They weren't freaked by anything, it's a retaliatory shakedown after ideological differences and Anthropic not doing exactly what they're told/what the Admin wants them to do.
Anthropic releases used to feel thorough and well done, with the models feeling immaculately polished. It felt like using a premium product, and it never felt like they were racing to keep up with the news cycle, or reply to competitors.
Recently that immaculately polished feel is harder to find. It coincides with the daily releases of CC, Desktop App, unknown/undocumented changes to the various harnesses used in CC/Cowork. I find it an unwelcome shift.
I still think they're the best option on the market, but the delta isn't as high as it was. Sometimes slowing down is the way to move faster.
Likewise, I foolishly assumed everybody else was just doing it wrong.
But this week I've lost count of the times I've had to say something along the lines of:
"Can you check our plan/instructions, I'm pretty sure I said we need to do [this thing] but you've done [that thing]..."
And get hit with a "You're absolutely right...", which virtually never happened for me. I think maybe once since Opus 4-6.
Fair push back, but I do think the LSTM vs Transformers point kinda supports my position in the limit, not refutes. Once the compute bottleneck is removed, LSTMs scale favourably.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02228 (I believe there's similar work done on vanilla LSTMs, but I'd have to go digging)
So the bottleneck was compute. Which is compatible with 'data or compute'. But to accept your point, at the time the algorothmic advances were useful/did unlock/remove the bottleneck.
A wider point is that eventually (once compute and data are scaled enough) the algorithms are all learning the same representations: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.07987
Yep, Gemini is virtually unusable compared to Anthropic models. I get it for free with work and use maybe once a week, if that. They really need to fix the instruction following.
Thanks for the long and considered response, but this is a really ugly UX decision.
As others have said - 'reading 10 files' is useless information - we want to be able to see at a glance where it is and what it's doing, so that we can re-direct if necessary.
With the release of Cowork, couldn't Claude Code double down on needs of engineers?
This is great, not 10 minutes before this outage did I present Railway as a viable option for some small-scale hosting for prototypes and non-critical apps as an alternative to the Cloud giants
Everything in plan mode first + AskUserQuestionTool, review all plans, get it to write its own CLAUDE.md for coding standards and edit where necessary and away you go.
Seems noticeably better than 4.5 at keeping the codebase slim. Obviously it still needs to be kept an eye on, but it's a step up from 4.5.
I've been working with a claude-specific directory in Claude Code for non-coding work (and the odd bit of coding/documentation stuff) since the first week of Claude Code, or even earlier - I think when filesystem MCP dropped.
It's a very powerful way to work on all kinds of things. V. interested to try co-work when it drops to Plus subscribers.