I've noticed something else - as Anthropic models get even more and more superhuman, they seem to serve me more and more casual nonsense.
Not like adding glue to pizza. Here's an example from today (paraphrasing): "you need to run `git merge-base branch1 branch2`. Pay attention to the order of arguments, it is important: `git merge-base` is symmetric and returns the same value regardless of the order of inputs".
So which one is it? Symmetric or not? It's not even one of those where it self-corrects, it just happily contradicts itself halfway through the sentence.
My pet theory is that these frontier models do quite a bit of brute force at the end - some kind of beam search - and silently downgrade you depending on demand or compute availability.
Still not great. This particular nugget is from Sonnet 5, default settings.
I've notice the same pattern even in GLM5.2. It has always been a thing, but it seems to be getting worse
It does feel like the kind of thing beam search would fix. It starts the sentence with a claim like "Pay attention to the order of arguments". Around that time it "notices" that the order doesn't matter, but it's already committed to the sentence and has to complete it in the best way still possible
Maybe at some point someone figures out how to train models with a backspace token
I also see stuff like this with Opus (4.8 and 5). It does the work correctly but then the explanation or "aftermath" description is kinda nonsense. It feels like they are tuned hard for agentic coding and everything else is getting worse. There are people that say older versions are also better for creative writing which would confirm this theory.
Claude has always noticeably degraded under heavy load. Opus goes from "decent to work with" to "dumb intern" depending on whether you're working at 3 AM west coast or 10 AM - 5 PM. It's part of why I cancelled my subscription - "max" plans and "extra high" effort are meaningless when there's so much variability between model availability, model performance, and harness bugs every day and every week.
Yes. I switched to Codex some time ago. I feel like I get fewer outages (had one over the weekend), and coding results are good. I built my own agent harness using OpenAI models too and feel it was the right decision.
Not like adding glue to pizza. Here's an example from today (paraphrasing): "you need to run `git merge-base branch1 branch2`. Pay attention to the order of arguments, it is important: `git merge-base` is symmetric and returns the same value regardless of the order of inputs".
So which one is it? Symmetric or not? It's not even one of those where it self-corrects, it just happily contradicts itself halfway through the sentence.
My pet theory is that these frontier models do quite a bit of brute force at the end - some kind of beam search - and silently downgrade you depending on demand or compute availability.
Still not great. This particular nugget is from Sonnet 5, default settings.
It does feel like the kind of thing beam search would fix. It starts the sentence with a claim like "Pay attention to the order of arguments". Around that time it "notices" that the order doesn't matter, but it's already committed to the sentence and has to complete it in the best way still possible
Maybe at some point someone figures out how to train models with a backspace token
Well you can't blame them, it's what brings in the cash. Other uses will suffer proportionally.
Update 11:27 UTC: I saw the error first at 11:22 UTC. Retry at 11:27 UTC still failing. Status page is still green.
Update 11:28 UTC: Incident has been declared dated 11:27 UTC https://status.claude.com/incidents/mfdtrknpxghq
No wonder the amount of water that both Claude and Codex are taking they also need so many frequent hydration breaks.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49056739