Unfortunate timing, as I am rooting for Anthropic as the underdog, but feel compelled to use whatever works best. Since mid-August I've demoted Claude to only putting the fire on UIs and am getting amazing results with GPT-5 for everything else. Given the nonstop capacity warnings on codex cli, I might not be the only one.

As someone who has implemented this myself, I know that it’s pretty easy to make innocent mistakes there. And the only visible result is a tiny distortion of the output distribution which only really becomes visible after analysing thousands of tokens. And I would assume that all providers are using speculative decoding by now because it’s the only way to have good inference speed at scale.

As a quick recap, you train a small model to quickly predict the easy tokens, like filler words, so that you can jump over them in the recurrent decoding loop. That way, a serial model can predict multiple tokens per invocation, thereby easily doubling throughput.

And the fact that they need lots of user tokens to verify that it works correctly would nicely explain why it took them a while to find and fix the issue.

  "we often make changes intended to improve the efficiency and throughput of our models.." 

I thought Anthropic said they never mess with their models like this? Now they do it often?

And I think it was 100% on purpose that they degraded the model performance as Claude Code got so popular and they either ran out of capacity or were losing money too fast.

But now that people are fleeing to Codex as it improved so much during the time, they had to act now.

I may be in a minority but I am still quite bullish on them as a company. Even with GPT-5 out they still seem to have a monopoly on taste - Claude is easily the most "human" of the frontier models. Despite lagging in features compared to ChatGPT Web, I mostly ask Claude day-to-day kinds of questions. It's good at inferring my intent and feels more like a real conversation partner. Very interested to see their next release.

In Cursor I am seeing varying degrees of delays after exhausting my points, for On-Demand Usage. Some days it works well, other days it just inserts a 30s wait on each message. What am I paying for? You never know when you buy.

Before I finally gave up on Claude Code, I noticed that I got more aggressive towards it, the more stupid it got as I could not believe how dumb it started to be.

And I am sure I was not the only one.

And this bad memory might stick for a while.

Curious why they can’t run some benchmarks with the model (if they suspect the issue is with the model itself) or some agentic coding benchmarks on Claude-code (if the issue might be with the scaffolding, prompts etc).

Removing the shown token comsumption rates (which allowed understanding when tokens were actually being sent / received!) … sometimes hiding the compaction percentage … the incredible lag on ESC interruption on long running sessions, the now broken clearing of the context window content on TASK tool usage

Who the fuck is working on this software and do they actually use it themselves?

Maybe the quality of Claude Code on any given day is indicative of whether their models are degraded …

https://x.com/claudeai/status/1965208247302029728

- shitty voice to text (why not just use Whisper at this point?)

- clunky website

- no image/video generation models

- DeepResearch sucks big time

- "Extended Thinking" doesn't seem to do much "thinking". I get the same results without it.

- API too expensive for what it is.

- No open-weight model to boost their reputation. Literally every other player has released an open model at this point..

I want to know how i could have been impacted.

Sure. I give it a few hours until the prolific promoters start to parrot this apologia.

Don't forget: the black box nature of these hosted services means there's no way to audit for changes to quantization and model re-routing, nor any way to tell what you're actually getting during these "demand" periods.