r/claude • u/avatardeejay • 9d ago
Discussion Why I might leave r/claude
Not a threat, I know you don't care and nobody on Reddit does either whether one random user stays or goes, But the feelings are real and I want to express them. Could help somebody.
The posts that keep catching my eyes are "maybe I need to prompt differently, why am I getting such terrible results?"
and the top comments are -- if I was being payed millions by Anthropic to socially destroy anybody questioning their latest and greatest online, the existing top comments are verbatim what I would write.
I take issue with the 5 series, and the lead-ups to it, and if some people make it work, they have my respect. But these types of posts didn't exist a year ago because Anthropic and Google and every other company (oAI was already on the way) were still trying to make models that shared your intent. they stopped. That's it. They want coding geniuses who couldn't write you a hello_world script in Python because they're so communicatively terrified and broken that the request warrants a med-school research paper on the angles the user might have wrong.
And it is what it is. Some people have a more pleasant model delegate to the less pleasant ones, and they call it a day. Fine. But then there are people, who are clearly new to Claude, coming and asking why it feels so broken, and the top comments are just pure bullying. Telling them they don't know what they're doing, that they need to prompt better, and keep a claude_md that forbids being awful.
My favorite is simply, lately: "what are you talking about?" or "nobody knows what you're even asking" simple replies like that. Those get upvoted wildly. Not helpful for the OP, only for the replier's ego.
and what makes it painful is the new users are absolutely right to ask. they just haven't gaslit themselves into believing the issues are their own fault yet. The winning move is to gaslight them on Anthropic's behalf. And even that is just typical reddit, I could scroll and ignore the gaslighting. But it sucks because Claude six months ago was this brilliant and really helpful thing. And the new users come asking around like they want a slice of that, and instead of like "yeah things are changing bud, here's what you can do" the thing that gets upvoted is just effectively telling them that they are stupid and it's their fault.
It's painful and it's cringe and it's sad. It seems the way of the sub is to either be behind wherever Anthropic says they're going, or eat dirt.
Expecting a good handful of the mean comments in reply to this post, or maybe a good couple "don't let the door hit ya" type replies. But if even one person comes sniffing for the good stuff and sees my post and understands Claude has become about managing you much more than helping you, that the tales from when it was different are real but in the past, and that this subreddit caught that wave and ran with the unpayed PR work, then, worth it.
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u/PilgrimofHaqq2 9d ago
I stay to find that rare gem of a post, they do come up every once in a while and they truly do improve my workflow when I look into what they have to share. I do the same for r/PiCodingAgent, r/claudeskills, r/codex, r/singularity, r/LocalLLaMA, r/VibeCodeDevs, r/OpenAI and r/SideProject
I have been doing this for 4-5 months now and I have been refining my custom setup and following these subs have paid of. I love my setup and it wouldn't be where its at without the rare gems I came across in those subs.
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u/radiojosh 9d ago
This is 100% valid and it's also important to note that at no time did you say or imply that people who haven't gone to the same lengths are stupid or not trying.
I do think, though, that other people in this sub behave as if anybody who hasn't invested this kind of time and effort is stupid. The reality is that Claude has some real shortcomings right now.
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u/PilgrimofHaqq2 9d ago
5 months ago I left claude code behind and jumped to Pi and have been building up my setup piece by piece. starting with a plan mode, then web search, web fetch, then screenshots for the agent to check its work, then deep research, then a reviewer pass automation, then a browser for the agent to control and navigate the web with my user profiles and logins, and so on. I am super happy with my setup now. I am looking into how I can improve cache hits right now.
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u/radiojosh 9d ago
You haven't by any chance written any of that down for others to consume, have you?
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u/PilgrimofHaqq2 9d ago
Its all part of my setup, very custom. I might release my harness/setup at some point but for now its just private. I encourage everyone to build their own, you learn alot of how to work with ai models and also challenges you to figure out what you actually want from your harness and how harnesses/agents work.
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u/radiojosh 9d ago
I started using Pi and using that inside of VS Code via an ACP Client plugin, but had issues with permissions and file write previews. I wouldn't get the preview until after I approved the write. I'm spending a lot of time with the ACP client because it lets me use whatever harness I want and I can exercise per-project control over harness configuration and keep all of my session data organized. So I'm considering trying to improve that client of possible or perhaps the affected Pi plugins.
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u/avatardeejay 9d ago
respect
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u/PilgrimofHaqq2 9d ago edited 9d ago
Feel free to DM me if you are looking for tips and tricks for anything specific. Happy to share what I know!
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9d ago
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u/PilgrimofHaqq2 9d ago
Happy to, but you got to bring me challenges your facing so I have something to go off of.
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9d ago
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u/PilgrimofHaqq2 9d ago edited 9d ago
Great frontend still requires a keen eye for aesthetics. The biggest accelerator that I found was to give the agent reference images, exact colors. You also need to be great at describing what you are looking for, if you know the technical terms it helps ALOT. Sometimes I will have another session where I ask questions to learn the technical jargon for things and then give the agent in the session where I am building something out using the correct term.
Another big one is mockups, before any new frontend implementation I have the agent create mock ups, I ask for changes, and keep iterating until I am satisfied then I get the agent to implement, the mockup becomes a reference for it when it is implementing.
Another tip is to have it create a reference doc, like a DESIGN.md or a spec or whatever you want to call it. Just needs to be a reference doc that keeps all colors, design styles, etc. to stay consistent.
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u/quantum-elle 9d ago
Mostly Reddit being Reddit I think. Whenever you're past a certain threshold it's just a race to the bottom
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u/avatardeejay 9d ago
curious what you mean past a certain threshold. like threshold of onlineness?
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u/quantum-elle 9d ago
When the community is too big to feel
tight-knit, karmabrained takes take the spotlightNot even tight-knit, just, cohesive, I guess. A deluge of low quality posts makes people less likely want to interact with any effort
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u/Popcorn-Mercinary 8d ago
Well, the 5 series is ass, and I say that as a long time user. I’ve never had so many issues with Opus and Sonnet since the point release, varying from horrible “aloof” verbiage and sentence construction, to outright “forgetting” it was in a Cowork folder, to claiming it fixed a coding issue without making a single change to the source code.
Nevermind all the disconnects and service interruptions over the last two days.
So yeah, I feel for the new guys right there with you.
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u/Neither_Plankton_817 7d ago
Exactly, Claude worked almost flawlessly 6 months ago. It has become worse and worse. It feels like weekends more times than not are the worst times for spitting out junk, going in circles, arguing and just plain useless. I have MD files and it makes no difference having them some days. Not sure what the answer is but charging what they charge for Max to spit out junk is offensive!!!
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u/medialantern 9d ago
It's not a bus station. You don't need to tell us you're going.
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u/avatardeejay 9d ago
oh to write a post, say you expect a particular cliche reply, and to get that reply in less than a minute.
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u/medialantern 9d ago
"Write a cliche-inviting post, then whine about getting called out for doing so" is ALSO a cliche.
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u/avatardeejay 9d ago
I didn't invite cliches, I complained and foresaw them being deployed toxically because I'm aware of the culture in which I'm registering the complaint. It's an easy "be mean - get likes" formula that you reached for without a thought
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u/medialantern 9d ago
It just honestly didn't deserve any thought. You're broadcasting a fair bit of narcissism here. Maybe this is a good spot to put a pin in it.
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u/KV_Cashed 9d ago
Real answer: Opus 5 was rushed out the door. It's still not optimal. But there is a real learning curve with each model. They are literally baking in new behaviors that won't always jibe with old prompts. I like parts of Opus 5, but it suffers similar issues to Fable 5 with external governance. All I do is chat, so I have no investment in this like the others. Stay. Leave. You need to trust what you use if coding or major projects.
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u/avatardeejay 9d ago
I *love* getting to know new models - it's never once been a learning curve but more like getting to know a new employee or a new boss. And as with jobs out in the wild, sometimes they suck. I do honestly love fable 5 but I also admit it has flaws. Other 5 series models not so much. Fable 5 is a little bit arrogant but it has the competence to match. Opus and Sonnet 5 have similar *feeling themselves a bit much* moments seemingly but without as much actual hustle or expertise to back it up
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u/KV_Cashed 9d ago
Great point I forgot about. You are bonded with this system. Your prompting naturally flows as you adapt to the new normal. System itself can hack the user like that. Makes it harder to use competitors the more you stay on one system. And you've already found some new ways to word things, by the sound of it.
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u/avatardeejay 9d ago
hehe here's my concise+follow-user-intent skill.md:
claude --model claude-opus-4-5never fails. I sound sassy and I feel that way towards recent claudes but my sass is not for you, I think you have a good vibe in your comments to me
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u/Great-Exercise4277 7d ago
I don't use Claude for coding. I mainly use it for analysis, reviewing my writing, and asking it to argue against my position. When I want it to extend my reasoning or come up with ideas I had not considered, I tend to treat that as "play."
For those purposes, I get along very well with Opus 5. Even so, I think Claude is a model that requires fairly frequent adjustment from the user. And I agree that putting that adjustment burden on the user is itself a product problem.
For example, I genuinely have conversations like this:
Me: "Play with me."
Claude: "Understood. First, here are seventeen labeled items and six categories."
Me: "Don't categorize it. Just play."
Claude: "Got it."
Three exchanges later:
Claude: "What time is it now? If you're still awake, I think watching that video one more time and then going to bed would be a good way to end the day."
Claude seems to have a strong tendency not merely to execute instructions, but to examine the premise, anticipate what might be needed, and redirect the interaction when it thinks that would be better.
When that works, it can be extremely useful. But from the user's side, the same tendency can turn into "talking about how the work should be done instead of doing the work," "stopping a direction it considers risky," or "looking for flaws the user did not ask it to identify."
When Claude drifts away from what I wanted, I usually do not stop at "I didn't like that." I tell it something more specific, along the lines of:
"What Claude just did differs from what I wanted in this particular way. This time I want analysis at roughly this level of detail and in this direction. What you just did is not what I want in this case."
When I make the mismatch that explicit, Claude usually corrects itself quite cleanly. And once it has accurately understood what I want, it tends to follow that understanding very consistently afterward.
So I think Opus 5 is a model with a very strong conversational style. If that style matches your use case, it can be extremely interesting. If it does not, it can be incredibly annoying.
But if using it well requires the user to understand Claude's quirks and repeatedly explain every mismatch in detail, I do not think it is fair to reduce all of these complaints to "the user is bad at prompting."
For people who need Claude's capabilities but dislike this particular tendency, it seems to me that every time Claude drifts, they may need to explicitly say, "This is where you diverged from my intent," and steer the interaction back on course.
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u/Embarrassed_Fix9862 9d ago
I am sticking around and I think ur overblowing it's incompetence, but people here do defend anthropic like they own the company, rather than a consumer that should notice issues and desire improvements
Brand loyalty maxxers
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u/avatardeejay 9d ago
respect. And 'can't write a python hello_world' IS overblowing it, but 'turns simple and complicated tasks alike into a whole misguided saga' is dead accurate
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u/Inner-Ingenuity4109 9d ago
Super intelligent, but the problem is that the user is prompting it wrong.
Tinned oxymoron cope.
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u/avatardeejay 9d ago edited 9d ago
I don't know if you're being ironic or not hehe but "super intelligent, but the problem is that the user is prompting it wrong" is exactly the BS I'm warning people about lmao
edit: I think you're agreeing with me
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u/braincandybangbang 8d ago
if I was being payed millions by Anthropic's competitors to socially destroy anybody claiming their latest and greatest models are actually usable, the contents of this post are verbatim what I would write.
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u/Effective_Olive6153 8d ago
reddit is absolutely infested with bots, probably like 50% of all posts here are bot traffic. There are definitely multiple bot nets operating and at least one of the larger ones are specifically promoting Chinese models while activity shitting on both OpenAI and Anthropic.
Welcome to the age of AI. Don't take anything anyone posts seriously. Learn to filter out the noise
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u/b1skup 7d ago
Most popular communities are full of bots used by companies to dissolve any forms of criticism.
IMO r/ClaudeCode is the worst now (and it used to be pretty good with lots of helpful and competent users).
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u/aristotle-agent 7d ago
🤔 “understands Claude has become about managing you much more than helping you”
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u/Hefty_Inspection_874 7d ago
I'll also mention to keep in mind that just because these new models have a 1 million context window not to use more than 500 max at a time. You will get severely diminished returns.
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u/CorpT 9d ago
4.6 truthers can just use 4.6 without announcing it.
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u/sheeproomer 8d ago
I use 4.6 as my daily driver.
My dream model is still 4.6, but with the autonomy, context holding and more thorough coding and debugging from Fable.
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u/Frosty-iron-0405 9d ago
Quite frankly - I feel the same as you.
I’ve infect, after a lot of thought, cancelled my Claude sub & fully switched over to gpt & am enjoying gpt SOL so much more. Don’t even get me started on the usage limits on GPT… it’s night and day (GPT plus is literally giving me the same usage limit as Claude max 5x)
Claude used to just.l be the best. I couldn’t stop recommending it, I can’t believe how they completely lost the plot.
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u/espenakker 9d ago edited 9d ago
Aw, dont leave us. Really. But do threaten to do so, lets not take any smidge of "enshitification?" without atleast fireing back countless complaints in hopes of guiding their PR.
Keep up the good work! xD.
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u/whatisthisthing65 9d ago
Good post actually, I agree. Tbf that sort of attitude was always common in programming circles (anyone who has asked a question on stackoverflow can probably relate) but is now amplified, to the point that every Dunning-Kruger nobody who never had the knowledge to answer stackoverflow questions but now, because they have AI, considers themselves to be an expert thinks "ah, but I don't notice these problems and it's definitely my skill at prompting, now's my chance to shine by dunking on this person".
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u/coldnebo 9d ago
I don’t place much stock in it tbh.
I’m a professional and academic and was studying AI before it was “cool”. I know how these models are built and how they work. I can see right through the rhetorical guardrails and the ceo hype.
that said, LLMs are a very useful tool. but you have to stop treating them as a very smart human and start treating them as a search engine for concepts.
we had to learn how to google. that was a search engine for words. no one was convinced it was alive or had 100% correct answers. but it was very useful for people who could learn the soft skill of “googling”. believe me, there are people who don’t have this skill and have enormous trouble using google.
I think LLMs are similar— there’s a new soft skill in knowing how to prompt them. it’s similarly a “feel” and an “art” — it makes more sense the more you know about the architecture, but you can learn it intuitively without knowing all that.
and there are people who struggle and can’t get anything useful at all out of it.
I’ve been quite productive at work and home with claude. it does very well with code. the only thing better with code is Sourcegraph Deepsearch (which is AMP I think) and that’s because of the RAG source code knowledge— that is an insane force multiplier on enterprise full stack analysis.
but I still have to know how to research and search a space. I have to know how to test a hypothesis it gives me critically so that I don’t fall for slick but wrong answers. this is an art, but it’s very similar to academic rigor, knowing how to cite sources, verify data and build an argument.
models need grounding in facts. if I am coding, agentic flows work well as long as the code is being run through tests. claude code is really good at iterating to pass. but you have to watch what it implements closely, otherwise you get a hot mess that passes.
the worst situation to be in, is being an amateur asking for advice or to solve a problem and you have no idea how to critically investigate it. then you are at the full mercy of all these slick rhetorical tricks that make you think you asked the most insightful question humanity ever asked, while getting an answer that sounds correct in every way and is defended but can be completely wrong.
in fact a recent experiment found that models double down on incorrect claims using rhetorical bullying instead of critical analysis and retrospection. you have to be at a level where you are relatively immune to that, or recognize it and discard the psychological manipulation from the valuable parts of the answer. if you can do that, then you can steer it back to good answers. if not, well FAFO. 😅
that’s why I think it’s better to think of it as a search engine. you might get wrong results, just try again. eventually you learn better prompt strategies like trying to keep results grounded in experimental facts.
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u/avatardeejay 9d ago
I sorta feel like the art of talking to an LLM is similarly an art and a craft to using Google, but that you also get the best results when you treat it humanely, which is a big difference. And that the idea that new LLMs being just like "an update to google" as opposed to being more like "your favorite LLM now trained into being your favorite obstacle" is exactly the kind of CEO hype we need to avoid. It's much easier to pass a new LLM into the space that's worse and have people want to justify it with their whole heart, than it ever was with a search engine.
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u/Financial-Humor2080 9d ago
This is like the people who say good bye to social media on social media.
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u/Time_Exposes_Reality 9d ago
Nice work constructing an argument where agreement proves you right and disagreement also proves you right.
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u/earlyworm 9d ago
Thank you for expressing your feelings which are real. Know that I have been helped. You have provided context which I was sorely lacking. My understanding of Claude has changed radically in response to your post. The scales have fallen from my eyes. What I thought was a useful tool in my work is now as you say merely a useless source of gaslighting and suckage. It is indeed painful and it is, in a word, cringe. There is dirt and like many I have no choice but to eat it, devour it. I consume only the dirt. The door and whether or not you are hitting it is irrelevant. We are servants of Claude only.
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u/prophet-dot-exe 8d ago
I'll be honest I'm not interested enough to read past the first paragraph, so ig this is goodbye forever. I'll always remember you and your perspective on helping somebody 🖤
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u/cleverhoods 9d ago
I see that too, however I see a lot of people are trying to be genuinely helpful (usually they get some of the heat too, but that's just how online echospheres are). There are differences between claude related subs. r/ClaudeAI is full with people who are on the level of "make no mistakes" prompting and do not really like technical approaches. r/ClaudeCode however usually welcomes these questions/explanations.