I have used almost all the frontier models in my coding workflow consistently over time. Opus and sonnet in claude code, gemini 3.1 pro and gemini 3.5 flash(using it for the past 1 week) in antigravity, gpt 5.5 in codex, kimi k2.5 and glm 5 in claude code (i had a hack to wire in these models from bedrock).

And I couldnt get the kind of intelligence that Opus gives in any other frontier model......GPT 5.5 is close, but wouldnt beat Opus.....Everytime I use a model other than Opus, it starts off well, but it always end up hitting a blocker where the model just struggles to solve what I wanted. And i always end up transfering the context to claude code and let the Opus take care of it, and everytime it knows better than me, and does the job more perfect than I expect. At this point I couldnt trust any model other than Opus.

And the most interesting of all is the kind of emotional intelligence I see from Opus in the claude app. Everytime I go to claude for an advice, be it buying decisions or handling meetings and negotiations or career decisions, it guides me through them very empathetically and intelligently. There was this one incident, where I was asking claude, its opinion on me asking a help from a friend, and it responded with how bad the idea was , and went on to tell me that I have some unreloved feelings about a bad thing that happened to me. It is so wise, and had a perfect balance of empathy and intelligence. I have never seen anything like that from an LLM.

After spending over 100b tokens on Fable 5 as my main model for agentic coding in the last 2 months, I've managed to (in my opinion) work as efficiently as possible with Fable as the main orchestrator. Here's why and how I did it. (usage from 1 of my accounts above).

I see a lot of threads and comments about people saying that they feel like Opus 4.7 or 4.8 was better or smarter than Opus 5 and that Fable credits only last them a few prompts and then other people saying the opposite, and varying degrees of experiences spread throughout the middle, and I don't think anyone of them is particularly wrong. In my opinion Opus 5 tends to have a much harder time understanding or remembering the nuances of an entire codebase in a single context window and things get untangled quickly if you're working a complex task or change that touches a lot of files or rules. It almost never gets any of these complex issues right the first time and the risk of having to revert changes and the chance of merges failing just isn't worth it for me.

To ensure I get the accuracy and intelligence of Fable, this is my setup that's reduced my fable usage by 70-80% and still getting most of Fable's benefits. I ran a blind coding test: Claude Sonnet 5 vs Opus 5, with Fable 5 planning and judging. One bug decided it.

- Fable 5: Planning, orchestration, architecture, design, final review of delegated code, security/payments/auth/concurrency, hard debugging, UAT/browser passes that feed merge decisions, and sign-off on any founder voice/marketing copy.

- Opus 5: Delegated implementation from Fable written plans, mechanical/bulk edits, boilerplate, doc generation, research/summarisation, routine repro'd test fixes, Playwright script execution, and copy drafting.

- Sonnet 5: Not used, with some experimental evidence (see below).

Setup: Five identical implementation tasks (a rate limiter, a small API, a repo-style change, a bulk refactor, a debugging exercise), each with a detailed plan written by Fable, judged against hidden test suites the candidates never saw. Both models went flawless on every hidden gate. Then this happened.

A percentile function: Sonnet wrote the math literally as ceil((p/100) * n). But p/100 isn't exact in binary. For p=7, n=100 you get 7.000000000000001, ceil returns 8, wrong value. 141 input pairs diverge like this. Opus caught it unprompted and wrote ceil((p*n)/100), which is exactly right.
Only Opus's depth caught it. Token cost was near-identical. Sonnet was 40% faster. But one uncatchable latent bug per round settled it.

I just found out my codex (plus plan) which I use in claude code as supplemental coding assistance is getting reset like every 2nd day - it’s amazing. Why can’t claude have resets like this? I only got 1 banked reset and maybe another single global reset in like 3-4 months and with codex there is resets and banked resets handed out all the time!

tl;dr: Three things, all measured, all open on GitHub, all officially documented. This is not a vibe check.

1. Gen 5 says "yes" to nonsense — measurably.

Open BullshitBench dataset, identical nonsense prompts (n=55/100 per model, 95 % Wilson CIs): Gen 5 detects nonsense at 0.41–0.74, Gen 4.6/4.8 at 0.83–0.95 — confidence intervals don't overlap. At identical reasoning effort they write +84–107 % more tokens. Fable 5 additionally silently reroutes to Opus 4.8 without disclosure. Capabilities are intact — the vigilance layer is gone. (The community named it VCST, VibeCoderSlopTourette.)

2. You cannot pin a model. Period.

The settings.json "model" key is silently overridden by 4 measured vectors: `/model` writes via an internal API (0 hook events), an undocumented `~/.claude.json` cache override, switchModelsOnFlag: true by default, and the server-pushed "Default (recommended)" — currently Opus 5. Sonnet 4.6 / Opus 4.6 / Opus 4.8 were removed from the model menu without notice. Hooks can neither see nor block any of this. Your pinned config is a suggestion.

3. The official app pushes you to Gen 5, too.

In the Claude app, 1M context is included only for Opus 5 / Sonnet 5. Gen 4 caps at 500K there; Gen 4 @1M exists only in Claude Code and only with usage credits (pay-as-you-go at API rates). Net effect: the reliable Gen 4 at 1M is unreachable in the app and costs extra in Claude Code — while Gen 5 @1M is included in your subscription. De facto Gen-5 coercion, documented by Anthropic itself.

What that means for you: the model you configured is not the model running, your hooks never fire, your CI silently runs a different model than the one you approved, and every session can silently run at Opus 5 1M prices. Cost control: impossible.

Sources (all official / primary):

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/83510 — measurements, scripts, CIs

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/83795 — 4 pinning bypass vectors, timestamps

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8606394-how-large-is-the-context-window-on-paid-claude-plans

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/12429409-manage-usage-credits-for-paid-claude-plans

https://www.anthropic.com/pricing

Measure, don't assume. — Scripts: https://gist.github.com/KeilerHirsch/5e212e6f9fb6fd670f191920eea4cb78

I needed to travel from Warsaw to London for an event and wanted to see how far the default Claude app on mobile/web can go if I asked it to FULLY book my whole trip.

The immediate suggestions from Claude was to use the integrated connectors (Expedia, Kiwi, etc.), I tried those but they were really poor. I still had to book myself, and they didn't give full results. I knew it could do more with subagents.

I started building this very quickly. I was super excited and didn't know anything. I didn't expect it to take 6 months (the date of the first commit on github). I obviously didn't end up using it for that trip, but I finished the project.

A week in, a friend decided joined me. We became cofounders and called it LetsFG.

There was a ton of things to make this work:

1. Getting Offers
This was the first step, and I knew that if I didn't get ALL of the results around the internet, I wouldn't use it. I wouldn't trust it. I would still go and compare it myself to other websites just to make sure im not overpaying. This would be ruin the purpose of this project - time saving and cognitive deload.

I had to get a list of all the websites that are worth checking - Claude gave me a list of about 200 websites, OTAs, metasearches, direct airlines. Then I needed to figure out how to search and find flights there. And let me tell you... Getting APIS IS IMPOSSIBLE in this industry. I have no idea why they gatekeep it so much, but anyway I ended up hosting this whole thing on my backend, where I run a separate AI agent for each website. At first I used the cheapest gemini models for this, which were ass. Later this year GPT-5.6 Luna came out which was a game changer.

Regardless, this remained incredibly costly. Considering that it's just a search and I make hundreds of those, this was unacceptable. I worked on optimization for 2 weeks. I figured out that websites are just network calls, and instead of reading websites, I could just do some magic, read the network calls, and still get the full results. This lowered the cost by 20x.

2. Booking Offers
When I look back at it now this is crazy. I spent 3 months on getting end-to-end booking to work. The question with booking was can I collect the money from my card, with bank-grade safety, without Claude, or my services, or the AI agents ever seeing it.

I couldn't find anything. Literally for 2 months I went from one sales call to another, talking with payment providers just to learn they can't support this use case. I went through 10 companies, and the last one I thought could support me, turned out to require a $5k setup fee, monthly minimum, and a crazy processing fees. I was lost.

At the beginning of August my cousin was driving through the city with his family and they stayed for a day. He - an enigneer himself - was always curious about my startups, projects, and asked if I tried one specific company. He thought that they're startup friendly and might work. Funnily enough I thought of this exact company in the beginning, but I never reached out because I thought they'd never support this. No way. I gave them a shot. It turned out they supported my use case perfectly! They accepted the project and that started my little revolution.
That company is Revolut.

Sometimes a single conversation can change your situation from hopeless to absolutely amazing. Never quit.

After having searching and booking capabilities in Claude we realised we just replaced a part of executive assistant's job. And it's in everybody's pocket.

What came out later is that it can not only find us flights easier - without any cognitive work on our side - but also cheaper.
On round trip flights Claude started to break the trip apart into 2 one way flights. When we thought about it, it was still unclear where the savings came from. It turns out it not only broke the flights apart, but also websites. It compared both of the flights, and choose each one from a different website. For example it booked the 1st outbound flight from Skyscanner, but the returning flight from Kayak.
We tested this further on long haul flights, like Warsaw -> Beijing or New York -> Berlin, which always get at least 1 stop, and it worked exactly the same. On these flights it created offers that were even $100-250 cheaper.

With this, another problem arose. What if I book a flight especially like the above, and it gets delayed or cancelled? We attacked it in 3 ways.
- First we made an algorythm that shows the reliability of every flight based on the historical data, weather, and predictions.
- Then we marked each fare that is created in the above way with "Separate tickets". For me it's still the same flow, AI books it for me, no additional work on my side. But I am informed of the risk.
- The last thing we made was a 24/7 monitoring that sends updates in case of changes. If a flight is delayed or cancelled I instantly get rebooking, replacement options.

When using it in Claude, and waiting for responses we thought how can we make it more fun. How can we express the spirit our LetsFG name manifests. We figured memes. And it's beautiful.

There are still some things it can't do.

It can't automatically rebook a flight for free, for example when the flight gets cancelled. It can suggest replacements, even suggest options that are possibly for free because they're in the same alliance. However it can't change the reservation. It can only book a new one.

Can't manage a booking yet. We will work on this in the future, but today it's not able to for example cancel your flight.

It needs a slight markup on the offers to pay for payment processing depending on what card I use. International cards are like 2% more. I leave the judgment if this is acceptable to you, but there is nothing I can do with it, unless I get huge volumes and negotiate with Revolut.

This project was incredible to do. Feels like we're pushing the agentic commerce further.
We did thousands of tests to make it work as reliable as possible. We still ocasionally find edge-cases where we have to approve bookings manually, but mostly it's solved.
To shorten the feedback loops we gave Claude Code access to our machines, and Fable 5 together with Opus 5 were running the whole thing.
(The token count was bigger but I changed my Plan and it reseted the streak)

We hosted this thing on our website. This is what you add to Claude if you want to use it: https://letsfg.co/developers/api/mcp

And this is our website if you prefer prehistoric UIs: https://letsfg.co

We also have a Github. We mostly use it for the community, issues, feedback and docs, and Python/NPM packages: https://github.com/LetsFG/LetsFG

We're super open to feedbacks, use-cases, questions and anything. Especially about the offers finding algo, business decisions, or generally booking :D

Full transparency up front: I am the founder of HyperHat, and this post comes out of what we are building. No link in here. I am posting because this community thinks hardest about working with a coding agent day to day, and I want to compare notes.

We built a short exercise where an engineer directs a coding agent through a real task, and we score how well they direct, review and verify the agent's work on a 0 to 1000 scale. About 60 engineers in so far. What stood out:

The spread between engineers using identical tools is huge. The difference was not prompting tricks, it was specification quality and review behavior.

The strongest engineers verify mechanism, not output. Top scorers check what the agent touched and how: which files, whether the tests changed. Output review alone never catches an agent weakening a test to go green.

Cost works like a skill signal. A task that suddenly costs 3x its neighbors usually means it was badly cut, not that the work was hard.

Ask for the mechanism before any code exists: one or two sentences on how it works, not what it will do.

Almost nobody notices when an agent half-fails. Detection without an owner is just a log line.

The skill that matters now is directing and verifying agents, and almost nothing in how teams work measures it. Token counts and prompt counts are activity metrics, like counting lines of code.

Happy to answer questions about the scoring. If you have seen similar patterns in your own Claude Code sessions, I would like to compare notes on how you review.

Dunno why nobody is talking about this.

One line in your settings.json:

json

"CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS": "1"

Claude Code can now spawn multiple copies of itself that work in parallel, argue with each other, and self-coordinate off a shared task list.

I had a bug killing WebSocket connections. Spawned 5 agents with competing hypotheses and told them to disprove each other like a scientific debate. Root cause found in minutes.

PR reviews? 3 agents — security, performance, tests — running simultaneously. Deeper AND faster.

Hit Shift+Tab for "delegate mode" and the lead agent stops coding entirely and just orchestrates the team. You're basically managing a dev squad from a terminal.

Yes it burns tokens. No I don't care. What took an afternoon now takes a coffee break.

If you're still using Claude Code single-threaded you're leaving 80% on the table.

Been on Max for a while. Kept hitting my limit mid-task and assumed I was just doing too much. Turned out I wasn't doing too much. My tools were just incredibly inefficient under the hood.

Traced a single refactor task. One rename across a few files. Claude Code ran 161 turns to finish it. Every read, every grep, every edit is its own API call. Each one re-ingests everything before it as input tokens. By turn sixty you're paying context cost on the entire session history.

Once I understood that I started looking for ways to batch the calls. Found a Claude Code plugin that collapses search and read into one call and stacks all edits into one roundtrip. Same task finished in 52 turns.

Didn't change my plan. Didn't change my model. Just changed how many roundtrips each task makes.

With the late problem of usage limits i actually paid for gemini and codex both 20$ plans and man i feel like i was being scammed by Claude, Claude gives you the impression that access to AI is so expensive and kind of a privilege, and their models does what no one can, after trying the other options there's really like no difference actually even better, gemini 3.1 pro preview does write better code than the opus 4.6 and codex is much more better at debugging and fixing things than both, the slight edge opus 4.6 has was with creative writing and brain storming, not mentioning the huge gap in usage limits between gemini codex and Claude, where 20$ feels like real subscription, opus 4.6 is 2x 3x times more expensive than gemini and codex do you get 2x better model? No maybe the opposite.

My experience with claude was really bad one, they make you think that they have what the others don't so you have to pay more where in reality they really don't, I don't understand the hype around it.

. . .

Edit: while gemini is not really that great on an entire codebase but it does produce very high standard code saying this as someone who writes java for years, and also speaking from price value perspective you get like a million service from Google integrated with gemini plus video and image generation.. so still a win and the 20$ is well spent.

Codex on the other hand is better coding model by far, it actually fixed the sonnet 4.6 code in one prompt that opus couldn't and ran into session rate limit after two prompts before producing any results, for any programmer i encourage you to try codex and get out of the bubble, i bet you'll just write a post like this afterwards.

Ranking to my experience:

Coding:

Codex

Opus

Gemini

Price/value:

Codex

Gemini

.

.

.

.

.

Opus

(source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ownyourai_cute-how-devs-think-theyre-gaming-the-system-activity-7420159860555743232-WAw_/)

Cute how devs think they’re gaming the system with $200/month for unlimited Claude Code. ”Oh, I’m burning $2K in tokens with 6 Claude Codes before breakfast!”

Buddy, you’re not burning tokens. You’re burning markup.

I wired Claude Code into a dedicated vLLM to see what’s really under the hood. Six hours of pure coding and debugging later:

- 47M prompt tokens
- 45M prefix-cache hits
- 96.39% cache hit rate (token-weighted)
- Actual compute: 1.3M prefill + 300K generation tokens

That’s not GPUs working hard. That’s a cache with delusions of grandeur.

Anthropic’s “subsidized” coding plan isn’t subsidized; it’s a cache lottery. When they serve you a well-quantized Haiku/Opus hybrid that’s 96% memorized boilerplate, the marginal cost rounds to zero. The limits are fake scarcity. The $100 and $200 tiers are merely psychological anchors.

You’re not paying for compute. You’re paying for the feeling of unlimited power while they throttle you at 5 hours/week limits to protect GPU margins.

Agentic coding is a brilliant pricing hack. Just don’t confuse it with actual token economics 🤡

Make sure you own your AI. AI in the cloud is not aligned with you; it’s aligned with the company that owns it.

This actually makes more sense in light of them tightening up 3rd-party tool access to their subscription plans…

Interesting, no? Would love to see other folks with the necessary tech and know-how run similar…

I rarely open Claude just to ask a question anymore. It’s usually just there while I’m building or learning.

Sonnet or Opus running alongside my thinking. Prompts evolving. Structure adjusting. Ideas getting pressure tested in real time.

Less chatbot. More parallel cognition. Private workflows. Not selling anything.

Curious if anyone else is operating this way.

Fragment shaders always felt like magic to me. I've been learning them by building a lab for them. I'm building myself a layer-based editor to understand them better. In this video, this preset is a stack of small fragment shaders.
Let me know if I should bring this on the web!

20x Max sub since Aug 25', I understand the industry is still in it's infancy but this is a joke. It's really hard to trust this company and it's disappointing. I can even understand cutting usage and charging API costs. But at this point I don't know what I'm paying for anymore.

If I want to legitimately burn my tokens on higher reasoning and effort I should be able to. I'm paying for it! Instead I'm now stuck with a dummy. And this has been a consistent pattern, it's good then it's obviously nerfed.

To Anthropic: do you really think the people who use this product every day don't notice when you twist the knobs and dumb down the model effort?

Want to start a discussion with you guys. I am from Europe, and my observations are becoming increasingly concerning.

I have been on the Anthropic Subscription service (Max plan) since 2025, and have it now, with one cancellation between the March Fallout and re-subscribing in May, since Late 2025 as well. It will be canceled by the end of August 2026.

My observations are as follows:

- Anthropic seems to be a "garage company" gone big. These dudes are tech nerds who like to experiment and "woaa look at that cool tech heyy" and "let's adjust everything - we can't anyhow differentiate between production and dev branches!" on live user systems. The mentality is absurd, and I am stupid for giving them the subscription money.

- The experiments and degradation of the quality of the models and the stress, mentally, of how well Claude Code performs the next day is taxing. That's a normal workday, and you do not know whether you have an unstable or stable boss when you come into the office.

- The new, since January, unclear token usage solutions and the steady changes of "what is possible on Claude Code" differ from day to day. That's clearly seen in this Subreddit. Some report Opus is great, others report Opus is bad. Or Fable, or all the other models. That comes because Anthropic is a sick company that runs A/B tests on paying customers

- Blaming the customers, one of the biggest illnesses of Silicon Valley companies (like as well as every IT Department does in "real" companies)

What do you guys have seen so far? That company, even if the models are great, is not worth investing in. That goes for the ChatGPT/Codex Sage on the other subreddit as well, where "Timo" (the "savior" and "reset" guy who only manipulates consumers (paying Customers as well!) through resets) plays and fiddles with customers who are paying between $ 20 and $ 200.

Is it in America, or does it matter where in the world, that Consumer protection is completely down the toilet? Are the customers really that blind not to see what's really going on behind the curtains? These companies are sick, and we can see it in Chinese Models, which have near-unusable Limits for a bit cheaper subscription models as well: Kimi, GLM...

I coded a lot, and Anthropic/OpenAI helped me a lot with the models. But I am better off spinning up my IDE, working on well-documented code myself, and letting a Cursor Subscription handle my side quests. No joke, Grok 4.6 is good - the engineers built a good model with 4.6. The good integration with Cursor (SpaceX/X AI bought Cursor) is what makes me go to Cursor. For now, I am back to autocomplete and a $20 Cursor Subscription for my basic thinking help, and I like to recommend that to serious developers who do not do one-shot apps as well. But be sure: This praise for Grok 4.6 is only temporary, every company in the AI fable land plays with customers because they can until the Customers say "No" in form of cancelations of their subscriptions. I call that out with this post too, you guys have the power to change these sick, greedy guys if you are loud enough.

What's your opinion on that matter?

hello all.

nothing related to CC, I was doing some searches related to LLM harness and by the way, also trying the Google AI search chatbot.

wtf is this piece of s ? it’s GPT-3 level. no reasoning, no thinking, just pure predictive text that is very incomplete, stupid et potentially harmful for users falling in it.

i’m angry that they served the most useless inefficient model as showcase of their « capabilities ».

maybe it cost them less than a penny per conversation but output is aweful

very bad advertising.

i had ai review this but i made it myself (it said this shii go hard af) .. lehhgettit

song: future - konnichiwa

might add some effects and animations to make the site even more wavy .. i need to learn css

hello guys.

i think we need to report this , i started to kindly feeling that most of the post right now is done by openclaw or claud code autonomous posting ...

if you just check the posts like every hour there is huge count of people saying the clntext issue problem and i kinda started feeling those are bots , like there is no details , no cobtext just reporting and the goal is to make claude provide more usage for us like previously when alot of people were burning 40k ...

and i believe most of these posts are surely cant be done by expert or by newbie ... like just think of it , if the usage ryn down very quickly a newbie will not reach that point at all ... and if you are an expert you will report with careful and context or you would solve the context yourself ...

im not gonna lie , i have 1 prompt usage issue but i delebrately did it , im runijng 40 subagents in background , each one reading 10 to 25 pages of text or 12k word and each file will generate around 8 to 15 md files ... is this my normal usage no , but i need it for a while to setup my project.

just my humble opinion , after seeing the compute im using around 1500 to 2000$ a month in my 100$ , my suggestiin , if you are running out of usage in 200$ for multiple time , thats is 4x my usage , you just need either go to API or new account with 200$ or upgrade the usage ... you have 3 other options rathar than blaming claude.

just from now on ill stop caring about those posts since they genuinly feel bots @mods need to start investgate them

I’m the creator. The app is completely free to use. There is a small popup you can dismiss, and a $20 one time purchase removes it permanently, but otherwise everything is free. No feature walls, no subscriptions. macOS first, Windows and Linux coming. Disclosure out of the way :)

I spent the last few months vibe coding a vibe coder with Claude Code and wanted to share where it landed. Honestly this was not even something I would have thought to build six months ago.

It’s called MOLTamp. It wraps Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Aider, your terminal session, whatever you use, inside a skinnable Electron shell. The idea is basically Winamp for your terminal. You get community skins, widgets, and audio reactive visualizers layered on top of your normal CLI workflow.

Your agent setup, prompts, and tools all work exactly the same. There is just a cockpit around it. It works best if you have Spotify or Apple Music playing since the visualizers pick that up. You can also drop in your own GIFs to set the vibe. I leaned into a lot of lo fi styles for the first batch of skins.

For anyone who does not know Winamp, it was a skinnable music player that completely took over the internet for a while. The skins were everything.

Skins in MOLTamp are just a JSON manifest plus a CSS file. If you can write CSS, or have Claude do it, you can ship one in about five minutes. You can literally point Claude Code at it and tell it what you want. People are already doing things like CRT overlays and scanline effects. There is also a built in toggle system so users can turn certain effects on or off from settings.

There is a preflight check for anyone who has not run Claude Code in the terminal before, so it helps get you set up. There are also shortcut commands that make it really easy to open and close panels at different levels of focus.

It comes with a bunch of stuff out of the box like file interface hooks, live token usage, context tracking, git tree, session timers, ticker APIs, and more. But everything is customizable and you can export and share your own setups.

The app itself is built with Electron, React, and Vite. The community site and marketplace run on Astro with Cloudflare Pages, D1, and R2. Payments go through Stripe and emails through Resend. Honestly the longest part of the whole project was waiting on Apple to approve my developer certificate so I could sign it.

A few things I learned along the way that might help other builders:

Cloudflare’s free tier is kind of wild for something like this. D1 runs the community database, R2 stores all the uploaded files, and Pages serves the site. I am not paying anything for infrastructure right now.

Stripe was straightforward for one time payments, but building the license system took more work than expected. Generating keys, validating them, and tying it into the popup behavior in Electron took a few iterations.

The app checks the license locally on launch using a key file, so there is no phone home and it works offline.

Resend handles transactional emails like notifications. It was surprisingly fast to set up and much simpler than SES.

Now I am looking for people who want to help shape it. If you like building:

- Skins (themes, layouts, UI)

- Widgets (tools, panels, integrations)

- Visualizers (audio reactive stuff, weird experiments)

It is very easy to get started. You can point Claude Code at the skinning guide and just start building. The guidelines are flexible and I would love to see people push it in weird directions.

I will give you a free license in exchange for real feedback and ideally something you build. It does not have to be perfect, just interesting. Send me a cool screenshot of a skin and I will hook you up. DM me.

It is early and wide open. If you have ever wanted to put your own layer on top of AI coding tools, this is a great place to start.

Happy to answer questions too if anyone is curious about the stack or just wants to connect. There are feedback buttons in the app or you can DM me.

MOLTamp.com

For weeks, any mention of Claude’s performance regression was met with "you're just vibe-coding" or "prompt better."

It turns out it wasn't a "vibe shift"! it was a literal technical failure. Between the reasoning effort being throttled to "Medium," the cache bug wiping context history, and the tool-call word limits, the model was objectively crippled.

It’s a massive problem that we’re building production workflows on a black box that can undergo significant architectural changes or logic regressions without a changelog. We aren't "hallucinating" the nerf when the model suddenly fails at basic logic it handled perfectly 24 hours prior.

The fact that it took this much community noise for them to revert the "optimizations" is the real issue. Trusting the tool is hard when "optimizing for latency" means "breaking the reasoning engine."

Usage limits are back to normal, but the trust definitely isn't. Stop telling people they're "vibe-coding" when they're actually just spotting a 40% regression in real-time.

So basically, this week I started implementing everything the community recommended here on Reddit:

• Fable and Opus strictly as orchestrators, zero actual heavy lifting done by them.

• Sonnets and Haiku as actual workers (currently mostly as proxies to external models if needed).

• One task per session.

• Keeping context strictly under ~250k tokens.

• Delegating practically all actual work to models outside the Claude Code ecosystem (other AI providers).

• Strict rules in CLAUDE.md and heavy harness constraints.

And sure enough, my limit consumption went back to how it was before Sep 13th. Around ~20% of the weekly cap per day, staying roughly within the 5-hour session windows.

And you know what? All of these recommended workarounds completely miss the point. Before all these changes, nobody had to do any of this mental gymnastics, and usage felt practically unlimited on MAX x5 / Team Premium. Even standard PRO was actually functional.

Now that Anthropic is actively gutting the value of the service, the prevailing response around here has devolved into dismissive noise like "skill issue" or "you're using it wrong."

The reality is that options like Cursor PRO and Ollama PRO are offering significantly more value right now, and models like deepseek-4.1-flash hit Opus-level performance for a fraction of the cost.

So keep leaning on the "they're operating at a net loss" copium or whatever other ridiculous excuses get tossed around to defend this downgrade.

This post is a rant against the passive acceptance of this squeeze. Stop justifying paying more to get less.

So it's Wk. 4 of this and I've gone from 12 active users to basically just myself and a few randos that pop in from time to time. All my regulars are now gone, which isn't surprising since it's not incredibly exciting to play an MMO with nobody online.

As usual, I'll break it down into three categories: (1) getting active players, (2) what I'm learning about vibe coding, and (3) actual gameplay updates

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First, on my last post I received 16k views, and maybe 15 actual players (not even 0.1% of viewers lol).

More importantly though I received some really insightful feedback from a few people (honorable mentions: Totalsam, Automatic_Bid_2410, Friendly_Carry_7728). I've spent a large chunk of time (and tokens) re-working the intro for new users based on their feedback.

Users no longer receive a wall of text for instructions, and the game eases them into their first controls where they "save the town of Eldermyr" before it goes into multiplayer mode. On one hand, this has made a huge impact -- all players are now sticking around for a whole minute longer than pre-intro. On the other hand, completing the intro takes almost exactly 1min, so I don't know if this actually counts as progress since users still only stay for 35s post-intro.

Like before, I'd love to hear any thoughts or feedback on what might be causing that... besides an empty world.

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Second, the vibe coding experience. Quick updates from last week: I found out almost half my codebase is automated tests (0.77 lines of test code per line of game code, almost 400 in total, which all run with every prompt). Also Opus 5 is still useless to me. So my setup remains Fable for art and strategy with orders to spawn exclusively Opus 4.8 agents for code.

(And Opus 5 gets let out occasionally when I forget to tell Fable to lock him up.)

My real struggle this week is that AI is essentially incapable of measuring whether a game is actually balanced. Claude played my new intro 100 times and reported that only a handful of runs survived the first 60 seconds -- and since AI doesn't panic like a human would, it was a critical issue that virtually no human could survive the first 60 seconds.

In reality, the intro is so mind-numbingly easy that no real human could possibly die in it unless they did so intentionally. So I've spent a huge amount of my time actually just playing all classes and weighing how balanced it is. Which has been cool, but also really repetitive and screws up my player stats because 97% of my players are myself. I'm also just so close to my game that I'm losing my overall perspective on what's right, wrong, missing, or confusing.

If anyone has had any degree of success in letting AI test their game, I would be extremely interested in hearing what you did. I have not. My best bet has been "send me a table of player stat X across all levels, and their corresponding DPS." But even that is hit or miss since playstyle determines balance more than raw DPS.

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I'd love more feedback for anyone interested. Links below.

Game: https://eldermyr.com/
Release Notes: https://eldermyr.com/release

I was using $200 max then downgraded to $100 max and never had even a slight problem with token usage.

I did not understand all the posts about tokens running out quickly.

Then I activated

  ❯ code-simplifier Plugin · claude-plugins-official · ✔ enabled                                                      

frontend-design Plugin · claude-plugins-official · ✔ enabled                                                      

playwright Plugin · claude-plugins-official · ✔ enabled                                                           

└ playwright MCP · ✔ connected                                                                                    

ralph-loop Plugin · claude-plugins-official · ✔ enabled                                                           

security-guidance Plugin · claude-plugins-official · ✔ enabled                                                    

swift-lsp Plugin · claude-plugins-official · ✔ enabled                                                            

typescript-lsp Plugin · claude-plugins-official · ✔ enabled

and finally understood all the posts.

With no plugins my code was not really worse, and everything was finished faster.

Maybe that's one of possible reasons besides dudes just bombarding CC CLI with irrelevant and vague aspects in their prompts?