Ask HN: Has Claude Code quality gotten worse?
I'm a daily user of Claude Code and love it. However, the quality of responses (using Opus 4.1) seems to have noticeably degraded over the last week.
Unfortunately, I don't have a good way to objectively measure quality aside from "it just feels like it's gotten worse" so thought I'd ask HN if others have noticed a change.
The perfect product. Imperceptible shrinkflation.
Any negative effects can be pushed back to the customer.
No acccountability needed.
The Reddit Claude sub talks about this at length.
Update on recent performance concerns - https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1nc4mem/update_on... - September 8th, 2025
I have actually, I'm glad you made this. Was thinking offhandedly it might be a result of rushed changes due to their lawsuit with NYT. But I've noticed it get worse on my model (claude-sonnet-4-20250514) over the last month, meaning it could be an issue with how the CLI prompts the model? My third conspiracy would be that they somewhat quantized the models to save cost. I saw that they had an outage after trying to use trainium chips for inference, perhaps they are pitching wild to try and keep up with their margins
Yes. It was noticeable to me through daily usage. So much so that I checked anthropic website for any issues they might have posted about. Opus limits also seemed to have been tightened.
I also feel that the responses and actions have gotten slower around the same time. It seems like there is a larger delay between messages and tool executions.