Anthropic silently downgraded cache TTL from 1h → 5M on March 6th
Cache TTL appears to have silently regressed from 1h to 5m around early March 2026, causing significant quota and cost inflation Summary Analysis of raw Claude Code session JSONL files spanning Jan...
Has anybody else noticed a pretty significant shift in sentiment when discussing Claude/Codex with other engineers since even just a few months ago? Specifically because of the secret/hidden nature of these changes.
I keep getting the sense that people feel like they have no idea if they are getting the product that they originally paid for, or something much weaker, and this sentiment seems to be constantly spreading. Like when I hear Anthropic mentioned in the past few weeks, it's almost always in some negative context.
A month ago the company I work at with over 400 engineers decided to cancel all IDE subscriptions (Visual Studio, JetBrains, Windsurf, etc.) and move everyone over to Claude Code as a "cost-saving measure" (along with firing a bunch of test engineers). There was no migration plan - the EVP of Technology just gave a demo showing 2 greenfield projects he'd built with Claude Opus over a weekend and told everyone to copy how he worked. A week later the EVP had to send out an email telling people to stop using Opus because they were burning through too many tokens.
Claude seems to be getting nerfed every week since we've switched. I wonder how our EVP is feeling now.
Pretty bad decision on his part. I've been telling other engineers within my company who felt threatened by AI that this would happen. That prices would rise and the marginal cost for changes to big codebases would start to exceed the cost of an engineer's salary. API credits are expensive, especially for huge contexts, and sometimes the model will use $200 in credits trying to solve a problem that could be fixed in an hour by a good engineer with enough context.
It kind of reminds me of the joke where a plumber charges $500 for a 5 minute visit. When the client complains the plumber says it's $50 for labor and $450 for knowing how to fix the problem.
lsdmtme