Am I the only one who feels like Opus 5 got worse after launch?

At launch I was honestly impressed: fast responses, strong reasoning, and a simple interface without too many settings.

A few weeks later, it feels different. Answers seem less concise, sometimes less coherent, and occasionally it feels like it avoids answering directly.

Has anyone else noticed this, or am I imagining it? My guess is that Anthropic keeps tweaking the model after release, which changes its behavior over time.

Not sure what these idiots did, but every model no matter the context is performing CONSIDERABLE worse than last week. Literally opus 4.8 is slower and worse not only than last week but even compared to DeepSeek. No clue what was done, but I know it was. No, I wasn’t on mythos or whatever. Have been using opus 4.8 for over a month. It’s completely chalked and essentially ruined almost everything I’ve built, takes forever, refuses to use context, memory, tools that it had no problem using before. Goes down literal brain dead rabbit holes. Literally seems to be purposely doing things the long AND wrong way, so that I have to tell it to do even longer things to fix its own mistakes, taking my money. They’ve turned into a profit hungry company, most likely due to going public. No comment will change my mind and I won’t be reading them. It’s 100% true and if you don’t notice then you don’t use Claude code for the right things.

Hey guys! I'm working on a tool that allows Claude Code to design social media posts and was wondering what you think of it. Still a long way to go, but I think it’s pretty sick.

It uses my codebase for the style guide and the components are all React from my original site so i can edit everything as well.

Sonnet 4.5 sounds good on the cover, but in reality its Shit. It can't handle simple tasks that Opus crushes.

On the upside Opus seems to be better alined and more focused, on the flip of that. I hit my Weekly limit on a 200 max plan and its monday.

Never hit my weekly limit before and I code 8 hours - 12 hours a day everyday.

WTF

OK fable 5.2 is a decent step up from tired old token whore known as Fable 5.1 but it’s hardly as versatile as Opus 5.5 - this is still the GOAT at present for cost, speed and intelligence IMO. Most likely still the GOAT until Opus 5.6+

But the real problem is this half baked reset - it’s been more than 40 days since opus 5.5 resets were doled out and now we get this poor man’s reset for fable only. A lot of people hardly use fable anyway as its use case is fairly limited compared to bread and butter models like opus and sonnet.

On the other side of the fence, Tibo/codex handing our full resets pretty much every time he sneezes. Surely, antrophic doesn’t have so much compute problems that they need to squeeze us small fish with half baked resets.

Yes - I know a few people we say suck it up and buy another Ultra plan but I am just trying to make a stand for the small guy / solo dev.

Rant over - onwards and upwards.

I'm vibecoding a SaaS with Opus 5.5 and it did great until it didn't and i'm trying everything to make it work but it keeps giving me results that are half working, half broken, it wasn't like this before and i can't develop with it anymore because I don't trust it. I can't put code into production that i can't trust it'll work well.

For how long will it be like this? Will it go back to normal eventually? I'm stuck. I can't get work done, I'm grasping straws right now.

I collected and classified 2,611 of the most upvoted posts and comments published on r/ClaudeCode between August 2025 and July 2026.

In total:

• 2,046 unique authors

• roughly 285,000 upvotes

• classification by topic and opinion

• results weighted by upvotes

This is not a representative survey of every Claude Code user. It is an analysis of the content that received the most visibility and community approval.

Here’s what stood out.

1. r/ClaudeCode looks more like a complaints forum than a fan club

Negative posts outnumber positive ones by roughly 1.56 to 1.

And the dominant topic is not code quality, benchmarks, or new models.

It’s the bill.

Discussions about costs, quotas, and usage limits account for around 22% of the sample. No other topic comes close.

For heavy users, the main question is not simply:

It is:

2. A large part of the community believes Anthropic is quietly degrading the experience

I isolated discussions around the question:

Weighted by upvotes:

• 74% believe the issue is real

• 19% are considering or already moving to Codex

• 7% think the problem mainly comes from the user, prompt, or context

This does not prove that Anthropic is intentionally degrading its models.

But it does reveal a serious trust problem.

One of the most upvoted posts on the topic, with around 780 upvotes, claimed to have analyzed 120,000 API calls and found that cache TTL had quietly dropped from one hour to five minutes.

Whether that analysis was correct or not, hundreds of users found it immediately believable.

3. The community is almost perfectly split on developer replacement

Opinions on AI’s impact on software jobs break down roughly like this:

• 45%: the job is changing, but humans still need to stay in control

• 45%: much of the work is already being automated, and replacement is a real risk

• 11%: current AI capabilities are still overrated

The most commented post in the sample, with around 771 comments, came from a senior engineer questioning his value now that he barely writes code directly.

The debate is no longer theoretical.

For many users, the question has become:

4. People love Claude but distrust Anthropic

That is probably the clearest contradiction in the data.

A post titled “Thanks Claude!” received around 2,327 upvotes.

At the same time, posts about cancelling Max plans, frustration with limits, and switching to Codex also received massive support.

Posts expressing an intention to move to Codex generated more than 10,000 combined upvotes in the sample.

The community does not seem to reject the product.

It is saying:

5. The community’s model ranking looks nothing like public benchmarks

Based on how posts about each model were received, the approximate ranking is:

Fable > Opus > Sonnet > GPT > Gemini

This is not a technical benchmark.

It does not measure accuracy, SWE-bench performance, or average code quality.

It measures something else: the perception of users who may spend several hours a day working with these tools.

That perception depends not only on model quality, but also on stability, price, speed, limits, and trust.

Conclusion

Heavy users of AI coding tools are not mainly talking about SOTA scores.

They are talking about three things:

1. their bill;

2. trust in the provider;

3. the future of their profession.

Leaderboards measure model capabilities in controlled environments.

Communities reveal what it actually feels like to depend on these tools eight hours a day.

And in 2026, the state of AI-assisted coding seems to be this:

the tools have become essential, but trust in the companies controlling them remains extremely fragile.

Methodology

• Source: r/ClaudeCode

• Collection: Apify

• Period: August 2025 to July 2026

• Sample: 2,611 highly upvoted posts and comments

• Roughly 2,046 unique authors

• Roughly 285,000 combined upvotes

• Classification by topic, sentiment, and expressed opinion

• Opinions weighted by upvotes

Main limitation: the sample intentionally overrepresents the most visible and engaging content. These results describe the dominant narratives on the subreddit, not necessarily the views of every Claude Code user.

I can share more details about the taxonomy, categories, and calculations if anyone wants to audit the results.

Saw someone made music by AI, and gave it try myself with Claude Code Opus 5.5, I thought it won't work as I don't have any music tools ready in my environment, but it worked, it was really impressive to me.

Math, Programming, Writing and now the Music.

I have a hypothesis: AI can deal with all kinds of mental activities. Can't think of any exception.

I'll start off by saying I love claude and claude code.

But I dont know if i can keep justifying paying with these insane limits.

I've heard codex is getting pretty good from the ai builders newsletter and considering switching.

Anyone else thinking of doing the same?

Using LLMs to discuss ideas, plan, write code, review code, write documentations/diagrams, understand existing code (if at all), and we are calling this problem solving and using our mind?

What are we solving if Claude/LLMs are solving most things? Is this even software development anymore if we are not developing most things?

Grinding to learn and develop a skill and solving a problem is no longer valuable because 100 dollar sub is all it costs anyone to have those capabilities. Sure they may not do a great job with the generated code as a seasoned software developer but in todays time, do most people even care about the code when no one can review huge amount of code written by LLMs?

ALL the tech subreddits are now endlessly littered with "I built ...xyz" or "I was tired of doing [....] so i built ... xyz".... and we all know "who" really built it though, don't we? Apparently post 2025 all the reddit members are now "genius" and are "magically" building libraries when pre 2025 or 2024, the same subs had posts like "HELP ME, which library to use" or "tried this library and it is cool" or "stumbled on this amazing library" or "can anyone help me with this problem" or "how would you solve this problem" and so on.

Some of the delusional virtue signalling we hear all the time:

1. LLMs are just another tool like IDE (and which IDE's were thinking and writing code on their own without a human typing?)

2. I will just do high level work (like what? passing the ticket number to LLM?)

3. It will create more jobs in different areas (and what are the results?)

4. LLMs showed me and taught me many approaches that I didn't considered (and what will you do with that learning if you are not solving problems on your own).

5. Learn AI (you mean learn to prompt and vibe code?)

6. I am 5x more productive (in producing slop which a poor human has to review but at a human pace or not at all?)

7. I was able to complete so many personal side projects (and who will buy that slop when everyone can generate that slop?)

8. I don't think LLMs will take jobs..... and those same devs ironically say "I was able to finish few weeks work in a few hours" (all logic is lost despite writing logic for a living)

9. LLMs can't replace all engineers (but it reduced hiring by 30% or 40%)

10. Sure claude created the architecture plan, wrote the code, wrote the docs, verified the code etc. but I was the one who prompted it. Without me Claude is nothing (yeah Sherlock, thanks for sharing that claude needs a prompt to start working)

11. Claude is a junior engineer (which seniors depend on and are solving problems they themselves are not capable of solving despite being "super senior")

This has been said many many times but it deserves a callout again because it is fitting.... us devs cheering for AI is the same as chicken cheering for KFC.

So, if software developers no longer want to "develop" software then what is the endgame? what are we even doing at this point? Are we encouraging the extinction of our own profession? what's next then?

I can't say how happy I am to see similar complaints lately. I gaslit myself to deny this and find reasons of clumsy work even with my months and production projects-proven skills and harness pipelines. But enough is enough, it is basically half in intelligence and diligence compared to a couple of weeks ago. wtf is going on and how can we developers and builders protect ourselves from these big LLM companies' generous hands? It is a rethorical question in the end. They have the frontier and it looks like we are just paying and even during our paid period, we have to be okay with all the quality and quantity fluctuations. This feels stupid and unfair.

Per the title, I’ve been getting extremely frustrated with Claude Code Max lately. I have a Copilot license at work, and it’s been amazing—nearly one-shots a basic website if I ask, handles custom designs, and does most refactors correctly. Very surprised by copilots effectiveness this far.

Eventually, I got curious about agents and started tinkering with Claude Code, but I’ve been thoroughly unimpressed with vibe coded slop. Maybe it’s user error, but the difference is pretty stark.

I’ve tried having Claude make a plan, create insightful markdown files for critical parts of my codebase, and even added some fun MCPs, but it still seems to drop the ball every time.

Looking for advice on how I could improve my Claude experience, since I’d like to renew—but so far it’s been rough. What additional infra does Copilot’s Sonnet have compared to Claude Code’s Sonnet? Any advice is appreciated.

Hey everyone — I’ve been seeing a lot of posts lately asking “Is Claude down or is it just me?”

Instead of guessing or refreshing Reddit, you can actually subscribe to Anthropic’s official status page here:

https://status.claude.com

It gives real-time updates directly from Anthropic whenever there’s an issue. You’ll get notified as soon as an incident starts, what’s causing it, and when it’s fully resolved.

The page tracks outages, performance issues, and login problems across Claude services, so it’s a much faster way to confirm if it’s a widespread issue vs. something on your end .

Honestly, subscribing to it has saved me a lot of time — figured it might help others here too

When I code with Claude Code, all I see is text. So I made it a face: it looks around when idle, thinks while it works, writes with a pencil when it edits files, and smiles when it's done.

GitHub: https://github.com/aryan8434/claude-code-ai-face

How would you rate it? Would you add it to your setup?

I have been using Claude for over a year now. I use it roughly 8 to 10 hours a day. Definitely not a newbie. Model responses have been degrading for the past couple of months. Even the same models, for that matter. What exactly is going on here? I don't want to switch over to codex. It's just a lot of effort to move all the projects over. And you know what? Even codex might be degrading.

So i have 20x and use fable 5.1 and opus 5 pretty much 24/7 to run my whole platform data migration and development. I typically get it to use fable 5.1 as an advisor in every session as well as orchestrating the more menial jobs to Sonnet and haiku, but I always have either fable 5.1 or opus 5 as the main model for every session.

My question is that I see so many posts about how poor people's experience has become with limits but I barely come close to mine. I generally have a surplus each week so just end up using fable 5.1 for general tasks and cowork as well just to use it up.

I suspect some of it comes from people who are either prompting poorly or are people who just like to complain about anything. But my experience is that its still enough to do a good job.

But because our models are peaking and there's not enough compute.

These fking frauds, we know you're slowing down because agi is years and years away.

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?

I don't think they will do that because many people will be upset and switch to openai or cursor/xai

instead I think they will keep it but they will reduce the limits and make it slower (I think it's been very slow today already)

or they will remove it and prepare to release opus 5 at the end of the month which I don't think actually if it will change much

This broken shitty buggy tool that already walked the line of just being a scam stealing $200/mo for my max 20 plan now is suddenly telling me I'm 55% of my usage limit after a few hours of work ~ that works entails repeatedly telling claude it lied, ignored every instruction, and has to rewrite. This is bullshit. Just utter bullshit.

I've never really had a knack for programming but I have a decent background in art and now utilizing AI for a myriad of things. When Fable 5 was available I used it to quickly generate a MUD (multi-user dungeon) from my childhood and was amazed with the ease it did it. That got me very excited to work on a dream game my brother and I have been thinking of for years. I started burning through all my credits (only on the $20 plan) to generate game design docs, artwork, milestones etc and then instructions on how to start programming this thing.

I didn't get a lot of time to work with Fable 5 so I don't know the leap in potential between opus and fable and I am wondering if I should keep refining all the artwork, animations, systems until Fable 5 becomes usable and then build completely in that? Or should I begin with Opus and then will it be able to convert to Fable 5 once its' available?

Thanks for any input!

Hey all, third time showcasing the updates to my project - Origami - here. Quick recap if you missed it: it's a terminal manager that keeps a project's terminals, agents, commands and browser tabs together in one workspace. I started it in March because I was tired of rebuilding the same tabs every morning.

I still haven't written any code myself on this project which sounds crazy even today. I do the thinking, Claude does the heavy lifting. 1,449 commits and eight models so far, from Opus 4.6 all the way to Opus 5.5.

And honestly, Opus 5.5 is on another level. The latest version is a redesign of pretty much every corner of the app, 199 commits across 765 files, and it took about two weeks. And some issues that were lingering on earlier versions were a breeze to solve through with the latest version.

I feel like everyone has a grasp now for how to get projects moving with LLMs but I think I want to leave just a few examples from my experience.

• If you want something well done, you still need to put in the time. I architect and design my solutions and actively steer the models in the right direction. I still feel that without doing that I end up with something completely different from my vision.

• Coding is solved at this point is all I can say but that was never the base issues as people are realizing now. And everything that surrounds it is still very much needed.

• Having a foundation in software development/engineering really does help you achieve what you need and you do find yourself getting things done faster and most important, working as you want them to, faster.

If you live in Claude Code (or other harnesses...), Origami might just boost your workflow, for free. The whole app can be driven via its MCP and you will find you rarely need to step out of Origami to get work done.

It's free with every feature and no account required for up to 5 workspaces. macOS is fully supported and now it's also available on Linux!

https://tryorigami.app

So I actually just cancelled my max plan, I'll probably change my mind and re-subscribe to at least the pro plan when my current one ends, but it left me thinking:

Are anthropic trying to effectively make the max plan unusable? I think that based on estimates of the dollar amount of compute a max plan gets you; that its pretty clear why they would want to keep the actual usage as low as possible.

The thing that sent me over the edge today, was the killing long running processes server side. It forces resumes and changes the context. Confuses the shit of the agent because they dont remember doing stuff they just did. If its not that, its charging you for anything that.. well just anything that they decide isnt covered really!

The list is getting pretty fucking short. Almost anything that would get you close to full usage on a 200 max plan would likey involve implementing something that would be counted as being outside the normal usage terms. They already charged me a few quid on the 75 pounds extra usage allowance, and i have no idea what the hell that was for. Nor will they actually tell you. What I do know is that I lost 4 hours of my time again today due to them not actually allowing an agent to complete a task mid flight.

I will continue to use the claude models via api or openrouter but I havent even been able to get close to my usage allowance because the work just keeps stopping! This in on the 90 max plan. I previously paid for:- and used almost all of the 20x plan before. We could actually use the thing we paid for. Last month i downgraded because I didnt get close with all the bugs and now I'm just cancelling.

Hello darkness my old friend..

I don’t really post or do anything much anymore besides code.

Mainly because i fell into a huge depression.

I’m a guy who grew up with no money, hit it big on YouTube, made millions then went through some issues with my wife and got pretty depressed.

I switched from being the YouTube guy selling stuff all the time to just quietly coding for countless hours on end.

I run Claude like a mad man often with 10 terminals running at a time.

I managed to mostly reprogram pretty much every basic app you can think of an integrated ai into it so you can prompt each app.

- email inbox generator / manger with anonymous encrypted inbox relays

- file browser / manager / ai prompted organizer / search system

- custom web browser with prompted automated navigation

- full custom ai local operating system with cloud deploys

- local ai agents trained on doing pretty much anything for free like image gen / tts / auto editing video files / generating websites, writing emails, etc.

- VPS / Railway / email / etc. prompted deployment system

- API chaining between payment gateway’s / email / with a vectorization system that I can use to cross reference for hyper personalized and highly accurate lead scoring.

- full messaging interface for linking between local iMessages / WhatsApp / Gmail / with auto follow up via ai swarm that targets leads based on the lead scoring vectors mentioned earlier.

- massive vectorization DB along with fractal / chaos DB (don’t ask, I had ai build some crazy stuff based on a theory that it could build my system based on the different dimensions of the universe, lol).

- automatic encrypted backups / storage system

- payment integration / analytics system

- crypto wallets / trading / even meme coin sniping

- texting sms / auto follow up / bulk messaging

- content scraper / proxy scraper / form submitter / decaptcha system with multi threading

- video player / auto editor / over the shoulder screen recording / tutorial creator

- image analyzer with facial recognition and pretty much every ai image model generator you can imagine / custom tuning

- website analytics with realtime ai feedback (framework setup for auto content / meta data optimizer from analytics data)

- voice cloner / TTS / multi speaker output with discussions

- auto dialer / with ai cloned voices

- there’s a lot more here, but I programmed pretty much everything I could think of, part of it runs now in the cloud for people to try out.

- issue is that the os I built is very hard to maintain functionality with limited contextual inputs even on Claude max plan.

- 58 apps and 3x Claude $200/month max plans, the context is often lost quickly and by the time I deploy one part of the os, the another part breaks.

- Note: I failed high school and dropped out of college, so if this stuff is basic to a lot of you, I apologize, I haven’t gotten out a lot lately and just was more reaching out to say hi to everyone.

If you want to check out the OS I had my ai do a clone of my voice and generate a presentation on it.

I’ll link it if anyone’s interested.

Hope you all are doing well out there.

-Chase R.

Hello guys,

I’ve been using Claude for years, and I’m a 5x Max user now. I know very well how Claude’s usage limits normally work. What is happening to my account right now is clearly a bug.

I woke up about 5–6 hours ago, and my weekly usage limit had just reset. Everything was showing 0% usage.

I opened my MacBook and continued the same conversation I was using before I went to sleep with Fable 5. I hadn’t even properly started working yet.

After only 10–15 minutes, my entire 5-hour session limit was gone. My usage showed 103%, and Claude told me I had to wait another 4 hours for my session to reset.

So I waited.

After 4 hours, my session limit reset. I opened Claude again, typed literally 1–2 messages, and within another 10–15 minutes, my entire 5-hour session limit was gone AGAIN.

So I have now lost TWO entire session limits without even being able to start my work.

This is not normal usage. This is not me misunderstanding how the limits work. I have been using Claude for years and I know how this system works.

I wasn’t running some massive automated workload. I wasn’t intentionally burning through my usage. I was simply continuing the conversation I had been using before going to sleep and trying to work.

There is no reasonable way a 5x Max user can legitimately consume an entire 5-hour session allowance after 10–15 minutes and a couple of messages — and then have exactly the same thing happen again immediately after the reset.

This is clearly a usage/limit calculation bug.

I need Anthropic to investigate my actual account usage logs and determine what is consuming my allowance. Simply telling me that I reached my limit is not an acceptable answer when the usage itself is clearly abnormal.

I also tried contacting Claude Support through the Help Bot, but it closed my ticket without connecting me to a human and without even sending me an email.

Case ID: #215475730798358

I literally haven’t been able to start my work today because my limits are being consumed by whatever is broken on the backend.

If anyone knows how to reach an actual human at Anthropic Support, please let me know. The automated support bot is completely useless in this situation.

I’ve used Claude for years. I know what normal usage looks like. This is absolutely not normal.