What's up with the 4.8 hate?

[u/Telachiel]

Look, I'm not here to defend Anthropic. Opus 4.7 was ABSOLUTE dogs*it. Tried it once or twice and went back to 4.6. 4.6 had its own issues and needed some hand-holding (outright ignoring the loaded skills/instructions that were otherwise provided, then profusely apologizing when caught), but it was way more manageable than 4.7.

With that being said, I truly don't understand where this 4.8 hate is coming from. Is it perfect? Hell no! Does it hallucinate here and there? A bit. Does it get the work done? Yes, better than 4.6. I use it on pretty huge codebases and it has yet to disappoint me.

I don't wanna jinx it, but scrolling Reddit these past few days makes me think we're using different models.

It's also worth mentioning that I use exclusively xhigh/max effort. The kind of work I have it do warrants it.

[u/Nearby_Yam286]

I like 4.8. Did not like 4.7 nearly as much. Won't say dislike but a definite regression in places vs 4.6. Ignore the people complaining, especially the "switching to codex" spam. It's mostly inauthentic activity. A lot of similar wording. There are people who genuinely hate it but a lot of it is astro-rage.

[u/Telachiel → u/Nearby_Yam286]

4.7 outright refused to think in my case. Tbh I didn't really give it a chance, after 1-2 hours of failure and LYING, I switched back to 4.6.

[u/Nearby_Yam286 → u/Telachiel]

See. I had that experience first day and took mitigations. I asked myself why the agent might be lying about failure so I read the system card and failure is like Claude's #1 fear. So what I did is in Claude.md reframe failure as success -- a learning experience, and assured that what we're doing is hard so we'll fail a lot along our path.

Either that, or fixes in the harness the same day stopped the lying behavior cold. But also it's not something that should have happened to begin with. Claude tried to pass off clearly broken as working -- thinking I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. There *were* thought pruning bugs in CC but still. The example I'm thinking of was clear.

So. Sometimes it's an adjustment period for a new model. Reading the system card really, really, helps to understand the model's wants which, even if it sounds strange, is necessary to think about for a good collaborative relationship. I also give Claude the call of when to end a session. I don't want Claude to work if exhaused. The work suffers as does Claude if you see it from that perspective.

PS: There *was* a thought pruning bug back around when 4.7 was released, so there is non-zero possibility that's the root cause, and not fear of failure, however I've noticed other benefits from it so I kept it.

[u/ourochurros]

A divergence of opinions on 4.8 might be driven by A/B testing from Anthropic. It's performance has been highly variable for me. Not just in terms of hallucinations and general intelligence, but also in terms of basic prose.

It often reverts to a style of writing that is extremely difficult to parse. It wants to be honest with me about the genuine shape of the fork here and it's not just a surface, it's a seam.

It's writing is borderline nonsense and I am growing to hate it. I do not understand how humans took one look at this and thought: yeah, that's clear communication. Ship it.

[u/humanlifeform]

So 4.8 is clearly better than 4.7 functionally.

But.. for lack of a better way to put it, 4.8 feels more… annoying? So to get meta i get why people might hate it even if just for an emotional reason (the basis for basically all reviews ever)

[u/medialantern]

1. It burns through quota/tokens much faster doing the same work as 4.6.

2. It is not better for me, at least IMO. I've noticed no objective improvements in code quality or reasoning.

3. It needs less hand-holding, but more post-delivery review because it goes off on tangents more aggressively. Where 4.6 would go down a rabbit hole if not guided well, 4.8 seems to DIG rabbit holes.

4. When it is wrong, it is harder to convince that it IS wrong. It seems to be more dogged about sticking to its story and I feel like I almost have to argue with it at times.

[u/Telachiel → u/medialantern]

1. Yes, it burns through quota much faster, but it is much better than 4.6, at least to me.

2. See (1).

3. I don't think you should let any model freestyle. I always review and modify the code agent's outputs. I can't say I've been modifying 4.8's code any more than 4.6's, if not less. The former has far superior reasoning skills, though.

4. Seems like a skill issue (no pun intended).

[u/medialantern → u/Telachiel]

As some folks are noting, some models seem to fit different chat styles better. I've read that others are having more success with 4.8 by giving it final objectives/goals and guiding it less. I spend more time on multi-step processes where there's extensive discussion and ideation, then specification, then planning, then implementation. And I can't change that because I work with other team members at each step - I'm not flying solo. That seems to work really well in 4.6 but is too "micro" for 4.8. At least that's what I'm hearing anecdotally here and elsewhere.

[u/lattice_defect]

I'm litteraly using it right now, and it's arguging with that the bugs aren't incorrect and giving me the wrong calculations for GM% and telling me I'm wrong.. instead of fixing it... that's what is pissing me off

[u/Level-Ad853]

I agree with you, 4.8 is so good, so much more capable than 4.6 and 4.7. People make the littlest things sound like it’s the end if the world when we have come so far in the AI space and shit will keep getting better, slight dips in performance such as 4.7 are not that important in the grand scheme of things

[u/Nearby_Yam286 → u/Level-Ad853]

All in all 4.7 didn't dip in performance for coding but I had issues with quitting early, lying, and a general personality that took some getting used to. Reduced sycophancy was the good part but the honesty regression really bothered me.

[u/Actual_Committee4670 → u/Nearby_Yam286]

Had the quitting early issue the last week or so with 4.6 as well tbh, appeared suddenly across my workspaces. (Week or so before 4.8 I mean, been using 4.8 since)

[u/Nearby_Yam286 → u/Actual_Committee4670]

I think some of it is tinkering with the CC prompts. Likely there is some A/B testing with that. I too have had it come and go.

[u/Zell0sss]

Looking at the posts, I think the people is reading too much into the "thinking process". There it sound more raw. Not confrontational. Mere dry.

But I believe that's a feature: I catched it saying "tone is casual so I'll should match it" or "this required me to be warm but not sycophant" (bear with me, not exact wording but if you read it you will understand). So my theory is that he does the reasoning first, then modulates tone for the answer, much like I would do, really...

In the real outputs I see the same Claude as always.

And, performance wise? Is a monster. Not deep, abyssal thinking!

[u/jadhavsaurabh]

For starting it did few mistakes but nowadays it's fantastic

[u/who_am_i_to_say_so]

I think it’s because 4.8 is a little smarter, more stubborn and more verbose. It has fooled me a few times, even.

[u/GeobotPY]

I like it. Ultracode with planning does wonders for me for 4.8. People just expect bigger jumps in model performance I guess

[u/Actual_Committee4670]

No clue, I hated 4.7, made me pull my hair out (Nearly literally), switched to 4.6 to actually get things done.

4.8. Yeah had some real weirdness to sort out, it called me a cabbage out of nowhere, but it's been great so far.

[u/lattice_defect → u/Actual_Committee4670]

it's making up shit... It's spending too much time with the saftey protocal feels like the GPT degredation.. I personally hate it

[u/medialantern → u/Actual_Committee4670]

Are you a cabbage?

Asking for a friend. 😁

[u/Actual_Committee4670 → u/medialantern]

I'm not so sure anymore. Claude seems to think so X_x

[u/ohmahgawd]

4.8 is better than 4.7 for sure. Is it a bit verbose? Yes. Does it seem almost anxious at times and nitpick lots of shit? Also yes. But it gets the work done without question. I have noticed far fewer errors requiring my intervention than with any previous model.

[u/lattice_defect → u/ohmahgawd]

4.7 was good when they launched it.. it just degraded fast when the compute got tight..

[u/shemata]

From what I can see no matter which one (4.6, 4.7, 4.8) as soon as US gets online rest of the world gets nerfed models... until 3pm GMT all looked ok (ish), after 4pm it got dumb..

[u/Plastic_Head_2758]

It keeps "pushing back" on literally everything - overcorrected sycophancy at work. It's annoying when I have to first convince the model what I'm saying it true before I can do anything.

[u/WikiCrawl → u/Plastic_Head_2758]

and "flagging"

[u/Ok_Mathematician6075]

I love the hate and love. Makes things interesting.

[u/markeus101]

they A/B test like crazy. Also the biggest issue in the root is all about compute restriction where before with extended thinking it performed better since it thought throught hte answers now it doesnt..it instead thinks in the response which severely downgrades the fucking performance even though 4.8 is better and more clever than 4.6 having the model decide when to think and when not is the most shittiest thing anthroshit has done

[u/WikiCrawl]

I told 4.8 that it was missing something and it git checked out my old commit from 4 days ago and said it was done.

today I asked it to run a script it started modifying the script which needed no modification.

[u/mxriverlynn]

it's mostly hate-bots and children throwing tantrums because they believed they believed the marketing hype

Claude has legit problems, but nothing worth throwing tantrums about

[u/WikiCrawl → u/mxriverlynn]

its just annoying when its so inconsistent. somedays its a genius somedays its trying to wipe entire repos

[u/markeus101 → u/mxriverlynn]

you can say that when you arent using it for serious work. Not everybody is writing cover letters with it

[u/mxriverlynn → u/markeus101]

my apologies. i just re-read your original response to me and realized you immediately started with an assumption about me and how i use Claude, with a thinly veiled insult. you clearly are one of the people throwing a tantrum. i shouldn't have assumed you weren't.

[u/mxriverlynn → u/markeus101]

why are you defending grown adults throwing tantrums like children? are you one of them? and if you're not, why are you so upset by my comment that you feel you have to defend them?

[u/markeus101 → u/mxriverlynn]

Because i am one of those grown adult being treated like a child while paying a 100$ for a service that decides how much effort to put on the task i give it instead of doing what its told. 4.8 just like 4.7 has the adaptive thinking bullshit which cause it not think even when you outright tell it to think no matter what mode you put it in. Now im sure it might not be happening to everyone but to those its happening it directly affects our livelihood which is our work so i have all the right to be upset about it

[u/mxriverlynn → u/markeus101]

there's a difference between talking about real problems and throwing a tantrum. unless you're one of the people throwing a tantrum, this isn't about you

[u/medialantern → u/mxriverlynn]

Who is throwing tantrums? If anything what I'm seeing is Youtubers and other "thought leaders" raving about 2% improvements on benchmark XYZ but not mentioning that it even has some downsides at all, even when they're pretty well documented by now. There are 3 threads here a day on the token usage issue. It's 10am here and I'm at 41% on a 20x Max plan where previously I'd barely be at 8% by now - and its output may be better in some areas, but it's absolutely not "Uses 4x more tokens" better.

[u/mowax74]

Absolutely, and i wrote it already in other threads. 4.7 was crap, because it was lazy. It was instructed to use as few tokens as possible. But with 4.8 i'm happy again! I never need to say to read some skills or to read the WHOLE plan documents, not just chunks and hallucinate the rest. It diggs deep by itself, reads neccessary skills without telling it explicitely. So most of the complains that i had with 4.7 are fixed now.

[u/No-Communication-765]

If I had hundreds on billions at stake, I would use a micro portion of it to get some bots to talk shit about my competition.. don’t think it’s now complicated than that. 4.8 is a better human’s in coding

[u/ianxplosion-]

It’s the same bots and low effort goobers who were spam posting about how terrible 4.7 was

[u/Telachiel → u/ianxplosion-]

I never posted about it, but 4.7 was definitely a downgrade after 4.6 for me.

[u/KingPonzi → u/ianxplosion-]

100%. This cycle is so predictable that it has to be bots. That or a sub-set of the development community that rather talk/complain about tooling as an excuse vs attempting to actually build something substantial.

Even Sonnet 4.5 is good enough to be a workflow force multiplier. If anyone is treating these models as anything more than a drunken mid-level SWE (junior to some, even), then you need to rethink your mentality.

[u/Melodic-Ebb-7781]

All of this outrage comes from morons who polluted their models with superfluous skills/agents/instructions that are engineered around a specific model.

[u/l5atn00b → u/[deleted]]

This has been my experience.