anthropic can’t survive as a pipeline for tokens, they need to build and control a platform, which means aggressively locking out everybody else building a platform.
by cedws
4/12/2026 at 9:56:47 AM
>> apparently a bug?it's a bug only if they get a harsh public response, otherwise it becomes a feature
by risyachka
4/12/2026 at 10:00:32 AM
> claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nukedI've used it with a sub a lot. Concurrency of 40 writing descriptions of thousands of images, running for hours on sonnet.
I have a lot of complaints. I've cancelled my $200 subscription and when it runs out in a few days I'll have to find something else.
But claude -p is fine.
... Or it was 2 week ago. Who knows if they've silently throttled it by now?
by esperent
4/12/2026 at 10:03:54 AM
A month ago the company I work at with over 400 engineers decided to cancel all IDE subscriptions (Visual Studio, JetBrains, Windsurf, etc.) and move everyone over to Claude Code as a "cost-saving measure" (along with firing a bunch of test engineers). There was no migration plan - the EVP of Technology just gave a demo showing 2 greenfield projects they'd built with Claude Opus over a weekend and told everyone to copy how he worked. A week later the EVP had to send out an email telling people to stop using Opus because they were burning through too many tokens.Claude seems to be getting nerfed every week since we've switched. I wonder how our EVP is feeling now.
by zazibar
4/12/2026 at 10:36:12 AM
Hopefully that EVP feels embarrassed that a big bet was made that not only didn't pay off but left the company in a worse position. Some schadenfreude may be all you can expect, since this is an executive.by dickersnoodle
4/12/2026 at 9:12:43 AM
Yeah I’ve seen this too. It’s difficult for me to tell if the complaints are due to a legitimate undisclosed nerf of Claude, or whether it’s just the initial awe of Opus 4.6 fading and people increasingly noticing its mistakes.by jakobnissen
4/12/2026 at 9:48:27 AM
It's not just you, there is a github issue for it: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796by babaganoosh89
4/12/2026 at 9:40:36 AM
Both can be a thing at same timeby PunchyHamster
4/12/2026 at 9:35:12 AM
I think there's a much more nefarious reason that you're missing.It's pretty clear that OpenAI has consistently used bots on social networks to peddle their products. This could just be the next iteration, mass spreading lies about Anthropic to get people to flock back to their own products.
That would explain why a lot of users in the comments of those posts are claiming that they don't see any changes to limits.
by iLoveOncall
4/12/2026 at 9:43:25 AM
The trouble with that argument, though, is that it works the other way as well: how do I, a random internet citizen, know that you're not doing the same thing for Anthropic with this comment?(FWIW I have definitely noticed a cognitive decline with Claude / Opus 4.6 over the past month and a half or so, and unless I'm secretly working for them in my sleep, I'm definitely not an Anthropic employee.)
by javawizard
4/12/2026 at 9:48:38 AM
Oh it's pretty clear to me that Anthropic employs the same tactics and uses bots on socials to push its products too. On Reddit a couple of months ago it was simply unbearable with all the "Claude Opus is going to take all the jobs".You definitely shouldn't trust me, as we're way beyond the point where you can trust ANYTHING on the internet that has a timestamp later than 2021 or so (and even then, of course people were already lying).
Personally I use Claude models through Bedrock because I work for Amazon, and I haven't noticed any decline. Instead it's always been pretty shit, and what people describe now as the model getting lost of infinite loops of talking to itself happened since the very start for me.
by iLoveOncall
4/12/2026 at 9:37:30 AM
Judging from the number of GitHub issues on Anthropic, shamelessly being dismissed as "fixed", I doubt openai needs the bots to tarnish that competitor.by hirako2000
4/12/2026 at 9:31:15 AM
Just one more anecdote:I'm on the enterprise team plan so a decent amount of usage.
In March I could use Opus all day and it was getting great results.
Since the last week of March and into April, I've had sessions where I maxed out session usage under 2 hours and it got stuck in overthinking loops, multiple turns of realising the same thing, dozens of paragraphs of "But wait, actually I need to do x" with slight variations of the same realisation.
This is not the 'thinking effort' setting in claude code, I noticed this happening across multiple sessions with the same thinking effort settings, there was clearly some underlying change that was not published that made the model get stuck in thinking loops more for longer and more often without any escape hatch to stop and prompt the user for additional steering if it gets stuck.
by kingkongjaffa
4/12/2026 at 9:44:22 AM
I’ve seen the point raised elsewhere that this could be the double usage promo that was available from the 13th of March to the 28th. ie. people getting used to the promo then feeling impacted when it finished.Although it seems that enterprise wasn’t included, so maybe not in your case.
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14063676-claude-march...
by adahn
4/12/2026 at 10:07:50 AM
its sounds like, tinfoil hat, they reduced the quant size of their model and tried to mask the change with the promo. your theory only addresses the spend not the reduced realiabilityby cyanydeez
4/12/2026 at 9:36:35 AM
Whenever I see Opus say “but wait, …”—which is all the time—I get a little bit closer toward throwing my computer out the window. Sometimes I just collapse the thinking section, cross my fingers, and wait for the answer. It’s too frustrating watching the thinking process.by UqWBcuFx6NV4r
4/12/2026 at 9:14:28 AM
There's still plenty of "leave my fellow multbillion corp alone" type ones,it means that corp can and should screw it's loving customer base harder.by pxtail
4/12/2026 at 9:19:27 AM
The enshittification meme has been taken too seriously to the point where it is shoehorned into every single place possible.It is not in the interests for Anthropic to screw its customer base. Running a frontier lab comes with tradeoffs between training, inference and other areas.
by simianwords
4/12/2026 at 9:57:04 AM
The investors are their customers - not the users of the end-product.by officialchicken
4/12/2026 at 10:17:22 AM
This shows a lack of understanding of how markets work. Investors make money when the valuation of the company increases. The valuation of the company is the best prediction of future profit risk adjusted.How would anthropic increase future profits without satisfying customers?
by simianwords
4/12/2026 at 9:35:48 AM
I certainly noticed a significant drop in reasoning power at some point after I subscribed to Claude. Since then I've applied all sorts of fixes that range from disabling adaptive thinking to maxing out thinking tokens to patching system prompts with an ad-hoc shell script from a gist. Even after all this, Opus will still sometimes go round and round in illogical circles, self-correcting constantly with the telltale "no wait" and undoing everything until it ends up right where it started with nothing to show for it after 100k tokens spent.Whether it's due to bugs or actual malice, it's not a good look. I genuinely can't tell if it's buggy, if it's been intentionally degraded, if it's placebo or if it's all just an elaborate OpenAI psyop.
by matheusmoreira
4/12/2026 at 9:47:37 AM
There's a github issue for this: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796by babaganoosh89
4/12/2026 at 10:02:05 AM
Yes, I commented on it and applied all remedies suggested.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664442
Configuration and environment variables seem to have improved things somewhat but it still seems to be hit or miss.
by matheusmoreira
4/12/2026 at 10:17:58 AM
On OpenRouter token consumption is up 5x since November 2025. If this is indicative of the industries growth then I can't fathom how we will not hit resource constraints.by oezi
4/12/2026 at 9:19:04 AM
Anthropic isn't your friend.Phase 1: $200/mo prosumer engineer tool
Phase 2: AI layoffs / "it's just AI washing"
Phase 3: $20,000/mo limited release model "too dangerous" to use
Phase 4: Accelerated layoffs / two person teams. Rehiring of certain personnel at lower costs.
Phase 5: "Our new model can decompile and rewrite any commercial software. We just wrote a new kernel after looking at Linux (bye, bye GPL!) We also decompiled the latest Zelda game, ported the engine to Rust, and made a new game with it. Source code has no value. Even compiled and obfuscated code is a breeze to clone."
Phase 6: $100k/mo model that replicates entire engineering teams, only large companies can afford it. Ordinary users can't buy. More layoffs.
Phase N: People can't afford computing anymore. Everything is thin clients and rented. It's become like the private railroad industry. End of the PC era. Like kids growing up on smartphones, there's nothing to tinker with anymore. And certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-skilled labor capital.
Anothropic used to be cool before they started gating access. Limiting Claw/OpenCode was strike one. Mythos is strike two.
Y'all should have started hating on their ethics when they started complaining about being distilled. For training they conducted on materials they did not own.
We need open weights companies now more than ever. Too bad China seems to be giving up on the idea.
"You wouldn't distill an Opus."
by echelon
4/12/2026 at 9:42:23 AM
Stop thinking billion dollar publicly traded companies are "cool" just because they make widget you like.You will be backstabbed
You will be squeezed for all they can.
And you will be betrayed.
> Phase N: People can't afford computing anymore. Everything is thin clients and rented. It's become like the private railroad industry. End of the PC era. Like kids growing up on smartphones, there's nothing to tinker with anymore. And certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-skilled labor capital.
Thankfully none of them actually makes money and just runs on investment so there is a good chance bubble will drop and the price of PC equipment will... continue to rise as US gives up Taiwan to China
by PunchyHamster
4/12/2026 at 9:58:43 AM
What I want to know is how did they make the only LLM that doesn't sound cringe?I think it has something to do with mode collapse (although Claude certainly has its own "tells"), but I'm not sure.
It sounds trivial but even for Agentic, I found the writing style to be really important. When you give Claude a persona, it sounds like the thing. When you give GPT a persona, it sounds like GPT half-assedly pretending to be the thing.
---
Some other interesting points about Anthropic's models. I don't know if any of these relate to my LLM style question, but seems worth mentioning:
Claude models also use way less tokens for the same task (on ArtificialAnalysis, they are a clear outlier on this metric).
And there's a much stronger common sense, subjectively. (Not sure if we have a good way to actually measure that, though.) It takes context and common sense into account, to a much greater degree.
(Which ties in with their constitution. Understanding why things are wrong at a deeper level, rather than just surface level pattern matching.)
Opus is great but it should be bigger. You notice the difference between Sonnet and Opus, but with heavy use you notice Opus's limitations, too.
by andai
4/12/2026 at 9:32:35 AM
What leads you to say China AI is giving up on open weights?I've been using GLM for over 6 months and pretty happy.
by jhancock
4/12/2026 at 9:45:40 AM
Why would any company release open weights once the investment money stops ?Releasing open weights have been basically a PR move, the moment those companies need to actually make money they will cut it out as that reduces their client base.
They DO NOT want you to run AI. They want you to pay them to do it
by PunchyHamster
4/12/2026 at 10:28:04 AM
ok. maybe. I don't know. I'm asking how you know.z.ai did go public on the HK exchange. They are under pressures similar to other public companies.
I know that China models are increasingly being trained and run using Huawei chips instead of Nvidia. I know China has a surplus of electricity from renewables (wind, solar, hydro).
by jhancock
4/12/2026 at 10:14:48 AM
open weights is a way to nerf your opponent and is meaningless to your business if you need to retrain a model because your trailingSo, it makes a lot of sense to get people a "demo" and claim the paid product is better.
i think a lot of people have no idea how capable local models are atm.
by cyanydeez
4/12/2026 at 9:44:22 AM
Good read on the situation.It all boils down to a brilliant but extremely expensive technology. Both to build and to run.
We've been sold a product with heavy subsidy. The idea (from Sam) scale out and see what happens.
Those who care to read between the lines can see what's happening. A perfect storm of demand that attract VCs who can't understand they are the real customers. Once they understand that it will be too late.
Regarding open weight models: eventually we will, as humanity, benefit from the astronomical capital poured into developing a technology ahead of its time. In a few years this and even more will run on edge.
Written by open source developers, likely former openai and anthropic employees who got so much cash in the bank they don't need to worry about renting their knowledge.
by hirako2000
4/12/2026 at 9:29:27 AM
> We need open weights companies now more than ever.If you're objective it to democratize AI, sure. But for those fed up with it and the devastating effects it's having on students, for example, can opt to actively avoid paying for products with AI (I say this as someone who uses it every day, guilty). At some point large companies will see that they're bleeding money for something that most people don't seem to want, and cancel those $100k/mo deals. I've already experienced one AI-developer-turned company crash and burn.
Personally, I don't think this LLM-based AI generation will have any significant positive impacts. Time, energy (CO2) and money would have been far better spent elsewhere.
by marcus_cemes
4/12/2026 at 9:39:13 AM
> End of the PC era, there's nothing to tinker with anymore. And certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-skilled labor capital.This one seems too far fetched. Training models is widespread. There will always be open weight models in some form, and if we assume there will be some advancements in architecture, I bet you could also run them on much leaner devices. Even today you can run models on Raspberry Pis. I don't see a reason this will stop being a thing, there will be plenty of ways to tinker.
However, keep in mind the masses don't care about tinkering and never have. People want a ChatGPT experience, not a pytorch experience. In essence this is true for all tech products, not just AI.
by magic_hamster
4/12/2026 at 9:22:11 AM
New theory of HN: every post on LLMs would involve at least a few comments hinting on class warfare and Marxismby simianwords
4/12/2026 at 9:46:27 AM
New theory: every post to HN will be about LLM or other AI. Or written by one. Usually bothby PunchyHamster
4/12/2026 at 9:31:43 AM
New theory of HN: every post on LLMs will attract the "what is wrong with AI? I don't get it [even though I've posted to HN every day for weeks/months on LLM/AI topics]. Please enlighten me" typesby gib444