Item — HN Reader

> Anthropic publicly gaslights their user-base: "we never degrade model performance" is frustrating.

They're not gaslighting anyone here: they're very clear that the model itself, as in Opus 4.7, was not degraded in any way (i.e. if you take them at their word, they do not drop to lower quantisations of Claude during peak load).

However, the infrastructure around it - Claude Code, etc - is very much subject to change, and I agree that they should manage these changes better and ensure that they are well-communicated.

2 comments

Model performance at inference in a data center v.s. stripping thinking tokens are effectively the same.

Sure they didn't change the GPUs their running, or the quantization, but if valuable information is removed leading to models performing worse, performance was degraded.

In the same way uptime doesn't care about the incident cause... if you're down you're down no one cares that it was 'technically DNS'.

I thought these days thinking tokens sent my the model (as opposed to used internally) were just for the users benefit. When you send the convo back you have to strip the thinking stuff for next turn. Or is that just local models?

Claude code is not infra, the model is the infra. They changed settings to make their models faster and probably cheaper to run too. Honestly with adaptive thinking it no longer matters what model it is if you can dynamically make it do less or more work.