I've noticed something else - as Anthropic models get even more and more superhuman, they seem to serve me more and more casual nonsense.
Not like adding glue to pizza. Here's an example from today (paraphrasing): "you need to run `git merge-base branch1 branch2`. Pay attention to the order of arguments, it is important: `git merge-base` is symmetric and returns the same value regardless of the order of inputs".
So which one is it? Symmetric or not? It's not even one of those where it self-corrects, it just happily contradicts itself halfway through the sentence.
My pet theory is that these frontier models do quite a bit of brute force at the end - some kind of beam search - and silently downgrade you depending on demand or compute availability.
Still not great. This particular nugget is from Sonnet 5, default settings.
I've notice the same pattern even in GLM5.2. It has always been a thing, but it seems to be getting worse
It does feel like the kind of thing beam search would fix. It starts the sentence with a claim like "Pay attention to the order of arguments". Around that time it "notices" that the order doesn't matter, but it's already committed to the sentence and has to complete it in the best way still possible
Maybe at some point someone figures out how to train models with a backspace token
I also see stuff like this with Opus (4.8 and 5). It does the work correctly but then the explanation or "aftermath" description is kinda nonsense. It feels like they are tuned hard for agentic coding and everything else is getting worse. There are people that say older versions are also better for creative writing which would confirm this theory.
Claude has always noticeably degraded under heavy load. Opus goes from "decent to work with" to "dumb intern" depending on whether you're working at 3 AM west coast or 10 AM - 5 PM. It's part of why I cancelled my subscription - "max" plans and "extra high" effort are meaningless when there's so much variability between model availability, model performance, and harness bugs every day and every week.
Yes. I switched to Codex some time ago. I feel like I get fewer outages (had one over the weekend), and coding results are good. I built my own agent harness using OpenAI models too and feel it was the right decision.
I've noticed something else - as Anthropic models get even more and more superhuman, they seem to serve me more and more casual nonsense.
Not like adding glue to pizza. Here's an example from today (paraphrasing): "you need to run `git merge-base branch1 branch2`. Pay attention to the order of arguments, it is important: `git merge-base` is symmetric and returns the same value regardless of the order of inputs".
So which one is it? Symmetric or not? It's not even one of those where it self-corrects, it just happily contradicts itself halfway through the sentence.
My pet theory is that these frontier models do quite a bit of brute force at the end - some kind of beam search - and silently downgrade you depending on demand or compute availability.
Still not great. This particular nugget is from Sonnet 5, default settings.
I've notice the same pattern even in GLM5.2. It has always been a thing, but it seems to be getting worse
It does feel like the kind of thing beam search would fix. It starts the sentence with a claim like "Pay attention to the order of arguments". Around that time it "notices" that the order doesn't matter, but it's already committed to the sentence and has to complete it in the best way still possible
Maybe at some point someone figures out how to train models with a backspace token
I also see stuff like this with Opus (4.8 and 5). It does the work correctly but then the explanation or "aftermath" description is kinda nonsense. It feels like they are tuned hard for agentic coding and everything else is getting worse. There are people that say older versions are also better for creative writing which would confirm this theory.
> they are tuned hard for agentic coding
Well you can't blame them, it's what brings in the cash. Other uses will suffer proportionally.
I don’t find Sonnet usable at all. Especially for the price. I’d much rather get half the usage of Opus.
Claude has always noticeably degraded under heavy load. Opus goes from "decent to work with" to "dumb intern" depending on whether you're working at 3 AM west coast or 10 AM - 5 PM. It's part of why I cancelled my subscription - "max" plans and "extra high" effort are meaningless when there's so much variability between model availability, model performance, and harness bugs every day and every week.
So, how's the OpenAI situation? Is the grass greener on the other side?
Yes. I switched to Codex some time ago. I feel like I get fewer outages (had one over the weekend), and coding results are good. I built my own agent harness using OpenAI models too and feel it was the right decision.
GPT 5.6 Sol is so free of drama for me for brainstorming, writing prompts, etc. Tasks I always did with Opus until 4.7.
Incident is claimed to be resolved but I'm now (11:22 UTC) getting:
And the status page says all green.Update 11:27 UTC: I saw the error first at 11:22 UTC. Retry at 11:27 UTC still failing. Status page is still green.
Update 11:28 UTC: Incident has been declared dated 11:27 UTC https://status.claude.com/incidents/mfdtrknpxghq
I'm also getting this error
Déjà vu.
Claude decided to take an extra day off, after going on vacation yesterday [0] and when Codex went and took a longer break the day before that.
No wonder the amount of water that both Claude and Codex are taking they also need so many frequent hydration breaks.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49056739
Can we not do the "AI is drinking all the water" bullshit at least on HN?
And I was told that AI is superior to humans because they don't need rest!