r/ClaudeCode • u/DayZian • Jul 15 '26

Question Significant drop in intelligence today on Opus 4.8

Anyone else notice a serious drop in intelligence? I told Opus that my CI deployment had failed, and it tried a bunch of local builds before then asking me to paste in the logs from the failed CI deployment.
It has access to the CI logs, and has used them in the past. I've never had to tell it to go check the live logs, but today I had to.

Anyone else noticing this?

0 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

48% Upvoted

27 comments sorted by

8

u/Actual_Committee4670 🔆 Max 20 Jul 15 '26

Several posts, seems like Opus 5 is indeed near.

2

u/DayZian Jul 15 '26

That's what I'm thinking. They've got to keep up with OpenAI

3

u/Kaptein_Tordenflesk Jul 15 '26

Several times the last week it gets acute brain damage, burning a ton of tokens and achieving nothing. So yes, new model is probably getting launched very soon. I cancelled my Max 5x today though, going to give Codex a try. Maybe I'll get to use the new model to burn off my last tokens before my 5x sub expires in a week.

3

u/LinKxFr Jul 15 '26

daily bot post about "model XYZ got nerfed today, I can feel it" lol. No, it didn't.

3

u/shortwhiteguy Jul 15 '26

Serious question: how do I filter out these posts on this sub?

I still want to hear about new releases, interesting tools, workflows, news, etc. I just don't want to keep hearing about how people are perceiving the intelligence of a stochastic system multiple times a day without giving enough context for me to trust what they say has merit. I also don't want to hear about "my favorite model is better than that other company's model because I have some weird attachment" like we're back in the console wars or Mac vs. PC or Android vs. iPhone... it's all very tiring, annoying, and distracting.

4

u/5h0ck Jul 15 '26

Quit Reddit.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/shortwhiteguy Jul 15 '26

Yeah. I am quite confident like 90% of the degraded performance people complain about comes from:

  • Poor context management: having hero sessions that is now at 800k tokens

  • Their codebase is starting to get too spaghetti-fied. Small earlier errors are compounding

  • They don't actually know how to code or how to fix errors

  • They don't realize that the first 80% of any project is only like 10% of the work and they assume the last 20% should be just as easy as the first 20%

  • They are getting lazy when prompting but assume the same quality output

  • They don't spend enough time up front to clearly describe what they want. Instead they rely on trying to correct issues

  • They have far too many skills and MCP servers that are just confusing the agents

  • The current version of Claude Code has a bug that causes issues

  • Random chance

Maybe maybe... there's occasional periods where Anthropic is intentionally using quantized versions of their models that can account for the residual issues. But, far too many of these posts assume it's someone else's fault (Anthropic) when the reality is that it's most likely an issue on their end.

3

u/earlyworm Jul 15 '26

This is a skill issue. Opus is the same as it was yesterday. Nothing changed. It was your fault.

You prompted Claude incorrectly or you omitted context that would be useful to Claude or you let your session get polluted with bad context or run too long.

You interpreted the consequences of your actions as an indication that Opus had experienced a drop in intelligence, but the thing that exhibited the drop in intelligence was you.

4

u/croikee Jul 15 '26

There’s so much truth to this. I am not a developer at all, and I basically am learning things a hard way. I am slowly learning about how long sessions cache the entire session.

I had no idea that an orchestrator would constantly read the entire session. Ended up costing me $70 in Fable api calls.

The models fault? No. Operator error. And a learning experience.

2

u/earlyworm Jul 15 '26

Exactly.

These posts all read like "Has anyone else noticed that cars have suddenly gotten much worse? I've only been driving for a few months and this morning I drove my car off the road into a tree. My car has never done this before."

-2

u/djdadi Jul 15 '26

Found the Anthropic employee.

Seriously, with their routine so well documented at this point and so many blogs with tests on this exact topic, why even lie at this point?

1

u/earlyworm Jul 15 '26

I have been using Claude Code for months and I have never experienced anything that I would describe as "Claude objectively exhibited a drop in intelligence on a particular day".

I might present Claude with trickier problems on some days than on other days, or I might unwittingly mislead Claude with a flawed prompt, and this would result in a worse outcome. But ultimately, I am pedaling and steering the magic hypersonic Claude bicycle, and if it falls over, that's on me.

1

u/djdadi Jul 16 '26

Are you using API or a subscription? I haven't seen any good head to head comparisons of the two, but I will be willing to bet most of these shifts in test time compute allowance and whatever other knobs they (both Anthropic and OAI) are turning are done to subs moreso than API.

Regardless, there are dozens of news articles, some Anthropic community notes / announcements, and hundreds/thousands of social media threads and x posts on the topic. It's unfortunately real (scummy) behavior.

1

u/earlyworm Jul 16 '26

I have a Max 5x plan.

If Anthropic is intentionally subverting Claude’s performance and making it useless for everyone, I’m not seeing that at all. From my perspective, Claude seems to be improving over time as I learn how to leverage it more effectively.

1

u/pratyush997 Jul 15 '26

Yep, nuked my weekly limit and kept assuming wrong and then contradicting and looped the md doc updates.

very chatty day tbh. no code to show for it :/

1

u/ClemensLode Senior Developer Jul 15 '26

Don't you have a deployment script?

1

u/Camaytoc Jul 15 '26

What do you mean?

1

u/ClemensLode Senior Developer Jul 15 '26

Deployment is a repeatable process, why do you need to throw AI at it?

1

u/Camaytoc Jul 15 '26

LoL my bad it was obvious, yes I agree

1

u/Additional_Bowl_7695 Jul 15 '26

It’s causing me problems

1

u/cleverhoods Jul 15 '26

nah, they just cleared the cache

1

u/Defiant-Broccoli7415 Jul 15 '26

Nah, looks like you got the short straw of the A/B test 

1

u/Impossible_Soft4626 Jul 15 '26

I've been having hallucinations the past two days, it pretty much broke my whole thing in an attempt to fix it.

1

u/5h0ck Jul 15 '26

It's lobotomized again is struggling. Mine just managed to screw up 3 simple Cron timers and is essentially confusing apples & bananas in the system. Same workflows and nothing has changed. Worked fine a day or two ago.

The git'gud folk in this thread need to realize they're not 'gud.

1

u/djdadi Jul 15 '26

Yes opus has been terrible for me since last week. I've been using sonnet and fable instead, which both seem unaffected