The thing is, all the assumptions you’d need for anything like a “normal user curve” basically fall apart the moment you look at real developer workflows.
1. People change how they work depending on what the tool shows them.
2. The tool changes its behavior depending on what people do.
3. There’s constant feedback, drift, hidden state, weird edge cases — all the stuff that makes the distribution wobble around.
4. And because of that, the whole thing never sits still long enough for an “average user” to even make sense.
Once those pieces go, you don’t get a nice clean Gaussian.
You get a heavy tail. And heavy-tail systems behave completely differently. If you design for the mean in a heavy-tail environment, you basically end up breaking the exact people who generate most of the actual usage.
That’s why this Claude change feels so off. It’s not just “oh they hid some file paths.”
It’s that they optimized for a user who doesn’t really exist, while cutting visibility for the users who actually push the tool hard enough to matter.
Once those pieces go, you don’t get a nice clean Gaussian. You get a heavy tail. And heavy-tail systems behave completely differently. If you design for the mean in a heavy-tail environment, you basically end up breaking the exact people who generate most of the actual usage.
That’s why this Claude change feels so off. It’s not just “oh they hid some file paths.” It’s that they optimized for a user who doesn’t really exist, while cutting visibility for the users who actually push the tool hard enough to matter.