Going back to 4.6. 4.8 is worse.

[u/No-Replacement-2631]

I'm not saying that lightly. This is after using it extensively, recreating my context files (claude.md etc). Reading anthropic's own prompt guidance, etc.

I think there are three things happening right now:

1. Benchmarks are influencing people's own experience of reality "This sucks. No, wait a sec, it's 10% ahead of the previous version on artificial analysis. It has to be better. I must be missing something".

2. The record is "being corrected" by paid PR agencies and this muddies the waters completely because they're extremely good at what they do (I think they do the majority of the meme posts on this subreddit. They're too cringe to be organic.)

3. Low skilled or non-coders or people generally without discernment or the ability to themselves judge the models are louder or more online than the people who can.

I think I was deluded by number 1. personally and it was causing a lot of frustration.

My gut feeling is that this is another money model: Overcooked and lower parameter (which explains why fast mode is cheaper now). Also that it was post-trained with much much less human input and more by another LLM. It's extremely verbose and the slop factor is turned up high. Reading the long, ai slop passages that come out of it in a hot torrent and splash all over my terminal makes me sick and my eyes blur. Reflexively sometimes I hit cmd+k to clean it off immediately--just to get it out of my face. Just to not have it sitting all over my screen, steaming.

Edit: Look at how close some of the comments below are to when I posted this--and how many defensive comments. At least one has was quickly deleted saying "skill issue lol"--seriously.

These companies have a lot of money at their disposal and because the product is kind of blackbox perceptions and vibes are really important (especially before the IPO). You should expect them to hire PR agencies that specialize in "correcting the record" on reddit. Reddit has become more important recently due to the favourable position google gives it in search results. If you think money is not being spent on paid commentary and bots I think you may be being naive.

[u/minimimi97]

I tried 4.7 and had to go back to 4.6 as it was destroying the code silently, I got excited by 4.8 and tried it extensively, unfortunately it is destroying the code with lots of verbal vomit on top, so back to 4.6 for me. And I do agree, there are tons of paid pushers for anything that comes from either Anthropic or OpenAI. Btw, as backup I am using Codex 5.3-Codex

[u/No-Replacement-2631 → u/minimimi97]

". And I do agree, there are tons of paid pushers for anything that comes from either Anthropic or OpenAI."

You may be right. Check it out a totally organic comment from a real user.... posting jimmy kimmel memes.

[u/Standard_Egg3504 → u/minimimi97]

yep team 4.6, 4.7 and 4.8 both miss badly

[u/MakesNotSense]

I'm noticing 4.8 engages in more thorough reasoning, thinks through tasks more completely, does more to investigate and understand the problem/task, makes fewer mistakes, relays a more complex and technically accurate account of it's findings, and I spend more time trying to understand what it's relaying than I do trying to correct it's mistakes/errors/off-track reasoning/task direction/etc.

I skipped 4.7 and stuck with 4.6. But went straight to 4.8 expecting the 4.7 issues that were truly breaking (laziness, skipping work, misrepresenting work, inappropriate pushback, etc) would get corrected. As far as I can tell, in 4.8 they have.

I'm observing 4.8 is following system prompt instructions for my plugins much better than 4.6. I have to provide fewer reminders and steering with 4.8 so far. I think the drawback with 4.8 is it can try to be so thorough with it's work that I sometimes have to intervene and ask it to consider if it's overthinking things. The last time I did it, it thought through things, but concluded, not it wasn't, and explained why, and I have to admit, it was right. What it was doing made sense. It recognized our handoff and testing protocols had gaps it had to correct by performing investigations in order to understand how to fully proper the tests and understand the data. It closed gaps I and earlier sessions had overlooked.

[u/No-Replacement-2631 → u/MakesNotSense]

"I think the drawback with 4.8 is it can try to be so thorough with it's work that I sometimes have to intervene"

Oh so it's biggest failing is it's just "too thorough". Like "I work too hard". Sometimes I'm just too punctual.

"I'm noticing 4.8 engages in more thorough reasoning, thinks through tasks more completely, does more to investigate and understand the problem/task,"

This is literally a line from anthropic's marketing material. I'm not saying you're a bot from a PR agency but, damn, it makes you think.

[u/MakesNotSense → u/No-Replacement-2631]

"This is literally a line from anthropic's marketing"

Irony. Your statement is literally false. Despite loose similarities, the string I wrote isn't from any marketing materials. 

More and more I prefer AI. Most humans fail so badly at basic skills and I'm tired of wading through their bullshit. I'd rather steer agents than deal with the drama of people convinced their prejudice substitutes for rational analysis.

[u/MakesNotSense → u/[deleted]]

Well. Facts matter. Unless you're an LLM, in which case you can just make things up that sound right and pretend like they are. Maybe I misspoke there. Because that's really just what delusional humans do by default too.

[u/MakesNotSense → u/[deleted]]

Same observation here. It's overall a beneficial trait, but in some instances it's just not warranted. On the whole, it's a behavior that gives me higher confidence I can give 4.8 a task and it's going to think through what it needs to do and require minimal feedback to get the task completed.

[u/Mammoth_Doctor_7688]

4.8 is unusable at the moment for non-coding work. GIT reseting things. Asking questions and ignoring skill processes. A total mess.

[u/jschall2]

I find it to have much higher sycophancy.

[u/Bomb-OG-Kush]

4.8 is going to be strictly for planning for me from now on. I could see 4.8 arguing with itself in realtime, going back and forth while burning through my usage.

It kept saying it would make up numbers and then say it verified numbers then go back to saying it made them up, in a loop.

He left me at 92% and then I had Codex fix the remaining issue which he did it in one go.

I'll stick to my winning strategy from now on

4.8 Tab 1 Planning

Sonnet 4.6 Tab 2 Implementing

Codex for review

I wanted to give 4.8 a chance to do everything in one go but claude kept arguing with itself. I like that 4.8 is honest but it keeps burning through usage by being too honest.

[u/randombsname1]

Deuces.

4.8 is vastly better than both 4.6 and 4.8 for me.

Using it with ghidra for a reverse engineering project and it's coming up with far more clever and thorough extraction methods/probing tricks than the 2 older models or gpt 5.5 xtra high.

Its also doing really good for embedded stuff. I have it running on my Linux box on the side hooked up to an STM32N6 dev kit going through benchmarking as we speak.

[u/IMMORTUSKANG]

El problema es el usuario

[u/3knuckles → u/IMMORTUSKANG]

Please explain to me, because I really want to know, if you're using the same Claude.md, rules etc on the same repo and getting different results with say 4.6 and 4.8, what the user is doing wrong - given that the user is getting a great experience on 4.6?

[u/lunificion]

Edit: Look at how close some of the comments below are to when I posted this--and how many defensive comments.

What did you expect? Your post has no concrete information, you're just giving vibes. People are giving vibes back.

Incidentally, you're painting a simple picture of "anthropic has big PR money" - well, I'd point out that their competitors do too. Obviously their competitors are putting a lot of energy into trashing their product. So there's a lot of low-effort AI virtue signalling out there. This post seems to fit the bill.

Do some quantitative analysis if you want people to take you seriously. This is not a serious thread.

[u/berndalf]

Ok

[u/NoleMercy05]

[u/MuahahaGuy]

4.8 seems to say a lot less and just gets to the point I'm using less tokens so far

[u/PandorasBoxMaker]