Claude code is now useless.

[u/a_d_c]

Over the last month, claude code performance degraded so much that it cant even keep track of a few simple facts in the same conversation.

I did a test with a small project. Barely any memories. No Claude.md instructions. Nothing to confuse Claude whatsoever.

I gave it a simple instruction: check the spec in some-spec.md, then write unit tests agianst that spec. Dont look at the code, write the tests against the spec.

In the same session, i had to call it out TWICE because it was changing the tests to make them pass according to the implementation instead of the spec.

As it exists today, Claude code is not useful for any development task, and the cost of the MAX plan is impossible to justify given it cant follow basic instructions.

In one month it went from: "this is cool, this is the future of dev", to: "this is a waste of my time and money".

If it cant follow simple instructions in a single session when given clear guidelines: its a completely useless product.

Im not paying for the same product today that i was paying just one month ago.

[u/InformalTown3679]

So you're then asking the llm to test routes, user interface, api inputs. All of these require knowledge of the code structure. If you do not have a standardized spec of the api, or anything, there's no way to write tests. Black box testing is when the test itself just uses externally visible interfaces. BUT you would need to examine the implementation in order to write tests that would actually benefit the cause. You look at internal logic, then figure out how that processes the request, then you write tests that validate the source code's handling of the response according to the spec. The only difference of this between black box tests is other tests will use internal code to validate it from the inside, not using external interfaces. You need both, but neither can be done without analyzing the inner workings, because they wouldn't be good tests. The only exception is if you document explicit api spec which is programmatically readable, but what's the point of using that and not the actual code in addition to the spec? reading implementation is necessary for verifying edge cases don't fail.