I've noticed something else - as Anthropic models get even more and more superhuman, they seem to serve me more and more casual nonsense.<p>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".<p>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.<p>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.<p>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<p>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<p>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.
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.
Incident is claimed to be resolved but I'm now (11:22 UTC) getting:<p><pre><code> API Error: 529 Overloaded. This is a server-side issue, usually temporary — try again in a moment. If it persists, check https://status.claude.com.
</code></pre>
And the status page says all green.<p>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.<p>Update 11:28 UTC: Incident has been declared dated 11:27 UTC <a href="https://status.claude.com/incidents/mfdtrknpxghq" rel="nofollow">https://status.claude.com/incidents/mfdtrknpxghq</a>
So, how's the OpenAI situation? Is the grass greener on the other side?
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.<p>No wonder the amount of water that both Claude and Codex are taking they also need so many frequent hydration breaks.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49056739">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49056739</a>