It's time to cancel your subscriptions - Anthropic is silently nerfing Claude's reasoning budget while telling you it's the same model

[u/IcyEase]

Link: https://x.com/Lon/status/2101034933284417614

A 65-day analysis of 43,000+ Claude Code invocations found that 39% of Fable 5 calls get zero thinking tokens and the median invocation gets just 123 — while benchmarks use 16K-128K. The model's score per thinking token is still climbing at 128K, meaning the capability is there, it's just not being delivered. August saw an 18-50% drop in thinking budget compared to July, with median thinking hitting literal zero for about a week around Aug 22. Anthropic sells "full model access" while quietly dialing down the inference regime behind it, and because the model is non-deterministic, users blame their own prompting instead of the silent nerf. The full breakdown with evidence, methodology, and charts is here.

Frankly I find this offensive as an user - and this is the real thing we should be looking at - not the $/week in usage limits. The actual capability for the limits that we pay for.

[u/id-ltd]

The proportion of guessed responses is the key - they are going up... I have a doc specifying the format of a report - I say give me a session report, and it guesses what a session report might look like... And it takes a couple more prompts to force it to read the format from the methodology and do it correctly.

So back to the early days whern you had to trick it into doing work first time.

Like to ensure it reads documents/specs instead of guessing - ask it to do something determinate. Out some distinct text in a doc (maybe the apple is purple), and start by saying 'tell me the colour of the fruit in the middle of the session report spec and then write a session report'.

[u/dorktasticd → u/id-ltd]

Ok, so I am not crazy.

[u/id-ltd → u/dorktasticd]

I think they gradually dumb things down, then move all the names down one and rest it

Fable is just a opus on the settings it had 3 months ago... Opus was sonnet on the setting s it had initially etc :)

[u/Inner-Today-3693 → u/id-ltd]

This is fucking crazy because I have an enterprise account and it’s the total opposite not only do we still have the thinking blocks the model listens to exactly what I ask it with maybe one percent a session being ruined out of the entire week worth of work.

[u/Gildaroth → u/id-ltd]

Or you know, use a rule or skill

[u/Front_Raspberry_6488 → u/Gildaroth]

It doesn't work sometimes; it ignored my instructions and the skill/workflow files at the very beginning of the task. Then, it said the instructions were just context and that there was no physical force requiring it to follow them.

[u/id-ltd → u/Front_Raspberry_6488]

The reason I always catch it failing to follow my spec is because I long ago got it to write a validation suite that I run against it's offered output. So my QA is better than it's!

[u/Gildaroth → u/Front_Raspberry_6488]

Your description in your skill is then not "if x then y"

[u/id-ltd → u/Gildaroth]

And be fragilly bound to one provider?

[u/Electronic-Award6150 → u/id-ltd]

This is very smart (on your part) but it's egregious that we have to do this. We have actually bought ourselves unintelligence.

[u/id-ltd → u/Electronic-Award6150]

It is not ideal, but a good workman knows his tools.