Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with the Feb updates
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Not claude code specific, but I've been noticing this on Opus 4.6 models through Copilot and others as well. Whenever the phrase "simplest fix" appears, it's time to pull the emergency break. This has gotten much, much worse over the past few weeks. It will produce completely useless code, knowingly (because up to that phrase the reasoning was correct) breaking things.
Today another thing started happening which are phrases like "I've been burning too many tokens" or "this has taken too many turns". Which ironically takes more tokens of custom instructions to override.
Also claude itself is partially down right now (Arp 6, 6pm CEST): https://status.claude.com/
Ive been noticing something similar recently. If somethings not working out itll be like "Ok this isnt working out, lets just switch to doing this other thing instead you explicitly said not to do".
For example I wanted to get VNC working with PopOS Cosmic and itll be like ah its ok well just install sway and thatll work!
I just experienced this some time ago and could not sign in still.
Their status page shows everything is okay.
Maybe it's because I spend a lot of time breaking up tasks beforehand to be highly specific and narrow, but I really don't run into issues like this at all.
A trivial example: whenever CC suggests doing more than one thing in a planning mode, just have it focus on each task and subtask separately, bounding each one by a commit. Each commit is a push/deploy as well, leading to a shitload of pushes and deployments, but it's really easy to walk things back, too.
Disconcerting for sure, but from a business point of view you can understand where they're at; afaiui they're still losing money on basically every query and simultaneously under huge pressure to show that they can (a) deliver this product sustainably at (b) a price point that will be affordable to basically everyone (eg, similar market penetration to smartphones).
The constraints of (b) limit them from raising the price, so that means meeting (a) by making it worse, and maybe eventually doing a price discrimination play with premium tiers that are faster and smarter for 10x the cost. But anything done now that erodes the market's trust in their delivery makes that eventual premium tier a harder sell.
imo cramming invisible subagents are entirely wrong, models suffer information collapse as they will all tend to agree with each other and then produce complete garbage. Good for Anthropic though as that's metered token usage.
Instead, orchestrate all agents visibly together, even when there is hierarchy. Messages should be auditable. Other tools are significantly better at this (e.g. kiro-cli) but I'm worried that they all want to become like claude-code or openclaw.
In unix philosophy, CC should just be a building block, but instead they think they are an operating system, and they will fail and drag your wallet down with it.
I’ve tried to use Claude code for a month now. It has a 100% failure rate so far.
Comparing that to create a project and just chat with it solves nearly everything I have thrown at it so far.
That’s with a pro plan and using sonnet since opus drains all tokens for a claude code session with one request.
StanAngeloff