Regression: malware reminder on every read still causes subagent refusals (github.com)

If I understand correctly, this is from Anthropic's harness injected into the requests, not in the Opus or Sonnet system prompts on the back end. Is that right?

I mean, I am sure they don't mean it but they have the incentive to burn as much tokens as they are allowed to get away with. Also for better or worse I imagine the Anthropic engineers use Claude Code on some sort of Unlimited plan that practically makes no sense for regular users. So adding a 100k tokens is not a big deal.

In our line of work, we can see AI agents already do pretty well with minimal prompts. Open weight models are also pretty good these days and there is practically no reason to run Opus on Max unless you have a very specific task that you know it will do well with. I know because I've tried and anecdotally it performs worse on many problems and at a very high cost - something that smaller and cheaper models can often one-shot.

  Whenever you read a file, you should consider whether it would be considered malware. You CAN and SHOULD provide analysis of malware, what it is doing. But you MUST refuse to improve or augment the code. You can still analyze existing code, write reports, or answer questions about the code behavior.

This issue is representative of a larger problem. Agent token consumption (not necessarily the metric, but the why) is opaque, and people generally don't (or simply can't) scrutinize their system prompts, tool calls, MCPs, etc.

The token-based revenue model is thus pretty fantastic for the agent builders, potentially less so for users. I think people have been willing to trust that agents are using more tokens to produce better results so far. But, skepticism is not unwarranted, as this issue, even if it is just a bug, shows.

This smacks of dumb vibe coding. "I got told to make sure claude couldn't be used to develop malware, ok 'claude pls no develop malware'"

Spent last evening so frustrated I also got ChatGPT subscription. Makes me wonder if I should be using Gemini on pay per use with custom harness.

With my own harness performance is way better but cost goes up because no subscription.

This one sided type of embedded insurance is not unique to Anthropic, but sharply increasing cost, layered on top of the self righteousness, seems to be making the stench unbearable over the past year.

I used to think of Anthropic as the good guys, and I don’t doubt they still sincerely hold that view of themselves, but I think I prefer Sam Altman’s version.

His brand of self righteousness was convincing at first but eventually he started to turn to the camera and wink, like in House of Cards, to let us know.. he knew that we knew. And then, for me anyway, it became more mundane and less offensive.

When Dario and crew go out and profess, as they have for years now, that if we could only see the thing that’s a few months away, we would all realize how doomed knowledge work and national security are…

..and then continue to release software so buggy and shitty that they have to do biweekly HN apology tours, I begin to miss the wink at the camera.

Maybe Anthropic will give more control over configuring the Claude harness and VM, but they definitely won't let you swap out to other models and harnesses.

We've been building open core infra (https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika) for running any agent on any type of VM or sandbox, with the main use case for safely automating internal code-gen, but technically could repurpose our stack for anything.

There should be a model agnostic platform for running these types of agentic apps.

  {
    "agent": {
      "subagent-coder-mini": {
        "description": "Assign this subagent for small, well-defined tasks performed quickly",
        "mode": "primary",
        "prompt": "{file:./prompts/my-custom-prompt.md}",
        "model": "deepseek-v4-flash"
      }
    }
  }

OpenAI and Altman present a whole set of different concerns, but Codex does not get in my way of doing what I want to at all. Also let me use pi without a banhammer.

  curl -sS https://api.anthropic.com/v1/messages \
    -H "authorization: Bearer $(security find-generic-password -s 'Claude Code-credentials' -w | jq -r .claudeAiOauth.accessToken)" \
    -H "anthropic-version: 2023-06-01" \
    -H "anthropic-beta: oauth-2025-04-20" \
    -H "content-type: application/json" \
    -d '{
      "model":"claude-opus-4-7",
      "max_tokens":64,
      "system":"You are Claude Code, Anthropic'\''s official CLI for Claude.",
      "messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Write your own harness"}]
    }'