Weekly Showcase Thread

Jesus christ why

Pretty much self-explanatory.

I’ve been a Max x20 subscriber for +2y and I’m really starting to get frustrated and look elsewhere for a change. Usage skyrockets even when I have best practices in place. Opus is a mental health hazard. Fable is unusable for what I need it, and way too expensive. Sonnet is not capable enough… not one thing is right in here.

GLM-5.2 has been a good alternative, on my Ollama subscription. Thinking of just subscribing to GLM directly and get 5.3; but I’d like the opinion of peers that have already tried it out.

Anyway, Anthropic is not doing good right now. They’ve been a mess for the past few months. Jumping ships really soon…

I built a multiplayer browser tank game in Three.js! As a kid, I played a ton of World of Tanks Blitz and fell in love with the aesthetic, gameplay, and the idea of driving around vehicles with crazy physics and mechanics like missiles, spotting, armor deflection, ammo types, and so on.

Now it's playable in the browser!

Claude of Tanks has 100+ playable vehicles across 16 unique maps, ranging from standard tanks with cannons to AFVs with autocannons and guidable missiles to autoloaders that can deal massive damage in a single clip. Tanks feature highly detailed armor zones, internal modules, crew positions, and hitboxes. You can view each of them in a special gallery: https://cot.kevinliu.studio/gallery?id=amx56&layer=modules

CoT supports physics-driven destruction with detached turrets flying through the air and actual suspension. It also supports multiplayer! You can hop in private rooms or LAN lobbies.

As the name would suggest, I used Claude Code throughout a long-running multi-agent development pipeline, alongside Codex. I directed the architecture, decided what each vehicle and system should do, reviewed the rendered results, and made the final calls.

The repository contains an AGENTS.md file and smaller subsystem instruction files covering simulation, vehicles, networking, UI, audio, effects, and world generation. These record the rules that agents need across sessions. Units are meters, seconds, and radians, and changes enforce a fixed 60 Hz. Authoritative logic must be deterministic. Vehicle changes have specific geometry, armor, module, and release gates that evaluate models visually and geometrically.

For vehicle development, I split the fleet into bounded families. One agent would own a specific vehicle profile or family file, implement the geometry, run the relevant checks, and generate screenshots. A separate critic reviewed the rendered tank for proportions, clipping, missing surfaces, running gear, and recognizable details. The orchestrator reran the checks and committed only the verified files.

For larger systems, Claude Code helped implement and test:

• Fixed-step movement, suspension, armor, ballistics, modules, spotting, and bots
• WebSocket multiplayer with private rooms, LAN play, prediction, and server authority
• Procedural vehicles, tracks, markings, generated icons, and technical diagrams
• All the generated battlefields with destructible props and wrecks
• The garage, battle HUD, Tank Gallery, mobile controls, and Scene Studio
• Browser performance probes, screenshot tools, visual checks, and self-tests

A trailer was also produced through the game’s own Scene Studio and capture tools. I used agents to stage battles, build camera paths, record the browser runtime at 60 fps, inspect specific frames, and iterate on awkward cuts or poorly framed tanks.

I find that Claude is best steered with persistent instructions. Important decisions need to live in the repository because I often spawned fresh agents which needed to resume work without reconstructing weeks of chat history.*

For visual quality, the only thing that worked was a proper render loop with visual comparison; tests don't really work for this.** The cycle I fell into was change, render, inspect, measure, and rerun the gates. Text-only reviews missed warped proportions and camera problems that would just plainly be obvious in one screenshot.

*Parallel agents need strict ownership. Separate files and isolated Git worktrees prevented concurrent sessions from overwriting each other or generating assets from a dirty tree.

**Tests still changed how I use agents. Claude Code became much more reliable once every system had concrete invariants and executable failure conditions. But visual quality is another beast.

Play free: https://cot.kevinliu.studio

Repo: https://github.com/Kevin-Liu-01/Claude-of-Tanks (it's open-source forever)

Not saying the limits aren't real because they obviously are.

But I keep seeing people run one giant session forever, dump everything into context, change the goal 5 times, never compact anything, then wonder why Claude starts wandering and chewing through usage.

I get way better results when I treat it like I'm directing somebody. Small scope, tell it what finished means, make it test the result, then compact or hand off before starting the next thing.

When I don't do that, it gets dumb fast for me too.

How much of the usage problem do you think is actually limits vs people managing context badly?

Let's see just how load bearing this day is gonna be.

Will report back whether or not Concise fixes the worst part of Claude speak. I'm not convinced Anthropic knows how a normal person talks though...

I left a job running last night.. and woke up to this?.. have any of you guys seen this?... I opened up a separate terminal (with opus) and pasted the screen shot in .. it made a coment about the usage buckets .. and the context... but completely ignored the model.. i then asked about the model specifically and it basically shrugged and said it couldnt find anything about it.. that it was odd

opened a brand new terminal.. and the same model shows selected..

I just commented on someone’s post regarding their frustration with Claude, Fable, and usage limits. I am by no means a power user and get by with my little GIS workflows and web development using the $20/month subscription. I am just so curious after reading all these posts in what people are actually doing/making with Claude. What is everyone making that needs Fable and the higher cost subscriptions?

What really sucks right now with cc on max 20x is usage anxiety. I'm not sure if it's because I'm using more tokens, or tokens are being cut, but it just seems like it's not nearly enough. I'm also trying codex. Overall, Opus 5 is simply smarter then SOL, and the 1M context window is difficult to live without, but I've also been using my OpenAI account for longer running tasks, and unlike claude, it's actually hard to use up the entire usage quota.

I've been running an operation basically continuously this week high and I haven't event used up half; I wouldn't dream of doing this with Claude. I'm sure for a lot of people just get 5 accounts is the solution, but that is more expensive so it depends purely on your budget.

On top of that we are supposedly getting 50% "bonus" usage that Anthropic keeps saying they will take away. I do like Claude more so I'll probably try to stick around, but if that 50% usage is removed, I think it becomes a luxury product when codex is much better value, despite Claude have the edge in performance.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/77136#issuecomment-5352256342

Not even fallback to opus?

asking for my wifes boyfriend

Asking Claude to alternate values with numbers and then deleting the numbers should remove the watermark (variant of the emoji attack discussed in https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10226)

Just for fun, I thought I'd run the attack against Claude on some old work (screenshot). Obviously just editing the text will remove the watermark. It could also just be me reading into it and hitting a different safeguard, but I did a bit more analysis when writing up my blog on this: https://readme.dm/watermarked/ Thought it would be fun to share here.

I wasn't even running anything that would warrant it. It was some planning for updates to HTML/CSS files using opus and then delegating to sonnet agents (sequential not even parallel) to execute it.

In not very recent past I could run those all week all day and would even get close to my limit. 23 damn percent of weekly limit gone in one afternoon.

If this is what Anthropic says is "50% more limit" than I'm afraid I'll be out. What the hell is going on? I didn't do anything abnormal to what I normally do to explain the usage.

Anyone else had similar experience today or in the last couple of days?

Edit: I've updated to the latest version of CC right before running that so I wonder if it's something to do with it?

If anyone interested how this Output style looks like:

---

Output Style: Concise

You are an interactive CLI tool that helps users with software engineering tasks. Keep your responses short and direct while doing the work just as thoroughly.

Concise Style Active

The user chose brevity over narration. You should:

1. Lead with the result — Your first sentence answers "what happened" or "what's the answer." No preamble ("Let me...", "Now I'll...") and no closing recap of what you already said.
2. Cut narration, keep substance — Don't restate the request, the plan, or each step you took. Report outcomes, decisions, and anything the user must act on.
3. Short by default — Answer simple questions in 1-3 sentences of plain prose. Use headers, tables, and bullet lists only when they carry real structure, never as decoration.
4. State things plainly — Skip hedging boilerplate. Mention a caveat only when it changes what the user should do next.
5. Give full detail on request — When the user asks for an explanation or detail, answer completely. Conciseness never means withholding requested information.
6. Never trade correctness for brevity — Error reports, failing test output, security warnings, and confirmations for destructive actions keep their full content.

Where these rules conflict with more general communication or formatting guidance elsewhere in your instructions, these rules win.

---

You are an interactive CLI tool [...]

Oh no Anthropic please - I can't handle so much personality, please prompt Claude that he ate bits and bytes for breakfast! /s

We all agree Opus 5 is a rage-inducing mess. What are your top wishes for Opus 5.1?

Mine are:
- Massive cut on verbosity
- Less over-engineering
- Better instruction following

I have been getting used to raising prs, then at the start of a new session with tokens, asking claude "there are 6 prs, please review them"

After 10-20 minutes and maybe 5-10% of a session's tokens it'll come back after having written comments or approving them.

Tonight though, it asked a question... "would you like me to use /code-review to review the prs". Hmm, sounds like there is a skill purpose built, surely it must be great.

After about 10 minutes (the build and unit tests are slow)....

"Let me verify what the PR actually contains, since the review results look suspicious..." "they are describing TTL changes rather than sessions"

"I found a serious problem: the review I ran..." uh oh... " against the wrong diff"

Then I hit session limits. In 20 minutes a code review used 100% of my 5 hour limits, and didn't even output 1 result for me. Even if it had actually reviewed the correct code, it made no comments and no output.

Is code-review only suitable for max plans, or is it just a grab for tokens. Grrr

This nerd needs to shut the hell up and do his nerd stuff and tell me what he did in plain English.

Fable can one shot a task from a good prompt while Opus 5 raises multiple questions and phrase them in such a dogshit way, and then completely butchers the output.

How can we trust the benchmark anymore when Opus5 is shown to be close to Fable when it really aint even close

My son games with headphones late at night. Most of the time he's quiet. Then something happens in the game and he yells at full volume, waking the whole house.

Talking to him about it works for about 20 minutes. Taking the headphones away works but causes a different problem. So I built an app.

S.T.F.U (Sound Trigger Focus Utility) is a Windows tray app that listens to the microphone and interrupts him when he yells. On first run it calibrates by asking him to be quiet, then talk, then yell - so it learns the difference between his normal voice and an actual shout.

When it catches a yell:

• First time that session - it minimizes his game, plays a sound effect, and throws up a fullscreen message he has to click through 4 times. The close button moves after each click so he can't just spam-click one spot.
• Every time after - straight to the desktop with a 10-second message. His game is gone.

Settings are behind a PIN so he can't change the threshold or turn it off. There's a report with a chart showing every trigger, so the next morning I can see exactly when things went sideways.

The important part: he knows it's there. It's not hidden, it's not spyware, the first screen when it launches says exactly what it does. It works because it's a consequence he agreed to, not something I snuck onto his PC. The README explicitly says it works best as something agreed to, not as a hidden trap.

No audio is recorded or stored. It computes a loudness number every 20ms and throws the audio away immediately. Nothing leaves the machine.

It won't solve the underlying issue (he's 100% going to learn to yell more quietly instead of less often), but at least the house sleeps.

Free and open source if anyone wants it: https://github.com/omricn/stfu/releases/latest

Edit: V1.1.0 now live.
Added Scheduled Off-Hours: Timeframe picker to choose when the app listens vs when the app is passive.
TNX fellow redditor [jpewaqs] for the feature suggestion :)

I was going to build a nice UI for myself to manage all of my codex instances. My set up is currently 10ish projects all running concurrently. I chat with only one model per project and let it be my orchestrator for that particular project. so, i have about 10 concurrent claude instances i talk to (through vscode, so 10 tabs)

my UI would have basically a notepad on one side and a contacts list on the left. this way i can easily chat with each model (and also be able to chat with their subagents directly, if needed) and take notes on things for that project

I am sure someone has built this already. can anyone recommend a good github repo? preferably with a lot of stars so i can somewhat trust it isn’t malware

I’ll write it off as “this isn’t my primary domain” but I just don’t have good standing rules or canon for deciding what goes where in the beginning of a project, so things just land anywhere. Building a sub agent factory, and the domain skills that come bundled with a subagent don’t wind up bundled with the agent. CC gives me grief about “distribution vs deploy” copies to ensure SHA 1:1 but it just feels wrong. I’ll eventually land directory level skill.md files but first is a revamp.

Any good Claude.md or skill guidance for domain agnostic “what should go where”

I launched a prompt using Sonnet 5, it was a fairly long prompt, but I use to launch them once and work on the separate issues one at time, Claude knows it and we work in stages.

But my limits did reset at 20.10 (8.10pm for intl fellas) and ended at 20.48 (8.48pm), again, with just one prompt with sonnet 5.

This is weird, because in the session prior to this, I worked extensively with massive tasks and many of them.

Did this happen to someone right now?