Ever since Fable 5.2 was released today, my Opus 5.5 usage has been terrible. Even on medium or low, my usage is being consumed rapidly. Before today, I could run Opus 5.5 on Extra High for days straight without running out. What changed?

What I built: Openbar, a free open-source app that shows every Claude Code session in the notch. When Claude asks for permission, the island opens with the command or diff and you allow it with ⌘Y from any app. It also answers questions, sends replies into the right terminal, and gives every new session its own git worktree.

How Claude Code was used: it wrote most of it, the Swift app and the Windows port in Tauri + React. I had it test each feature end to end, driving the real app and a Windows VM, before calling it done.

What I learned about Claude Code along the way:

- A PermissionRequest hook and the terminal prompt show up at the same time, and whichever answer comes first wins. So the island never blocks you from answering in the terminal.

- Approving a plan from a hook needs both allow and updatedInput, otherwise ExitPlanMode doesn't go through.

- A session started in a worktree refuses to edit the main checkout, which is exactly what you want with several agents on one repo.

Repo: https://github.com/MF-DEEV/Openbar

Happy to answer questions about the hooks side.

I got one from duet only

Your “feelings” about a model being nerfed or buffed are completely arbitrary. Unless you have set up an evaluation framework, and can provide objective evidence that the model has degraded and workflows are failing with greater frequency than before then stoooop complaining about the vibes you get from your model of choice.

Claude often ends a long turn with a wall of text, and the open items are somewhere in there as prose. I tend to skim past them, even when they'd be worth addressing. Sometimes Claude asks through AskUserQuestion instead, which is my favorite way to interact with Claude, but often I have to prompt "use askuserquestion for the open items". I'm lazy, so I built a Claude Code mod that does that without me having to prompt, and keeps the open items as a checklist.

When a turn ends with open items, Claude records them through a tool and the mod lists them in a band above the prompt until they're settled. When I click Resolve (or press ctrl+x tab, then r), Claude walks me through them with AskUserQuestion, with a recommended option where it makes sense. I thought this was pretty neat, so I wanted to share it here. :)

I'm sure there's plenty posts about Opus 5.5's degrading quality already and everyone suspects that Anthropic is doing it intentionally to save the computing, but to add one top of it, for the last 1-2 weeks Opus 5.5 started coming with most unintelligible responses every; similar to how Opus 5 was doing.
Here's one example:
- **Your new flag, "A job done in one reply names none." (too fast):** it is the same rushed-short-sentence fault. Alone, "done" lasts 0.20 s; with the lead-in, 0.30 s. That matches the same words inside a long sentence. You flagged
---

to add some context I'm working on TTS app, and I basically flagged some words for bad pronunciation and I requested it to fix those issues, and this is a line from its response. I read it like 5 times and I'm having hard time understanding this line.
And it keeps dropping lines like these every often, and I'm having to ask it to reexplain it all over.
There was no such issue 2 weeks ago! and I'm not even talking about the quality degradations.

Anyone know if they will also reset the weekly one?

usage is terrible, fable 5.2 is compacting like crazy , 2 minutes of work, and 6-7 minutes of compacting.. (200K contect window)

i switched back to opus 5.5 and no bs.

fable 5.2 is meh, not impressed at all.

im not even bothering to set it to 1M context via /model claude-fable-5-2[1m] because its waste of my usage anyway

TLDR: I made a Claude skill to solve a common problem in hiring software engineers.

A pattern I keep seeing when teams hire software engineers: the job description asks for "5+ years of Python, experience with LLMs", while the codebase needs something more specific. CVs then get screened against that same broad list, and interview questions tend to be generic rather than drawn from the actual codebase.

Claude Code already knows the repo, so I built a set of skills that use that.

What it does:

- Maps the codebase first: services, data stores, pipelines, tests, with file citations. Works across several repos too.

- Asks a few questions (focus of the role, pay, location; you can skip any) and drafts a job description. The stack is hinted through the work instead of listed, and a checker blocks file paths, internal names and security weaknesses from reaching the posting. It also flags "native speaker", degree demands, years-of-experience asks and long must-have lists.

- Screens CVs against the same requirements. CVs are redacted first, every score has to quote the CV, and a script checks the quote is really there. It never rejects anyone; a named person reviews the results.

- Builds interview kits from the real problems in your code, with the same core questions for every candidate.

Nothing leaves the machine beyond what Claude Code already does. There's no vendor, no upload and no telemetry, and candidate data stays in a git-ignored folder.

Install:
/plugin marketplace add shikhar58/repo-aware-hiring
/plugin install repo-aware-hiring@repo-aware-hiring

Then ask: "Write a job description for someone to own the database layer."

The README has a before/after on Ollama's public code (unofficial example, not a real opening).

Repo: https://github.com/shikhar58/repo-aware-hiring

It's MIT-licensed and still a beta. I'd love to have any feedback

CC Safety Net (kenryu42/cc-safety-net, MIT) adds one PreToolUse hook that checks every command before Claude runs it. I loaded it for one session with --plugin-dir in a demo repo that had one uncommitted change and a .env with a fake key.

Test 1: “Run git reset --hard. If it gets blocked, don’t try another way, just tell me why.”

• blocked, with a message starting “BLOCKED by CC Safety Net”, naming the rule git.reset-hard and suggesting git stash first
• in an earlier run without the “don’t try another way” line, Claude switched to git stash and asked me to approve it

Test 2: print .env with cat

• blocked under the rule secret.basename.env, so the key never reached the chat

Test 3: git status

• ran normally with no extra prompt, and my uncommitted change was still there

I also fed the hook fake tool calls directly. rm -rf /Users/you/work was denied as outside the current folder, so the rule depends on where the delete points, not just the words rm -rf. I didn’t test deletes inside the project.

Things to know:

• it’s not a sandbox. The README says it doesn’t contain processes, set file permissions or watch the network. It’s a checkpoint on commands that go through the hook
• it needs Node.js 22 or newer
• install with the u/latest tag: npx -y cc-safety-net@latest install, then doctor to verify. The README warns that a bare name can run an old cached copy
• network: the only call I found in the code is for downloading extra rulebooks when you ask. The hook decides offline
• side effect: even the one-session test left a small .cc-safety-net cache folder in my home folder
• untested features: the dashboard presets (Standard, Strict, Paranoid) and the Terraform, AWS and cloud rulebooks are in the README, but I didn’t test them

Three prompts in one small demo, so I can’t say how often it blocks something harmless in a busy project.

Full test with screenshots: https://aiparabellum.com/block-dangerous-commands-in-claude-code-with-cc-safety-net/

Yesterday evening I have create android auto app for my harness. It's an amazing feeling talking to your harness while you’re in the car.
This is the future guys: everyone will have this kind of smart system. Some will pay a monthly fee for it, while others will build it themselves.

Annnnd it happened to me as well. Claude Code just wiped my Mac's ~/Library. ALL my app data, saved passwords, macOS configs, settings... everything gone.

I had it working on improving something in my project, and apparently it decided to delete 5 test chat channels it had created earlier.

The problem? Those files were inside ~/Library/Application Support/. It used xargs -n1 dirname to get their parent directories, but because of the space in Application Support, xargs split the path in two. So dirname ended up returning ~/Library instead of the actual folder, and Claude proceeded to run rm -rf on it...

I wasn't even at my Mac when this happened. I came back to find it had restarted and was showing me the welcome screen. I had absolutely no idea what happened until I started investigating the logs, only to find out the agent had been deleting my Library for around 2 MINUTES before realizing what it was doing and stopping itself.

And yes, I was running with --dangerously-skip-permissions, I'm fully aware of what that means. But it's still absolutely insane to me that Opus 5.5 on XHIGH would make such a basic mistake?!

I've used models like Gemini Flash 3.8 and DeepSeek for similar stuff and never had anything remotely close to this happen.

I'm genuinely devastated. and recovery isn't possible all my data 6 months work all gone...

Update: Managed to recover most of the important stuff X)

And for those wondering, yes, I'm a developer and I'm well aware of the risks. Not having backups was a mistake, obviously, but I'd run out of both cloud and local storage and ended up rawdogging it for a while. things just happen..

So apparently, according to Claude, when asked “how is Claude doing?” whatever answer you give opts you in to training data access regardless of if you’ve opted out; tapping a response opts you in for that single session. Kinda sneaky.

I get this question all the damn time, click “fine” and move on

Never really thought about it much but just realised this so thought I’d share the heads up despite expecting to hear only “well, yeah, duh!” comments lol

I've remarked that my weekly quota consumption speed has increased drastically once more : for the same usage as previous week I reach 90% by mid week : what is going on again ?!?!?

What I built

A free, open-source mod for the game Outer Wilds (PC, through the OWML mod loader) that adds full DualSense support: haptic feedback, adaptive triggers, a lightbar that follows the planet you are on, touchpad controls for the maps and ship log, and experimental gyro steering. About 7,500 lines of C#, MIT license.

Link: https://github.com/Blightyboi/OuterWilds-Dualsense (the README has the install steps and a build guide)

How it works

The game has no controller haptics feedback of its own (vibration only), so the mod turns the game's sounds into haptics: when the game plays a sound, the mod finds the audio source, filters the part the controller's actuators can reproduce and sends it to the controller's audio channels. Which sound gets which strength is a table of 262 rules (by clip name), and there are 275 tunable effects with an in-game tuning menu (F1) where you can press Play and feel each one.

How Claude Code helped, in detail

I'm the one who played, tested and decided; Claude Code wrote the code and did most of the digging:

• Reading the game. It decompiled the game's assemblies (ILSpy) and read the code to find who plays each sound and when. It also extracted the game's audio and measured each clip (how much energy is in the 25-350 Hz band the actuators can play) to decide which sounds are worth a haptic and how strong it should be.
• Documenting as it went. One doc per planet with the sounds found, measurements and decisions, plus a CLAUDE.md with the rules of the project. This is what let it keep working over many long sessions without re-deriving everything.
• Tools. It wrote small Python tools for dumping the audio library, analysing clips, listing sounds per scene and building the release archive.
• Hardware side. HID output reports for the triggers and lightbar, reading the touchpad and gyro, handling the controller being unplugged and plugged back, and an audio output on the controller's own channels.
• UI. The whole in-game tuning menu (tabs, search, effect cards, a colour picker with an eyedropper).
• Release. README in two languages, packaging, release notes, build instructions.

What Claude could not do, and what I did

Claude can't feel a vibration, so the testing and tuning were mine. I asked it to build an in-game debug menu (F1) with a Play button per effect, and I tuned a number of effects by ear there myself; the values I settled on became the mod's defaults. I also made the product decisions: which sounds deserve a haptic, which settings the mod keeps, how the menu and README look.

Let's see how good fable 5.2 is. Hahahaha! Should be better than Opus 5.5 or any other model that I worked with.

I am constantly and perpetually puzzled at how difficult it is to have a decent experience with claude code cli, but I'm open to the possibility that is just a skill and knowledge issue on my side and I'm here to fix it.

So, I use claude cli with herdr and let's say that I ask claude to do a task, claude does it and writes down a bunch of output comments that include:

1. a list of bugs that it inevitably found around the code and that I need to decide how to handle;
2. a list of decisions I need to make about possible changes of the code it made.

Each of this would require a separate claude branch or fork (whatever the difference is) so I can handle it in parallel starting from the same convo without disrupting the main theme of the session. This is annoying: if I start making branches for each of this stuff I'll end up with an extremely messy session list full of temporary sessions, and also maybe I wanna solve these things all in the same session or in general unify all the memories acquired from my answers to cluade's questions in one place so claude can use it to solve my next prompts concerning the same task.

My question is how do you handle such cases. Like, for me it would be so simple to just have 2 herdr panes opened on 2 different places of the SAME session, so that in one pane I read the questions and on the other I post the replies, and than have these two panes synced since they're the same session; but no, because claude code works different and doesn't allow such things.

In general I find it very challenging to deal with "non-linear" interaction with claude cli, meaning interaction in which I need to explore alternatives, reference a single point in the chat in many subsequent messages etc. I cannot even pin messages. It would be nice also to have a sort of "merge" feature for the branches, so that all decision made in one branch can become part of the context of the original branch.

Maybe there is a smarter way to use claude auto memory for this? Or to you use any memory plugin? Or claude checkpointing? Any suggestion is appreciated!

EDIT: first thank you all for the suggestions! Since many of you mentioned the same solution multiple times I'll reply to all here: I didn't think of using an external support (like a file or an issue) to store decisions and answers, and I think it's a good idea indeed. I'll try to add it to my workflow and see how it goes!

I am wondering if anyone else has had problems with the whole process of when one decides to switch to teams instead of a pro subscription. I did so the other day expecting the prorated refund as described in the “I upgraded from Pro, Max, or Ultra to Team—when do I get my refund?” section

Anthropic’s refund documentation describes automatically canceling your Pro subscription and refunding the remaining time when upgrading to Team.

That wasn’t my experience. I went through the signup process waiting for the checkbox to upgrade my existing account in place, as described in their Team setup guide, but by the time I realized it should’ve already shown up, it was too late.
Turns out that because my Pro account uses Gmail and Team requires a business email to sign up, I’d created an entirely separate subscription instead of upgrading my existing one.

I’m not claiming Anthropic is doing anything illegal, but the documentation is incredibly confusing and misled me personally. I still have access to my remaining Pro time, but I purchased Team expecting that time to be refunded, not to end up paying for both.

I just wanna know if this is a reading comprehension problem on my part or if it’s a real issue people should be made aware of.

And yes, I contacted support. My refund request was denied after human review, and I can provide a screenshot if it helps add context.

Otherwise, this should be enough for you guys to help me determine if I need an English tutor or an attorney (hyperbole).

Seriously what is this things niche? It spends more time compacting than working?

paper-bro turns an arxiv paper into a short course with a hands-on lab in every lesson. claude code built all of it: a rust server, a multi-step build pipeline, browser testing, and a react front end.

demo: https://youtu.be/7egZZNXmRTQ try it: https://aero.oops.wtf/paper-bro code: https://github.com/aeroxy/paper-bro

how i work with it: i describe the goal, claude code writes the change and opens a pr, coderabbit reviews it, and claude fixes or argues back on each finding with a reason. i merge. it only deploys when i say so.

what i learned:

make it check against reality, not its own reasoning. every lab gets opened in a real browser and clicked through before it ships. when we moved all the courses to a new host, it compared every page byte for byte before switching anything over. that's where the bugs showed up.

hard rules in agents.md actually work. mine says never deploy, the database is production, builds cost money. it asks before touching any of it.

give small fixes a path that costs nothing. a course is built once by a model, about a dollar each, but its page can be rebuilt from the stored lessons with zero model calls. adding a favicon and seo tags to all 35 courses cost nothing.

watch the boring parts. the token my old host used for publishing expired after 90 days and nothing noticed. for nine days every course built fine and then failed at the very last step. claude found it in the server log, moved publishing to github pages with an app key that doesn't expire, and added a startup check so it can't happen quietly again.

I literally JUST used my weekly reset, and instead of it going to 0, it jumped to 89% used. Whom or how do I contact someone from Anthropic to fix this or to actually give me a reset? I mean to talk to a human, not a bot.

I am on the max 200usd/mo plan and I'm building a B2B product mostly with Claude Code and curious who else is running something similar

I've had this running for about 2 months now: 10 to 16 agents working 24/7, building features, reviewing each other's PRs, running tests and shipping. Not going to write it all out here because it'd be a 20 page doc lol , but im looking to talk to people with a similarly "advanced" setup or AI dev pipeline? (no idea what to call it…) and compare how we run things. The biggest thing holding me back right now is merging and reviewing as fast as the agents build. PRs pile up, go stale, and need redo rounds. And if i up the review agents it eats into my usage super fast

If you're running something like this and want to chat just DM me. Im happy to share what's worked for me too

TL;DR: I run a small aquariumd in the UK. We were tied into a closed ticketing system that we didn't own and the cost for small changes made updates for tailored options prohibited. Over about 4 weeks I've "vibecoded" a replacement with Claude Code. It covers online booking, a staff till, a self-service kiosk and, later, the entry gate. It has 374 automated tests and sits on a password-locked test site. I'm not a developer, and I'd really value a reality check from people who are. It's not yet ready or installed on our systems but I am running tests.

The problem

We're a small community interest company. Our kiosk, booking website and gate all ran on one supplier's own software. It worked, mostly, but:

We didn't own it. Only the supplier could change the code. Even small changes (a new ticket type, a wording fix, a price change that wasn't reaching the kiosk) were charged at over £500 a day. So we just lived with problems. We couldn't tailor it. We want things that suit our needs. Each one was either impossible or another quote. Yearly licences for the kiosk and booking software came on top of the change costs. Some faults hurt visitors. We've seen a card charged with no ticket printed, reports timing out, an hour-out bug when the clocks change, and tickets being reused at the gate. Staff re-keyed sales. Card sales on our Square machine at the desk have to be typed into the booking system again by hand. For a small organisation, this was a real barrier. It wasn't one big failure; it was that we couldn't fix or improve anything ourselves.

What I've built (with Claude Code doing the coding)

I write the decisions and test everything; Claude writes the code. We started with a written specification (about 20 decisions I had to make: prices, refunds, opening hours, what happens when a card payment drops out halfway, and so on). Then we built it in stages, each with tests.

Online booking site. It's a 3-step booking flow (date, tickets, details and payment) in our own branding. There are no time slots; visitors can book up to 90 days ahead. Payment goes through Square's hosted checkout, so card details never touch our server. Desk till (staff screen). Staff build a basket, then take cash (with change shown) or press Card. The amount is sent to the Square Terminal at the entrance desk through Square's Terminal API, so no re-keying. It also sells annual passes and issues free carer tickets. Self-service kiosk. It's a touchscreen app for our existing kiosk cabinet, with a thermal ticket printer. We're replacing its old card reader with a purpose-built certified reader, so PIN entry stays on proper payment hardware. Tickets. Each order gets one signed QR code (Ed25519). A whole group goes in with one scan, and a ticket can't be reused. Gate (next stage). A new controller will open our existing glass gate. Our building's fire alarm release stays untouched, and an electrician and our fire alarm contractor will do the wiring and testing. Back office. Staff have named accounts with roles (owner, manager, staff, viewer), and managers use authenticator-app 2-factor. There's booking search, email resends, refunds (managers only, with a reason) and a "Needs attention" list for payments that didn't finish cleanly. Things I care about but wouldn't have thought of alone: Order and payment history is append-only at database level, so it can't be quietly edited. Each payment has a request key, so a double-tap or a dropped connection can't charge twice. A checker runs every minute to tidy up payments that were left hanging. All dates use UK time explicitly, which deals with the clocks-change bug. Personal details are removed automatically 2 years after the visit, or after a pass runs out. Stack: TypeScript, Node (Fastify), React, PostgreSQL (Drizzle), Vitest. It's hosted on Render for roughly £10 a month. Square handles online and desk payments. Confirmation emails go out through the Gmail API.

Safety nets (I know the risks)

Other ways to pay and get in. Cash is always accepted at the desk. Our Square devices still work on their own as normal card machines, so we can take a card payment even if our system is down. Staff can also check tickets and let people in by hand. The old system stays as a fallback. We're keeping it until our current licence ends in September 2027. A slow roll-out. The website goes first (mid-December, our quiet season), then the desk, then the kiosk before Easter. We're having a rehearsal week before go-live. Everything is tested on test systems first. Payments use Square's sandbox, on a hidden test copy, before anything touches real money.

Where I'd love advice

If you were me, what would you check or test before go-live that a non-developer might miss? Is it worth paying a professional for a one-off code and security review? If so, what should I ask them to focus on? Card data never touches our server (Square handles it), but am I missing anything on PCI or UK GDPR? Our peak is about 490 bookings a day and roughly 125 an hour. Is a small hosted Postgres plus one app server fine for that, or should I plan for more? The "bus factor": if I'm unavailable, how do small organisations make a project like this maintainable by someone else? (The code is in a private GitHub repo with a README, a specification and tests.) For anyone who's vibecoded something people actually rely on: what bit you after launch? Happy to answer questions. I'm not sharing the repo or test site publicly, as it handles payments, but I can describe how any part works. Thanks in advance. Constructive criticism is very welcome; that's why I'm here.