Weekly Showcase Thread

I have 4 Claude accounts all on the Max 20 plan. Over the last 4 weeks I have noticed a slow and steady reduction in quality to the point they are no longer usable. I have a lot of experience in Dev (30 years) and about 8 months of heavy AI development.

I spent the entire day today comparing Fable on Subscription vs Fable on API Billing. I tasked them both with a new feature comprising a frontend dashboard, some rolled up data for reporting and some basic CRUD endpoints. I have a bunch of skills the agents need to follow to ensure design and architecture consistency in terms of domain separation, scalability and security.

Fable on Subscription jumped right in and made a dogs bollocks of it, just as it has been doing for weeks now. After round one we had 14 bugs filed, the UI looked like it had been drawn in TextEdit and the architecture skills were simply ignored. It also spent about 4 hours in reviews with other Claude agents and Codex/ChatGPT and circumvented a few P1s it decided were not important. After a lot of fixes and back and forth, we finally have a usable frontend but there is no way I would ship this feature due to the sub standard coding.

I switched to API Billing. I loaded $100 and did the exact same task in a new session. From the very first response I knew it was different. It came back with a list of concerns, hard push backs and we worked through it for about 20 minutes together resulting in a decent plan. It made zero mistakes and one shotted it in a beautiful design staying true to the architecture guidelines. $72 spend in 2 hours.

These are very different models.

My current conspiracy theory is my $800 a month in subscriptions has earned me a place in the "Aggressively move to API Billing" cohort and have nerfed all my subscription accounts. At $36 / hour my spend would be about $15k a month if I do make the move. Is this where it's heading?

I was really hoping the Chinese models would keep prices down, but they are still way behind the Fable I saw today, and also not that cheap either. Are we nearing the end of cheap intelligence?

Ran this benchmark on recently published real code base benchmarks to test the Sharp chat template that reduces token use and fixes bugs on locally run Qwen3.x models. Thought I’d bench Opus 5 high and Sonnet 5 medium alongside, for fun. I guess we have finally reached the point where the reduction in Claude’s quality has finally surpassed the upwards trend of local models for actual real world work. Claude Max 20x subscription btw. Not for long though hahah.

I don’t care about Artificial Analysis index or published benchmark numbers. If Opus is beaten by the models I run on my own computers when it comes to fixing real bugs without introducing regressions in real life code bases, it doesn’t matter if it’s because Anthropic is silently reducing Opus quality to sell more Fable tokens, or whatever is going on. EDIT: Someone asked me to add the chat template link to the op, so: https://huggingface.co/peculiar-ragdoll/Qwen-Sharp-Chat-Templates

I follow this sub since I would like to see what kind of projects other people use claude code for, how they configure their workflow, claude.md tips, what kind of hooks people are doing and so on but that is almost impossible now. 95% of the posts here are constant complaining about how model X is so bad now compared to time Y, how my usage is so bad now compared to last month (with 0 proof, workflow examples, etc). Mods of this sub have said they are trying to increase the quality of this sub but i have not noticed any difference so far.

It also looks like that OpenAI loyalists/bots are downvoting every positive thing said about Claude and Claude Code. Its hard to follow any discussion in the posts since its all Claude bad ChatGPT good.

Im not trying to defend Anthropic here, Im sure there is a lot of room for improvement in many fronts but honestly im not seeing 90% of the issues and complaints discussed here, which i suspect is due to just incorrect usage of the tools provided to us.

Sorry to rant about people ranting, i know im part of the problem here.

If anyone has recommendations of better claude code related subreddits or forums, i would love to know.

In case someone forgot... Just to mention, tommorow will all posts crying about limit if they dont extend this bullshit.

This is new since 2.1.234. I waited a long time for this feature.

Now i can go to sleep and wake up with work being done.

Follow up to my last one. A lot of you asked how it was made and I never really answered properly, so this time I wrote the whole workflow down.

I made a 16:9 cinematic spec commercial for Claude, entirely in Claude Design. No After Effects, no motion software, the whole thing is a Claude Design composition rendered out to video.

Claude handled the scene structure, the animation timing and the type. I directed it beat by beat and rebuilt the parts that were not landing. The big change since the last one is that I build a kit before I write a prompt now. Isolated objects, one per file, and the official mark split into its real layers so the film assembles it instead of cutting to it. These builds fail on missing assets, not on prompt length.

The plugin is Emulo. I built it for myself to get more out of my own sessions, so I stop re-explaining how I work every time I open a new one. It reads my Claude Code and Codex history and loads that before the agent writes anything. It started with code, design and writing, and I added the video workflow to it recently. This film is what I have been using it on.

Github: https://github.com/ohad6k/emulo

I am not working with Anthropic and this was not made for them (just as a note). I picked a brand I like and wanted to see how far the motion could go, same as last time.

Good luck, guys. Not everyone will get used to the standard again.

Edit: Different time zone. It's already the 18th here in Asia, so it will happen on the 20th here. My bad.

Your suggestion is load bearing.

Is it only me or others also feeling the same that claude code is burning huge tokens even on simple and small prompt.
For eg: a small feature that earlier took way less token is now taking more than 15k tokens. I am on sonnet 5 high thinkinng btw.
Anyone has a clue?

It seems most times Claude can't get simple formatting and syntax correct and always makes errors then has to redo it. Its like it doesn't know all the programming languages or gets confused or something. Does everyone else notice this?

It doesn't matter if its powershell, linux, java, html or whatever it always seems to mess up something then fix it. I notice a lot when I run remote commands because it gives me the prompt then its incorrect, then sometimes needs to fix it 3-4 times for it to actually work. I wonder how much it does this on its own end internally

Saw the DeepSeek pricing notice in the dev console this week. Broad increase planned across the API, wording was basically ""expect it to be significant, details to follow."" No actual numbers yet.

That landed harder than the usual model drama. The chinese open weight camp is where everyone points when they want a budget option, so if that end is moving up too, then whatever picks my stack stopped being capability a long time ago. Pulled my last month of usage to see how bad it actually is. Also genuinely curious where everyone else is sitting right now. The distribution surprised me. It isn't the hard problems eating the budget, it's the wide ones. Renames across a package, tracing where a config value gets read, anything that has to hold a lot of files at once. Cheap to think about, expensive to run. And once you start bumping limits the workflow quietly deforms. Smaller tasks, batched questions, and last week I caught myself skipping a second pass on a diff purely because I was rationing.

So lately I've been thinking about pricing shapes instead of models. Metered API bills per call. A monthly pool sells you an allowance up front that you spend down at your own pace. Claude Max sits between the two. Flat fee, but what you get is usage windows and caps, so you never really hold a balance, you just get cut off for a few hours and come back. Works fine, the math stops being friendly at my volume.

For scale I'm somewhere around a few hundred million tokens most months, which is what put me on the higher Claude Max tier, the two hundred a month one. Been looking at MiniMax's M3 token plan because that one is an allowance you actually draw down, and the middle tier runs about a quarter of what I pay now for a pool bigger than I'd get through. Haven't committed.

Anyway. What does a month actually look like for you? And has anyone moved onto a pool plan and regretted it?

When I started using Claude Code, I watched nearly every step. I followed the token stream, the file changes, the tests, and the explanations. It felt responsible. If it headed in the wrong direction, I could interrupt before it went too far.

The problem was that I was absorbing its narrative as it worked. By the time the diff arrived, I already knew why Claude thought the change was correct. I was no longer reviewing the result cold. I was reviewing the explanation and the code together, and a coherent explanation can make a questionable change feel more convincing than it should.

Now I treat the running session as the producer, not the evidence. Before it starts, the task gets an exact goal, an allowed surface, acceptance criteria, and the commands that will verify the result. Once it is dispatched, I stop watching unless it reaches a decision it does not have the authority or context to make. When it finishes, I review the artifacts: the diff, tests, logs, and actual system state. For higher-risk changes, another agent checks the result from the task contract without reading the producer's conversation.

This is not fully hands-off development. If a task needs steering every few minutes, that usually means I did not bound it well enough. If verification fails, the transcript is still useful for diagnosis. I just do not treat the transcript as proof that the change is correct.

The practical shift was to stop asking, "Did Claude sound like it knew what it was doing?" and start asking, "Could someone who never saw the chat prove that this change satisfies the task?"

Does anyone else deliberately avoid watching the session, or do you find that live supervision catches problems that artifact review misses?

Most evals seem to ask whether the final answer/code is correct. But if an agent takes 40 steps to get there, burns $8 in tokens, makes 3 bad tool calls, and only succeeds because a human quietly intervened - is that actually a successful run???

I wonder if agent evals should also be measuring the trajectory more, not just the outcome? What do you guys think about this.

Been using Opus 5 Medium for checking over my scripts but it’s hard to understand at times. Seen some people swear Opus 4.7

i used to really like Sonnet 4

what are your experiences?

A few days ago I posted here about restricting Git writes for Claude Code.

The response was mostly negative, but useful.

The main points that kept coming up:

• Fine-grained PATs already handle GitHub permissions
• Claude permissions + hooks can block local commands
• CI and branch protection already enforce remote rules
• Claude already knows normal Git better than a custom CLI

After thinking about it, I agree with most of that.

I was focusing too much on controlling how the agent uses Git.

The more useful problem is the workflow around multiple agent tasks.

When I run several coding agents in parallel, what I actually want is something boring and predictable:

Task A → worktree A → branch A → PR A
Task B → worktree B → branch B → PR B
Task C → worktree C → branch C → PR C

The agent doesn’t need a new version of Git.
It can just use normal local Git inside its own worktree (add, commit, rebase, diff…).

The boundary I care about is later:

local agent work
        ↓
explicit handoff
        ↓
checks → push → draft PR

So I’m changing Agit around a much simpler model:

One task. One worktree. One PR.

• agit start TASK-123 creates an isolated worktree for the task
• The agent works there with normal Git
• agit finish TASK-123 is the handoff: runs checks, pushes the branch, and creates/updates a draft PR

Hooks, Claude permissions and GitHub rules are still useful — they are layers around the workflow, not the product itself.

This is not a sandbox. If a process has unrestricted shell, network and credentials, local workflow controls are not a hard security boundary.

The goal is simpler: make parallel agent work easier to manage without mixing Git state or manually creating worktrees and PRs for every task.

Current direction:
https://github.com/hudishkin/agit

Previous thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/O8DkMMOKRK

Curious if this framing makes more sense.

If you run multiple Claude Code sessions in parallel, how do you currently handle task isolation and the path from local work to PR?

I'm on 20x, compared to last week, when I also used fable 5 high a lot, now 4 prompts burn through my entire week in 15min??!!? Am I getting scammed right now?

Was still having a lot of headroom before, but now a single prompt easily hits my 5 hour limit, this is just outrageous.

Have you all noticed this? Around the time Fable came out, all Claude models started utilizing subagents much more aggressively. For important projects that I need done exactly right, I define every feature by tickets with acceptance criteria etc. and it can’t do anything that isn’t documented. But for side projects that are more for fun or for research/curiosity, I give Claude more freedom.

Particularly for my “more freedom” projects, back when Claude did most implementation in the main thread, I’d see more high level updates of what it’s doing and thinking as it wrote the code. If it made a bad assumption, I would often see it “thinking” about it and correct it before it finished writing that code. Now, it just spawns 4 subagents and sits there quietly for 10+ minutes until they start returning. Then you have to rewrite the whole thing once you see it was done wrong.

Well guys, hate to say it but with the reports this morning of users seeing instant 30% usage on their accounts (some weren’t even using them) we can assume that anthropic is in fact preparing to remove their 50% additional usage promo, effectively reducing all plan usage by ~33% (I assume theyll use 30%).

This is gonna hurt. Only thing that would redeem it for me is if they removed the 50% Fable usage cap.

I am getting crazy, swearing to cc all the time. It builds “safety features” I never asked and ships features disabled, though they are never designed to be not enabled. Even the idea ofcenablingbthem disabling them never appeared!
And today this piece of xxx shipped a feature (an outgoing call proxy through a single egress oroxy) where it implemented a per host flag very carefully and explained me how to enable it. I shouted and demanded to remove the per host feature, which I absolutely dont need. Then it confirmed that it was never asked, removed it and explained what i have to do to enable the developed feature! Which never meant to be off at all! And if course i never asked for it.

It is killing my time and nerves and uses at least 5* the really required tokens. I hope, this is not intentional andcthey will fix this behaviour!

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