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Posted by WXLCKNO 19 hours ago

Claude Code is being dumbed down?(symmetrybreak.ing)
969 points | 617 commentspage 9
jongjong 5 hours ago|
The dumbing down of LLMs seems to be working in my favor so far as my platform provides guardrails for LLMs by abstracting away complexity.

They could potentially dumb it down further, but if they did that, it would hurt other use cases and competitors much more.

syspec 16 hours ago||
RooCode is a better version of ClaudeCode than ClaudeCode.

No affiliation, just a fan.

kshri24 15 hours ago||
Hilarious! Anthropic can just vibe code the boolean flag in.
ares623 15 hours ago|
I think they already do? Which is commendable tbh. But I keep my popcorn ready and warm for the day when their vibe coding can't keep up with the codebase. Of course they will try their best to hide that fact for as long as possible.
jtrn 18 hours ago||
I find it hard to care about claims of degradation of quality, since this has been a firehouse of claims that don't map onto anything real and is extremely subjective. I myself made the claim in error. I think this is just as ripe for psychological analysis as anything else.
thunfischtoast 18 hours ago||
Did you read the article? It's not about subjective claims, it's about a very real feature getting removed (file reads showing the filepath and numbers of lines read).
jtrn 2 hours ago||
This is exactly what I am talking about. Let me try to explain.

I am interested in the more abstract and general concept of: "People excessively feel that things are worse, even if they are not." And I see this A LOT in the AI/LLM area.

For instance, the claim that Claude Code, on the UX/DX side, is dumbed down seems to me absolutely not a reasonable take. The "hiding" of the file name being read is no longer being shown neither supports that claim, AND has to be seen in the context of Claude Code as a whole.

On the first point: Could one not make the argument that "not showing files read", is part of a more advanced abstraction layer, switching emphasis to something else in the UX experience? That could, by some, be seen as the overall package becoming more advanced and making choices as to what is presented for cognitive load. Secondly... it's not removed. It's just not default shown in non-verbose mode. As I understand it, you can just hit CTRL+O to see it again.

Secondly, even if it was done ONLY to be less for "power user focus," and more for dumb people (got to love the humility in the developer world), it's blindly obvious that you can't just mention ONE change as proof that Claude Code is dumbed down. And to me, it just does not compute to say that Claude Code feels dumbed down over the last patches. The amount of more advanced features, like seeing background tasks, the "option" selection feature, lifecycle hooks, sub-agents, agent swarms, skills—all of these have been released in just the last few months. I have used Claude Code since the very beginning, and it is just insane to claim that it's getting dumber as a tool. And this is just in relationship to the actual functionality, UX, and DX, not the LLM quality. But people see "I now have to hit CTRL+O to see files being read = DUMBED DOWN ENSHITFICATION!!!" I don't get it.

My point was simply... I'm much more interested in the psychological aspects driving everybody to predictably always claim that "things are getting worse," when it seems to not be the case. Be that in the exaggerated (but sometimes true) claims of model degradation, or as in this example of Claude Code getting dumbed down. What is driving this bias towards seeing and claiming things are getting worse, out of proportion to reality?

Or even shorter: why are we obsessed with the narrative of decline?

grim_io 1 hour ago||
It's not a narrative, it's an experienced reality.
jtrn 53 minutes ago||
I know you think that's a clever comeback, but it's not; it's just a shift in what level of analysis one does.

It's an experienced reality indeed, but THEN you create a narrative based on that. Obviously.

Experienced reality is, by definition, subjective and affected by filters for what you can, and how, experience things.

For instance, you can actually and truly experience something as bad, and then create a narrative around that. And you can be right, or you can be wrong in the narrative. Some narcissists experience themselves as a victim and unfairly treated, but everybody around them thinks the victim narrative is wrong, because they can clearly see that they are primarily at fault for their own situation.

So you just shifted the question to: "Why do people have a bias towards experience something as worsening, regardless of objective measures of quality"?

grim_io 33 minutes ago||
I'm not sure what you are trying to say.

Sometimes people are right about something and sometimes the are not?

That's all I got out of it.

layer8 18 hours ago||
You seem to be referring to something else than the topic the article is about.
bandrami 12 hours ago||
No, it's a psychological effect. Claude Code pushes the reward center in your brain, and that reward center gets tired after a while.
kissgyorgy 19 hours ago||
This is why I am a big fan of self-hosting, owning your data and using your own Agent. pi is a really good example. You can have your own tooling and can switch any SOTA model in a single interface. Very nice!

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi/

keeganpoppen 15 hours ago||
this has got to be one of the worst comments sections i've ever seen on HN... people shouting past each other... into the void...
ares623 12 hours ago|
WHAT??
dacapoday 12 hours ago||
Goodbye Claude Code. Welcome Pi.
alansaber 19 hours ago||
I don't feel as if any CLI editor has quite nailed UX yet
Imustaskforhelp 19 hours ago|
If you are talking about agents I feel like opencode has gotten pretty good UI/UX

If you are talking about a CLI editor, then micro has hit the nail on quality UX

https://micro-editor.github.io/

AnonyX387 19 hours ago||
The UX where it completely breaks copy paste conventions on Linux? Other than that I agree it's gotten pretty good but this one thing drives me mad each time I use it.
Imustaskforhelp 5 hours ago||
I think that you can actually change the keybindings to follow the copy paste conventions that you want in micro

But personally I really love these new copy paste conventions, its the ctrl q convention which troubled me in ghostty but what I did was "ctrl > " write quit enter

https://github.com/micro-editor/micro/blob/master/runtime/he...

go_photon_go 13 hours ago|
Gemini CLI shows all the file paths.
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