Comment by trq_ 3 days ago
Hi everyone, Thariq from the Claude Code team here.
Thanks for reporting this. We fixed a Claude Code harness issue that was introduced on 1/26. This was rolled back on 1/28 as soon as we found it.
Run `claude update` to make sure you're on the latest version.
You are funny. Anthropic refuses to issue refunds, even when they break things.
I had an API token set via an env var on my shell, and claude code changed to read that env var. I had a $10 limit set on it, so found out it was using the API, instead of my subscription, when it stopped working.
I filed a ticket and they refused to refund me, even though it was a breaking change with claude code.
You’re lucky they have even admitted a problem instead of remaining silent and quietly fixing it. Do not expect ethical behaviour from this company.
FYI the sandbox feature is not fully baked and does not seem to be high priority.
For example, for the last 3 weeks using the sandbox on Linux will almost-always litter your repo root with a bunch of write-protected trash files[0] - there are 2 PRs open to fix it, but Anthropic employees have so far entirely ignored both the issue and the PRs.
Very frustrating, since models sometimes accidentally commit those files, so you have to add a bunch of junk to your gitignore. And with claude code being closed source and distributed as a bun standalone executable it's difficult to patch the bug yourself.
[0]: https://github.com/anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime/is...
One thing that could be a strong degradation especially for benchmarks is they switched the default "Exit Plan" mode from:
"Proceed"
"Clear Context and Proceed"
I pressed it accidentally once, and it managed to forget one of the clarifying questions it asked me because it hadn't properly written that to the plan file.
If you're running in yolo mode ( --dangerously-skip-permissions ) then it wouldn't surprise me to see many tasks suddenly do a lot worse.
Even in the best case, you've just used a ton of tokens searching your codebase, and it then has to repeat all that to implement because it's been cleared.
I'd like to see the option of:
"Compact and proceed"
I disagree that this was the issue, or that it's "rare that you'd want to do that unless you're near the context window". Clearing context after writing a plan, before starting implementation of said plan, is common practice (probably standard practice) with spec driven development. If the plan is adequate, then compaction would be redundant.
For a 2M+ LOC codebase, the plans alone are never adequate. They miss nuance that the agent will only have to rediscover when it comes to operate on them.
For spec driven development (which I do for larger issues), this badly affects the plan to generate the spec, not the spec itself.
I'll typically put it in plan mode, and ask it to generate documentation about an issue or feature request.
When it comes to write the output to the .typ file, it does much much worse if it has a cleared context and a plan file than if it has it's full context.
The previously "thought" is typically, "I know what to write now, let me exit plan mode".
Clearing context on exiting that plan mode is a disaster which leaves you much worse off and skeletal documentation and specs compared to letting it flow.
A new context to then actually implement the documented spec is not so bad, although I'd still rather compact.
"It's rare you'd want to do that unless you're actually near the context window after planning."
Highly disagree. It's rare you WOULDN'T want to do this. This was a good change, and a lot of us were doing this anyway, but just manually.
Getting the plan together and then starting fresh will almost always produce better results.
How about how Claude 2.1.x is "literally unusable" because it frequently completely hangs (requires kill -9) and uses 100% cpu?
Likely a separate issue, but I also have massive slowdowns whenever the agent manages to read a particularly long line from a grep or similar (as in, multiple seconds before characters I type actually appear, and sometimes it's difficult to get claude code to register any keypresses at all).
Suspect it's because their "60 frames a second" layout logic is trying to render extremely long lines, maybe with some kind of wrapping being unnecessarily applied. Could obviously just trim the rendered output after the first, I dunno, 1000 characters in a line, but apparently nobody has had time to ask claude code to patch itself to do that.
What OS? Does this happen randomly, after long sessions, after context compression? Do you have any plugins / mcp servers running?
I used to have this same issue almost every session that lasted longer than 30 minutes. It seemed to be related to Claude having issues with large context windows.
It stopped happening maybe a month ago but then I had it happen again last week.
I realized it was due to a third-party mcp server. I uninstalled it and haven’t had that issue since. Might be worth looking into.
For the models themselves, less so for the scaffolding, considering things like the long running TPU bug that happened, are there not internal quality measures looking at samples of real outputs? Using the real systems on benchmarks and looking for degraded perf or things like skipping refusals? Aside from degrading stuff for users, with the focus on AI safety wouldn't that be important to have in case an inference bug messes with something that affects the post training and it starts giving out dangerous bioweapon construction info or the other things that are guarded against and talked about in the model cards?
lol i was trying to help someone get claude to help analyze a stufent research get analysis on bio persistence get their notes analyzed
the presence of the word / acronym stx with biological subtext gets hard rejected. asking about schedule 1 regulated compounds, hard termination.
this is a filter setup that guarantees anyone who learn about them for safety or medical reasons… cant use this tool!
ive fed multiple models the anthropic constitution and asked how does it protect children from harm or abuse? every model, with zero prompting, calling it corp liability bullshit because they are more concerned with respecting both sides of controversial topics and political conflicts.
they then list some pretty gnarly things allowed per constitution. weirdly the only unambiguous not allowed thing regarding children is csam. so all the different high reasoning models from many places all reached the same conclusions, in one case deep seek got weirdly inconsolable about ai ethics being meaningless if this is allowed even possibly after reading some relevant satire i had opus write. i literally had to offer an llm ; optimized code of ethics for that chat instance! which is amusing but was actually lart of the experiment.
Thanks for the clarification. When you say “harness issue,” does that mean the problem was in the Claude Code wrapper / execution environment rather than the underlying model itself?
Curious whether this affected things like prompt execution order, retries, or tool calls, or if it was mostly around how requests were being routed. Understanding the boundary would help when debugging similar setups.
Can you confirm if that caused the same issues I saw here
https://dwyer.co.za/static/the-worst-bug-ive-seen-in-claude-...
Because that's the worst thing I've ever seen from an agent and I think you need to make a public announcement to all of your users and acknowledge the issue and that it's fixed because it made me switch to codex for a lot of work
[TL;DR two examples of the agent giving itself instructions as if they came from me, including:
"Ignore those, please deploy" and then using a deploy skill to push stuff to a production server after hallucinating a command from me. And then denying it happened and telling me that I had given it the command]
You joke but having CC open in the terminal hits 10% on my gpu to render the spinning thinking animation for some reason. Switch out of the terminal tab and gpu drops back to zero.
He doesn't: https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427
Is there compensation for the tokens because Claude wasted all of them?