961 karma · joined June 12, 2022
It's not some sci-fi thing, most plausible explanation is cost saving measures. Economics drive everything. And Opus 5 and to a lesser extent Fable 5 have clearly been quantised, or they serve different models to different users from various factors, like usage patterns, API vs subs and server load.
Here's a tragically funny but highly accurate satire of Claude's way of speaking these days (triggerwarning): https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1w3rxkj/average...
So yeah, different people get different quality. I wouldn't be surprised if it calculates a wealth level, willingness to upgrade, influence, usage levels, etc. and decides what models to serve.
It's extremely obvious to me they've nerfed all models on my 5 Max from Fable to even 4.6, but i've tried through enterprise with huge differences in quality, and i've seen other people experiencing this both on reddit and twitter.
How do you guys afford this, huge company that grants this?
Definitely not viable for my lean startup.
4.6 was best for us and right now yeah OpenAI and others are edging forward, but slower while prices are increasing industry wide as much as 20x, time to completion is increasing wildly and i'm sure they'll do the same over at OpenAI as their compute constraints also start to take a toll ie degrade performance.
In my view 4.6 era was way faster and with less weirdness so we've gone downwards at least in my company, 4.7 was ridiculous, then 4.8 was almost 4.6 level, 5 is even worse than 4.7 - so it's not a bit up and down its down then a little up then further down.
And all of this is against a backdrop of zero ROI in this sector - so it makes sense we've hit a peak and we're now seeing the subsidisation phase begin to falter, will there be better models certainly but only for short amounts before they get quantised (or whatever is happening behind the scenes), and with diminishing returns over huge prices increases and slower responses.
I good exercise for me is to constantly look at the folder structure and skim the code, i don't have to approve every line, but the primitives, the datastructures and other skeleton should be human readable, hand writable in an easy maintainable way following existing standards / libs. etc - so you can continue if suddenly all AI disappeared.
I've even considered the claude "fast mode" setting, but thats only 2x and at least 20x as expensive as the 5x plan so can't afford that atm for my company.
Peak for me was 4.6 and it just did stuff blazing fast, both Opus5 and Fable is way, way slower for me, breaks stuff, uses bizarre cryptic language. As i've said elsewhere in this thread to me it's pretty obvious there's huge downgrades because of economy with various "clever" fixes that makes them work, albeit slower and weirder, ie. you get less for what you pay increasingly over the last 6 months.
5 would constantly veer of in random directions if not working from 100% strict and narrow instructions.
I find it weird there's not more discussion here on HN on how the most used model now has clearly degraded in quality and it seems we've hit a peak and are on a downslope - because the model is clearly smaller or more economical for Anthropic no doubt about it, and the benchmaxxing they do is pure marketing bs - Fable in my view has also been not much better than 4.6 or 4.8 after a few days, disregarding the insane amounts of astroturfing and marketing everywhere.
Theres thousands of threads of twitter, reddit and the internet at large but silence here. Weird but not weird as crypto bs was also insufferably rampant here for a while.
Personally i think we've hit the top of the subsidisation phase and prices will probably 10-15x soon as foreshadowed with both API price policy changes from all the big providers, and now the 1100% deepseek API price changes from yesterday, this could domino into a market implosion and an AI winter, because expecting growth from the bizarre bubble carousel investments with little ROI atm is just not viable.
A bit worried about this as i've already grown quite accustomed to these tools.
I really hope EU or some other instance says you can't just mix propaganda, insanity and ads with simple messages to friends and family.
So much that i don't really visit anymore after 15 years of use.
It's a bizarre situation with billions in marketing and PR, astroturfing and torrents of fake news with streams of comments beneath them with zero skepticism and an almost horrifying worship of these billion dollar companies.
Something completely flipped here at some point, i don't know if it's because YC is also heavily pro these companies, and embedded with them, requiring YC applicants to slop code their way in, then cheering about it.
Either way it's incredibly sad and remind me of the worst casino economy, nft's, crypto, web3 while there's actually an interesting core, regex on steroids with planning aspects, but it's constantly oversold.
I say that as a daily user of Claude Max for over a year.
The ones who ace their careers are for the most people that are fun, driven, or psychos, all social traits that make you good in a political game.
Spending lots of time with other socially awkward types talking about hard math problems or whatever will get you nowhere outside of some SF fantasy startup movie.
I'd say it's especially important for the more nerdy (myself included) to be more outgoing, and do other stuff like sales or presentations, design/marketing og workshops - that will make you exceptional because you then got the "whole package" and undestand the process and other people.
Tahoe is tragically bad by almost every UX measure, and following various Apple subreddits i wonder if they just don't care anymore - since the majority of people are shocked by the amateurishness of both bugs and design choices in the latest update - this comes on top of literally every major bug being ignored from the alpha to releasing anyway then continuing to ignore feedback.
"Aristotle integrates three main components: a Lean proof search system, an informal reasoning system that generates and formalizes lemmas, and a dedicated geometry solver"
Not saying it's not an amazing setup, i just don't understand the word "AI" being used like this when it's the setup / system that's brilliant in conjunction with absolute experts.
Seems exactly like the tests at my company where even frontier models are revealed to be very expensive rubber ducks, but completely fails with non experts or anything novel or math heavy.
Ie. they mirror the intellect of the user but give you big dopamine hits that'll lead you astray.
I don’t think it can really be said to have occurred autonomously then?
Looks more like a 50/50 partnership with a super expert human one the one side which makes this way more vague in my opinion - and in line with my own AI tests, ie. they are pretty stupid even OPUS 4.5 or whatever unless you're already an expert and is doing boilerplate.
EDIT: I can see the title has been fixed now from solved to "more or less solved" which is still think is a big stretch.
The hard part is day to day operations for years with thousands of edge cases, actual human feedback and errors, knocking on 1000 doors etc.
Otherwise you're just doing slot machine coding on crack, where you work and work and work one some amazing thing then it goes nowhere - and now you haven't even learned anything because you didn't code so the sideproject isn't even education anymore.
What's the point of such a project?
It's not the hackernews i knew even 3 years ago anymore and i'm seriously close to just ditching the site after 15+ years of use.
I use AI heavily but everyday there's crazy optimistic almost manic posts about how AI is going to take over various sectors that are completely ludicrous - and they are all filled with comments from bizarrely optimistic people that have seemingly no knowledge of how software is actually run or built, ie. it's the human organisational, research and management elements that are the hard parts, something AI can't do in any shape or form at the moment for any complex or even small company.
Again it's the last 5% that takes 95% of the time, and those 5% i haven't seen fixed with Claude or Gemini, because it's essentially quirks, browser errors, race conditions, visual alignment, etc etc. All stuff that completely goes way above any LLM's head atm from what i've seen.
They can definitely bullshit a 95% working app though, but that's 95% from being done ;)
You didn't give any examples of the valuable bespoke apps that you are creating by the hour.
I simply don't believe you, and the arrogant salesy tone doesn't help.
I use AI daily as a senior coder for search and docs, and when used for prototyping you still need to be a senior coder to go from say 60% boilerplate to 100% finished app/site/whatever unless it's incredibly simple.
There's talks of upwards of 500 thousand deaths now, half a million, most of them civilians, women and children.
It's not in any way controversial anymore and the info is out there and has been for a long time.
That people like you call this into question, i'm truly shocked at the heartlessness. It's a slaughterhouse, just like the original holocaust and industrial in its scale and efficiency which makes it that more frightening.
Yeah no, this angle is offensive.
I use LLM's daily as a search engine and syntax help - but this bizarre meta-meta-meta now if you just abstract even more it'l work, maybe invent an entire universe, or hey why not invent a cluster of universes that'l turn off the lights in eastern europe so you can vibecode... no, no, no.
I don't think this crazy energy wasting hell is getting us anywhere useful when someone's going to wade through the bullshit and the energy needs will go exponential on an already strained energy infrastructure not to mention the state of climate.
I still believe LLM's are helpful but in the other direction, more focused, smaller scaled and with less abstraction and magic happening.
But yeah both are very bad.
Millions are having problems for years so it's not just me, honestly thought i was "getting old" but no incredible amount of threads and now this on YT with 1 mil views:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo
Wild typing on a 3210 was less stressful for me.