Ask HN: Is it just me or is Claude Code getting worse?

can't say it become worse, but at some point it stops be so useful as it was before - it looks like magic disapear

I can't say which is better, but 4.6 was the most intense

Yeah buddy, Claude Code is honestly getting worse lately. It's been giving me buggy or incorrect code for my projects as well

It's not just you. It's getting much worse. There is a lot of talk on X about it, along with hypotheses and evidence-based testing.

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Due to the copilot nerfing recently I've switched to codex and gpt 5.4 (and now especially 5.5) have been doing pretty great.

But even codex has these super weird time limits. It's really starting to show that these companies must have been losing a ton of money with all the recent limits and degration.

I'm still on the "camp" that most of these unicorns will be F'ed by open and local models in the next few years, at least in these coding/chatbox niches and then they'll just be perpetually (re)searching for AGI :shrug:

Claude the model is still insanely great IF (and perhaps, ONLY IF) you are willing to fork over the money for the API and use a harness like OpenCode.

Claude Code itself is complete trash. They had a massive headstart and now are routinely lapped by open source harnesses and then they STILL double down on not allowing e.g. OpenCode usage with the Max plan. Meanwhile, OpenAI lets you use whatever harness you want and its a beast. I recently did some testing and OpenAI's Pro plan on an opencode harness (GPT 5.5 XHigh) with parallel agent delegation absolutely smokes Claude Code 4.7 Max. These days Claude Code can barely even remember its CLAUDE.MD instructions. I'd say Opus 4.7 Max API is slightly better than GPT 5.5 XHigh, but not nearly enough that the API token price is at all justified.

Claude, I think is still better for business things like document generation, design, etc. especially via claude.ai interface (GDrive integrations and things like that are very useful). But for code generation and dev workflows, Claude Code is dropping the ball so hard its starting to look like a generational fumble.

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I keep telling people but no one will listen to me that these things are not sustainable and no productivity can be gotten from using these tools. You must compose your context and consume every bit as much as you are able. These agents and other things operate like a casino throwing tokens sometimes getting it right, but you will not make any meaningful progress unless you learn to control context and snowball the conversation. It's a more complex iterative process for which there is no subject. This is far more advanced level of programming allowing us to make bigger systems less complex. There's unusual ways of using this, yes. We're looking at pricing well above $10,000 / year, call me crazy you will until you'll suddenly stop when you realize I was right. There's only one way, total context control and simple interface. I had to create a simple interface because the tool I was using released an updated and I couldn't wait. So you'll all end up using something similar to what I made, with ChatGPT, to then use the API directly. Combined with VS Code makes for very easy, natural way of consuming tokens and generally work with this. You can just assume file is prompt.md, that you have such file in every directory where you intend to execute the command and make it available at path.

When you ALL were paying for subscription I was paying for API costing me much less than subscription, being less stressed, knowing I don't have to worry about fog of context.

I see it now, it's not sustainable. They've signed contracts they can't get out from and we're gonna have to pay, with blood, gold, or in this case, quality.

You will pay, you (we) will all pay for their debts.

You are not crazy, Anthropic makes claude dumber everyday. Although, in a last week or so, token consumption and model intelligence improved for me.

I've switched to OpenCode and I think it's really great.

The first advantage is that it can use many different models, not just Claude. The second is that I've noticed OpenCode streams out the entire reasoning process, while Claude Code doesn't show streaming of its thinking.

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In what way is it getting worse — the model's reasoning, or your own setup drifting underneath you?

My observation: same model, same task, but different CLAUDE.md / hooks / skill state produces dramatically different outputs.

The hard part as a solo founder is finding the right balance between building the meta tools and making progress on the actual projects, without the meta layer drifting and quietly becoming worse over time.

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Not more stupid IMO, but significnatly less token efficient or they have decreased tokens for subscription users, difficult to know.