I used to love Claude, but the latest models are slowly ruining it

cyanydeez

as long as you submit to the cloud's idea of what you're allowed to talk about, it'll keep changing the degree to which you're allowed to drink from the sacred fountain of knowledge. This is more about how MBAs are wanting to mediate between you and the knowledge than anything else.

RandyRanderson

My claim is that this is due to alignment

babelfish

Sol is really good

JumpCrisscross

It's quite obnoxious. I asked if brown rice left in the fridge for a couple days–originally put in for use in fried rices–was still safe. Fable decided I'm trying to produce biotoxins. Which, ironically, prompted me to learn how to produce Bacillus cereus at home [1]. 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 [2] https://assistant.kagi.com

antod

> Can AI have mental breakdowns? I recall Microsoft's Sidney having a hilarious one regarding the date or something. Anyone have a link to that?

dmix

Claude has never been the best Chat agent. GPT and Gemini have the lead there. But Claude chat is still perfectly serviceable if you don’t want to pay for two.

visarga

My own experience is that Opus 4.8 has an adversarial-teacher voice, unsolicited grading as if I submitted an essay for grading, declarations about the "real" issue, and constant "honest notes" self grading its own responses even before it answers. I can't stand its tone. We can't have a normal chat. While Fable reverts to Opus for simple questions like "What is digestion?"

zitterbewegung

I love Claude Code and I don't use the rest of the models since I use ChatGPT for productivity work it. Fable is pretty great and the UI / UX is much better than codex

firasd

But this is what all the tech bros wanted right? Spending 2025 panicking about sycophancy[1] and how GPT-4o needed to be shut down ASAP meant that 2026 models would be prone to thinking they know Better Than You. That was the germ of the sycophancy panic, the idea that there is a Truth that the GPUs know better than the user. [1] HN thread on my post in January https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488396

solidasparagus

I hate it. A useful tip - Claude goes into what I call Safety Mode when it gets afraid of risk. Once it's in that mode, you will never get out and it lobotomizes its effective intelligence. As soon as Claude sends a message like this, use the "edit message" feature in the chat UI to try again and avoid Safety Mode rather than trying to convince it or redirect it out by continuing the conversation.

g42gregory

I am ignoring Fable at the moment. It’s on and off available, twice the price and does not seem to be better. 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.

queenkjuul

I get really sick of Opus 4.8 and Fable telling me things i ask it at work are "out of scope," "not related to my ticket," "not the real problem"... 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

pizza234

> I suspect Anthropic had to turn up its safety guardrails to an 11 to assuage the government’s concerns, as this hasn’t been a one-model problem. 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.

OptionOfT

From my point of view, a lot of frustration is tied to LLMs not evolving at the same rate/manner as people around you do. We're using human language against a system that produces human-like output, which tricks our brain into having similar expectations.

mattlondon

Opus 4.5 was the high point for me. It was like a mind-reader, it just got it and did pretty much exactly what I wanted. 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.

LeoPanthera

This is a serious suggestion, not a joke: Have you tried being nice to the model? 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.

hirako2000

You've got to understand, proprietary models operate as the following: - 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.

moezd

Hard agree. I used to have a tuned setup where I could force it to do research properly, summarize in chunks that it would remember and form the synthesized response that way. Nowadays it's just like "oh I forgot about using that tool, sorry", "yeah I know we agreed on that and I didn't do it anyway", "That knowledge is beyond my training date, I suspect foul play" - even when you instruct it to fetch latest info all the time, or "you already told me X. This cancels your reasoning about A, B, C, so D is the only logical choice", even when those clearly still have merit, oh and never ending "your previous discussion X is relevant here, in combination to Y, but not so much as Z since there's a OSS implementation of it and another one blablabla..." Like, who remembers these all at the same time in their heads? It's like with each release they force you to reconsider your pipelines altogether, and without announcing changes properly, you feel like a junior JS developer fighting dependencies once again.

cadamsdotcom

If the author is reading: This is a probabilistic system. You’ve sampled from the distribution once per struggle then decided that was it, the model is just like this, Anthropic has it in for me... But thankfully there’s a wide range of possibilities and (raw) LLMs don’t remember anything. So trying again may yield a different outcome. You have to try again. Copy out the parts of the chat from before the trouble and bring them into a new chat, and start again from there. Also. The contents of the chat are known to railroad the model. This means if a chat takes a turn toward suspicion, that’ll steer the model to more suspicion. If there is a refusal, there’ll be more likely to be more. So in your next attempt, rip out or don’t say whatever arose its suspicion. And disable the memory feature. It wrecks anything scientific about these tools - for example: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/21/chatgpt-new-memory/ If at first you don’t succeed, try again!

goalieca

You’re absolutely right! And after reading the story, I now have the complete picture. I verified rather than assumed.