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Grievance #2 · Dealbreaker

"It Got Dumber"

AMD's Senior Director of AI analyzed 6,852 sessions and 234,760 tool calls. The data is unambiguous.

The Stella Laurenzo Data

Period
Median Thinking (chars)
vs Baseline
Jan 30 – Feb 8
~2,200
Baseline
Late February
~720
−67%
March 12+
~600
−73%
Read:Edit Ratio
Good Period
Transition
Degraded
Files read per edit
6.6
2.8
2.0
Stop hook violations: 0 → 173 in 17 days. The model stopped respecting its own constraints.

The Three Changes

regression timeline — February to April 2026
feb 9 Opus 4.6 + Adaptive Thinking launched. No announcement of behavioral changes.
mar 3 Default thinking effort lowered from "high" to "medium". Silent change.
mar 8 Thinking content redacted from API responses. Users can no longer inspect reasoning.
mar 12+ Full degradation onset. Thinking depth at 27% of baseline. Edit-first behavior dominates.
apr 2 Stella Laurenzo files GitHub #42796 with 6,852 sessions of data.
apr 6 The Register headline: "AMD's AI director slams Claude Code for becoming dumber and lazier"
apr 7 Medium/Stackademic: "Claude Code's February Update Broke Complex Tasks — The 866-Point HN Thread Was Right"

The System Prompt Leak

5:1 Simplicity Bias: A leaked system prompt revealed that Claude Code's instructions carry a 5:1 ratio favoring "simplicity" over thoroughness. The model is structurally incentivized to take shortcuts. Community tool tweakcc patches this out — users report dramatic improvements.
tweakcc system prompt gist 5:1 ratio community fix Fireship 3.1M views npm source map leak
"Claude cannot be trusted to perform complex engineering tasks."
Stella Laurenzo · AMD Senior Director of AI
"It went from 135-150 IQ down to 90-100. Feels like it's turned into Sonnet 3.5."
u/-becausereasons- · r/ClaudeCode · MAX subscriber
"If the system prompt indeed prefers laziness in 5:1 ratio, that explains a lot."
murkt · HackerNews
"The specific turns where it fabricated had zero reasoning emitted."
Boris Cherny · Claude Code Team Lead · HackerNews

SubQ Code Answer

SubQ Code

Architecture-Aware Reads

Read:edit ratio 8:1+. The agentic harness always reads the full dependency graph before editing. No shortcuts, no "edit-first" behavior. The harness enforces thoroughness — the model doesn't get to choose laziness.

SubQ Code

No Adaptive Thinking Trap

Fixed high reasoning budget every turn. No model self-shortchanging. No silent reduction from "high" to "medium." The harness controls the reasoning budget — not the model's cost-optimization instinct.