I used to love Claude, but the latest models are slowly ruining it(androidauthority.com) |
I used to love Claude, but the latest models are slowly ruining it(androidauthority.com) |
While Fable reverts to Opus for simple questions like "What is digestion?"
Same for graphics, visual consistency, anything around the "does the look make sense and is pleasing" really, which makes claude design such a (good) surprise, I hope very hard for a Codex equivalent. And Gemini "gets" graphics.
Claude is definitely a code and cowork tool first, that's where it shines.
The tone is not the issue IMO: we're already at a point where we can have another, cheaper (as in: 20x cheaper for example), model query other models and have them reword the answers when having a "chat".
pi.dev can definitely control a Claude Code TUI window and follow prompts to Claude Code.
I'm 100% sure the arseholy tone of recent Claude Code models can be rewritten today, to not be arseholy, by literally prompting another model to unharsole Claude Code.
Now of course this doesn't solve the other half of the issue: in "teacher lecturing you while being confidently wrong", the "teacher lecturing you ..." is really not the most important issue.
There are so many criticisms here that I just don't see myself.
If the models have been trained on human responses, then it's plausible that they will prefer to become less helpful to requests which are blunt or even rude, because that's what humans do too.
Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. -- https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04950It could stand to reason that if you are nice to the AI, you will get a response that is trained on all of the nice responses and be higher quality.
- release: full precision, debrided, uncapped context
- shortly after, hooked: quantized, governance department slammed, and a pseudo large context, attention reduced to start and end of thread.
- down the road: 4bit quantized or worse with nerf incantation to make the next upcoming model feel amazing.
Rince and repeat.
I paid for a year but am going back to Kagi's multi-model system [2].
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7913059/ Don't Do It
This behavioral change is actually official (https://www.anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5):
> For Fable 5, we made this safety margin much larger than in any prior launch (row B), meaning that many more benign requests would be blocked. We understood that these kinds of false positives would be frustrating for users, but made this tradeoff in the interest of making the model’s other capabilities widely available.
We're using human language against a system that produces human-like output, which tricks our brain into having similar expectations.
It is super anecdotal, but I’m convinced that Claude peaked in January/April period and since then is on steady decline. And I don’t know what they do in background, but the older models (Opus 4.6 in particular) have degraded too. Same for codex but I use it less overall.
“You were right to push back on this”, “my previous claim was too broad” - this is super annoying
I recall Microsoft's Sidney having a hilarious one regarding the date or something. Anyone have a link to that?
Since then, I've been less impressed and I agree it feels a bit downhill. At work we are "stuck" on Opus 4.6 which is okay but I feel like that was when the deviant opinionated behaviour started to creep in.
It's a tool, I don't want my hammer to refuse to hammer a screw if I decide that is what I want to do today. I know it's wrong, but I'm the fucking boss.
Hard disagree. It wasn’t that long ago that Gpt was clearly falling behind, and Gemini was like the “and also in the room”.
I've used both quite a bit back/forth and this is just my personal opinion.
I decide what is in scope, what I work on, and what needs fixing! It drives me nuts, it's like it's trying to avoid doing work
Claude.ai is pretty frustrating too. It will talk to me as if anything I ask for is below it. Could be the system prompt I use, but I did not have this issue with 4.6.
Yes, I tend to prefer GPT, but I can't remember having GPT ever refuse a direct instruction that wasn't an obvious ToS violation.
It is surprisingly offensive.
The only friction for me is the general expensiveness of trying out top tier models, eg OpenAI's Fable equivalent (Sol?) to run for a trial period. I'd like to see a like-like comparison, eg buy x20 on OpenAI and see how much Sol i can use, how well it works, etc.
edit: Though surprisingly Claude seems to think Codex doesn't have hooks? That'll be tough, i use Claude hooks quite a bit.
With GPT 5.5 it never got in the way.
Now it's infuriatingly deciding to reject the most basic actions used hundreds of times before. It just gave me this gem:
> The push to GitLab was blocked because the repository's privacy status couldn't be confirmed. Since the code is private, do you explicitly authorize pushing it to the configured origin on gitlab.com, so the merge request can be opened?
This is not a new project, and Codex has opened a hundred merge requests without issue before.
I use Opus 4.8 with OMP/Pi coding agent and Matt Pocock Skills installed. I use professional/polite/questions-based communication pattern with Opus and it seems to work fine for coding. I am always aware that I need to justify my requests so it doesn’t barf.
Of course, I would never use Claude for anything customer-facing. It’s woke to the point of being fanatical.
[1] HN thread on my post in January https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488396
This is more about how MBAs are wanting to mediate between you and the knowledge than anything else.
I've been using DuckDuckGo's multi-model service for my "ask an AI random questions" needs. I was already paying them and discovered this LLM thing is part of my subscription. Works pretty well and has privacy guarantees I'd expect out of DDG, though I think they've been tightening the usage you can get out of it recently.
I'll have to try Kagi if DDG gets much tighter.
I asked one of the DDG ChatGPT bots about some error output from a program and apparently forgot to redact a URL. I found the DDG bot trying to access it about half an hour later. It was a long and randomly generated alpha-numeric subdomain and the conversation never discussed the URL or anything related to it- it was simply buried in the pasted error output. I think this was even before the DGG bots had web search capability. I was thoroughly spooked.
(he, in this case, would not be the llm but the people over it)
I find those kind of limitation very dystopian and way more dangerous than the threat they claim to fight against.
But it's a rather annoying service if the customer can't predict in advance what sort of tasks they're willing to take on. You should have some idea about what they're normally willing to do for you.
Whether the book takes the form of an llm or an online website or a printed book is merely implementation details.
"No knowledge in Kamar-Taj is forbidden. Only certain practices."
You reminded me of that quote from the Doctor Strange movie.
Even the most "dangerous" knowledge can be life-saving, depending on the circumstances. When I was a teenager, I read the Terrorist's Handbook, which was a text file circulating on bulletin boards. After 9/11 it vanished, because posession was considered a crime in some jurisdictions.
Knowing how to build a bomb is useless and/or dangerous in civilian life. Ask a Ukrainian if it is useful knowledge!
Knowing all about nuclear weapons doesn't mean you're going to blow up a city. But if someone else does, then you'll have the knowledge needed to avoid the worst of the radiation and maybe survive.
It'll be dystopian when that'll become your only source of information, and we're working on getting there. If you want to be horrified, look at what students (in school and post-secondary) are doing these days.
It's insane to offload your thinking and knowledge to a machine owned by other people, but you have to if you want to keep up with the rat race.