Claude Code CLI was broken

3 days ago (github.com)

At least this breakage is clear & obvious.

I did some testing of configuring Claude CLI sometime ago via .claude json config files - in particular I tested:

- defining MCP servers manually in config (instead of having the CLI auto add them)

- playing with various combinations of ’permissions` arrays

What I discovered was that Claude is not only vibe coded, but basic local logic around config reading seems to also work on the basis of "vibes".

- it seemed like different parts of the CLI codebase did or didn't adhere to the permissions arrays.

- at one point it told me it didn't have permission to read the .claude directory & as a result ran bash commands to search my entire filesystem looking for MCP server URLs for it to provide me with a list of available MCP servers

- when restricted to only be able to read from a working directory, at various points it told me I had denied it read permissions to that same working directory & also freely read from other directories on my system without prompting

- restricting webfetch permissions is extremely hit & miss (tested with Little Snitch in alert mode)

---

I have not reported any of the above as Github issues, nor do I intend to. I had a think about why I won't & it struck me that there's a funny dichotomy with AI tools:

1. all of the above are things the typical vibe coder stereotypes I've encountered simply do not really care deeply about

2. people that care about the above things are less likely to care enough about AI tools to commit their personal time to reporting & debugging these issues

There's bound to be exceptions to these stereotypes out there but I doubt there's sufficient numbers to make AI tooling good.

  • The permission thing is old and unresolved. Claude, at some points or stages? of vibe-coding, can be become able to execute commands that are in the Deny list (ie: rm) without any confirmation.

    I highly suspect no one in claude is concerned or working on this.

    • I think at some point the model itself is asked if the command is dangerous, and can decide it's not and bypass some restrictions.

      In any case, any blacklist guardrails will fail at some point, because RL seems to make the models very good at finding alternative ways to do what they think they need to do (i.e. if they are blocked, they'll often pipe cat stuff to a bash script and run that). The only sane way to protect for this is to run it in a container / vm.

      2 replies →

    • I had Claude run rm once, and when I asked it when did I permiss that operation it told me oops. I actually have the transcript if anybody wants to see it.

      2 replies →

  • Those stereotypes look more like misconceptions (to put it charitably). Vibe coding doesn't mean one doesn't care about software working correctly, it only means not caring about how the code looks.

    So unless you're also happy about not reporting bugs to project managers and people using low-code tools, I urge you to reconsider the basis for your perspective.

    • This isn't remotely true. Vibe coding explicitly does not care about whether software works correctly because the fundamental tenet is not needing to understand how the software works (& by extension being unable to verify whether it works correctly).

      6 replies →

    • Nobody cares how the code looks, this is not an art project. But we certainly care if the code looks totally unmaintainable, which vibe-coded slop absolutely does.

      12 replies →

  • > it seemed like different parts of the CLI codebase did or didn't adhere to the permissions arrays.

    I’ve noticed the same thing and it frustrates me almost every day.

    • CC works amazingly well but I agree the permissions stuff is buggy and annoying. I have had times where it’s repeatedly asked me for permission for something I had already cleared, then I got frustrated and said “no” to the prompt, then asked it, “why are you asking me for permission for things I’ve already granted?” Then it said “sorry” and stopped asking. I might be naive but don’t we want permissions to be a deterministic, procedural component rather than something the AI gets to decide?

  • I get the same feeling, but I think its not just the code agents.

    All the AI websites feel extremely clunky and slow.

  • This is why I run claude inside a thin jail. If I need it to work on some code, I make a nullfs mount to it in there.

    Because indeed, one of the first times i played around with claude, I asked it to make a change to my emacs config, which is in a non-standard location. It then wanted to search my entire home directory for it(it did ask permission though).

  • I’d urge you to report it anyway. As someone that does use these tools I’m always on the lookout for other people pointing this type of stuff out. Like the .claude directory usage does irk me. Also the concise telegraphing on how some of the bash commands work bug me. Like why can it run some commands without asking me? I know why, I’ve seen the code, but that crap should be clearer in the UI. The first time it executed a bash command without asking me I was confused and somewhat livid because it defied my expectations. I actually read the crap it puts out because it couldn’t code its way out of a paper bag without supervision.

  • Not sure the comments are debating the semantics of vibe coding or confusing ourselves with generalizing anecdotal experiences (or both). So here's my two cents.

    I use LLMs on a daily basis. With the rules/commands/skills in place the code generated works, the app is functional, and the business is happy it shipped today and not 6 months from now. Now, as as super senior SWE, I have learned through my professional experiences (now an expert?) to double check your work (and that of your team) to make sure the 'logical' flows are implemented to (my personal) standard of what quality software should 'look' like. I say personal standard since my colleagues have their own preferred standard, which we like to bikeshed during company time (a company standard is after all made of the aggregate agreed upon standards of the personal experiences of the experts in the room).

    Today, from my own personal (expert) anecdotal experiences, ALL SOTA LLMs generate functional/working code. But the quality of the 'slop' varies on the model, prompts, tooling, rules, skills, and commands. Which boils down to "the tool is only as good as the dev that wields it". Assuming the right tool for the right job. Assuming you have the experiences to determine the right tool for the right job. Assuming you have taken the opportunities to experience multiple jobs to pair the right tool.

    Which leads me to, "Vibe coding" was initially coined (IMO) to describe those without any 'expertise' producing working/functional code/apps using an LLM. Nowadays, it seems like vibe coding means ANYONE using LLMs to generate code, including the SWE experts (like myself of course). We've been chasing quality software pre-LLM, and now we adamantly yell and scream and kick and shout about quality software from the comment sections because of LLM. I'm beginning to think quality software is a mirage we all chase, and like all mirages its just a little bit further.

    All roads that lead to 'shipping' are made with slop. Some roads have slop corners, slop holes, misspelled slop, slop nouns, slop verbs, slop flows and slop data. It's just with LLMs we build the roads to 'shipping' faster.

  • No matter what which stereotypes you think the developers adhere to, your should file the bugs. Or stop complaining about them.

    • Right? The general case just doesn't make sense to me when people do that, where "that" is "I have a problem with person/organization, but rather than talk to person/organization about thing, I'm going to complain about it to everyone except person/organization and somehow be surprised that problem never gets fixed"! Like, how do you want things to get better?

      1 reply →

    • These are "AI"-addicted developers that you're talking to.

      They have been tricked into a world-view which validates their continual, lazy use of high-tech auto-generators.

      They have been tricked into gleefully opting in to their own deskilling.

      Expecting an "AI"-addicted developer to file a bug is like expecting an MSNBC or Fox News viewer to attend a town meeting.

      The goal of "AI" products is to foster laziness, dependency, and isolation in their users.

      Expecting these users to take any sort of action outside of further communication with their LLM chatbots does not square with the social function of these products.

      Edit (response to the guy/LLM below me):

      Hackernews comments written by fearmongering LLM idiots will tell me to "keep an open mind" about dogshit LLM chatbots until the day I die.

      LLM technology is garbage.

      If these tools are changing the world, they're only doing so by:

      1. Dramatically facilitating the promulgation of idiotic delusions

      2. Making enterprise software far, far more vulnerable than it was even in the recent past

      3 replies →

I have to chuckle that a bug like this happens after reading that other thread about the Claude Code creator running like 5 terminal agents and another 5-10 in the web UI.

We vibing out here.

  • I think its 25 agents now, they keep increasing. one of the agent has started posting on twitter. his productivity is up 200x, and anthropic has started making trillions in profit.

    • In one of the pictures the Claude Code author had 2.4m tokens on his last his prompt.

      I don't understand how that would fit the context window. But with prompts like that your workday would be very boring if you had to run one single agent and wait for it to be done.

  • 10x productivity, yo.

    • I'm up to 29.8x productivity in the first week of 2026 by continually running 12 concurrent agents, each with 3 independent sub-agents. Each third sub-agent generates new prompts for its corresponding agent by engaging with a custom-defined MCP protocol.

      3 replies →

  • Yeah after that other thread, I feel a lot less comfortable giving Claude code access to anything that can't be immediately nuked and reloaded from a fresh copy.

It's fixed as of nine minutes ago: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/pull/16686

I'm surprised that they don't do an integration test in CI where they actually start the app. (Since that's all you need to catch it)

  • We're trying to make billions of dollars here, we don't have time to do crazy things like test basic functionality before shipping changes to all live users at once

  • Ironically that might have passed, because this didn't break the version, this broke all versions when the global referenced changelog was published. It wasn't the new version itself that was broken.

    But testing new version would have been downloading the not-yet-updated working changelog.

    There are ways to deal with this of course, and I'm not defending the very vibey way that claude-code is itself developed.

  • I just set this up for the project I'm working on last week, and felt dirty because it took me a couple of months to get to it. There are like 5 or 6 users.

    There's something so unnerving about the people pushing the AI frontier being sloppy about testing. I know, it's just a CLI wrapped around the AI itself, but it suggests to me that the culture around testing there isn't as tight and thorough as I'd like it to be.

  • Considering how shitty tests my coworkers are producing with Claude, I'm not all that surprised.

What's funny to me is that the amount of "same here", "+1" comments are still prominent even if GitHub introduced an emoji system. It's like most people intentionally don't want to use that.

  • Yeah me too.

    (Just kidding.) Some of it is unawareness of the 'subscribe' button I believe, occasionally you'll see someone tell people to cut it out and someone else will reply to the effect of wanting to know when it's fixed etc. But it's also just lazy participation, echoing an IRL conversation I suppose, that you see anywhere - replied instead of up votes on Reddit and to a slightly lesser extent here for example.

  • There is no emoji for "me too", if you think about it.

    So what should one pick? The rocket, the thumbs up?

    Also the emoji won't turn into a notification to steal the dev attention and make him fix the thing lok

  • Probably ego thing. With emoji you’re just an increment in a counter, but with a comment you can see your whole profile.

workaround from the issue discussion:

```

  Problem: Claude Code 2.1.0 crashes with Invalid Version: 2.1.0 (2026-01-07) because the CHANGELOG.md format changed to include dates in version headers (e.g., ## 2.1.0 (2026-01-07)). The code parses these headers as object keys and tries to sort them using semver's .gt() function, which can't parse version strings with date suffixes.

  Affected functions: W37, gw0, and an unnamed function around line 3091 that fetches recent release notes.

  Fix: Wrap version strings with semver.coerce() before comparison. Run these 4 sed commands on cli.js:

  CLI_JS="$HOME/.nvm/versions/node/$(node -v)/lib/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js"

  # Backup first
  cp "$CLI_JS" "$CLI_JS.backup"

  # Patch 1: Fix ve2.gt sort (recent release notes)
  sed -i 's/Object\.keys(B)\.sort((Y,J)=>ve2\.gt(Y,J,{loose:!0})?-1:1)/Object.keys(B).sort((Y,J)=>ve2.gt(ve2.coerce(Y),ve2.coerce(J),{loose:!0})?-1:1)/g' "$CLI_JS"

  # Patch 2: Fix gw0 sort
  sed -i 's/sort((G,Z)=>Wt\.gt(G,Z,{loose:!0})?1:-1)/sort((G,Z)=>Wt.gt(Wt.coerce(G),Wt.coerce(Z),{loose:!0})?1:-1)/g' "$CLI_JS"

  # Patch 3: Fix W37 filter
  sed -i 's/filter((\[J\])=>!Y||Wt\.gt(J,Y,{loose:!0}))/filter(([J])=>!Y||Wt.gt(Wt.coerce(J),Y,{loose:!0}))/g' "$CLI_JS"

  # Patch 4: Fix W37 sort
  sed -i 's/sort((\[J\],\[X\])=>Wt\.gt(J,X,{loose:!0})?-1:1)/sort(([J],[X])=>Wt.gt(Wt.coerce(J),Wt.coerce(X),{loose:!0})?-1:1)/g' "$CLI_JS"

  Note: If installed via different method, adjust CLI_JS path accordingly (e.g., /usr/lib/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js).

```

I'm not usually one to pile on to a developer for releasing a bug but this is pretty special. The nature of the bug (a change in format for a changelog markdown file causes the entire app to break) and the testing it would have taken to uncover it (literally any) makes this one especially embarrassing for Anthropic.

  • In the specific commit, what seems like a bot or automated script added changelog entries for 3 new versions in a single commit, which is odd for an automated script to do. And only the latest version had the date added.

    https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/commit/870624fc158...

    That actions-user seem to be mostly maintaining the Changelog but the commits does not seem consistent with an automated script. I see a few cases of rewriting previous change log entries or moving entries from one version to another which any kind of automation would not be doing. Seems like human error and poor testing.

They really have “anthropics” not “anthropic” on GitHub? That’s a shame, it looks like typosquatting. If people are taught to trust that it’s easier to get them to download my evil OpenA1 package.

this is funny in context of their main dev advocate constantly bragging about how claude writes all of his code for claude code cli....

  • Claude may write all the code but this is an oversight from the dev. Do people think these agents are acting independently? If they wanted or had thought of tests that would catch this then they would have them! The use or non use of LLM is irrelevant. I find the discourse around this all so strange.

    On the other hand people ask "where is all the amazing software that has been vibe coded, I haven't seen it?". So Claude Code is two things at once (1) incredibly popular and innovative software that's loved by a huge amount of devs (2) vibe coded buggy crap. If you think this bug is the result of vibe coding, frankly you should look at Claude Code as a whole and be impressed with vibe coding. If Claude CLI has been "vibe coded" then vibe coding must be fine because I've been using Claude Code for probably 8 months and it's been a pretty smooth experience, and an incredibly valuable tool.

As I commented [1] on the earlier Claude Code post, there's an issue [2] that has the following comment:

> While we are always monitoring instances of this error and and looking to fix them, it's unlikely we will ever completely eliminate it due to how tricky concurrency problems are in general.

This is an extraordinary admission. It is perfectly possible (easy, even, relative to many programming challenges) to write a tool like this without getting the design so wrong that the same bug keeps happening in so many different ways that you have to publicly admit you're powerless to fix them all.

[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6836

Even if it broke after some sort of vibe coding session, the fact that we’re now pushing these tools to their limits are what’s allowing Anthropic and Boris getting a lot of useful insights to improve the models and experience further! So yeah, buckle up, bumps expected

With the issues since November where one has to add environment variables, block statsig hosts, modify ~/.claude.json, etc. does anyone have experience in managed setups where versions are centrally set and bumped on company level? Is this worth the hassle?

Work around from comments:

  rm -rf ~/.claude/cache
  mkdir -p ~/.claude/cache
  echo "# Changelog" > ~/.claude/cache/changelog.md
  chmod 444 ~/.claude/cache/changelog.md

I wonder when they will make the support for lsp-tool (plugin) working properly finally.

  • I created a workspace local extension in VS Code that uses the VS Code API to let Claude Code open files in VS Code as tabs and save them (to apply save participants like Prettier in case it is not used via the CLI) and to get diagnostics (like for TypeScript where there is no option to get workspace-wide diagnostics and you have to go file by file). I taught Claude Code to use this extension via a skill file and it works perfectly, much more reliably than its own IDE LSP integration.

It is frustrating how often things break in CC. Luckily issues are quickly fixed, but it worries me that the QA / automated testing is brittle. Hope they get out of this start-up mode and deliver Enterprise grade software.

Maybe try opencode

  • Is it better than CC? Can it use my subscription, or is it API-only? I've seen it mentioned, but not many people elaborate on the performance.

    • It's about the same as CC. You can use subscriptions and API. It works well with basically all the providers as well - no need for hacks over Claude-like endpoints. Most big plugins I've dealt with support both CC and OC at the same time.

    • You can use subscriptions.

      I like it but I am not too deep into the whole agentic coding business.

huge changelist and issue was fixed very quickly. didnt affect me. nice work Boris

Claude Code creator said Claude wrote 100% of his code last month: https://xcancel.com/bcherny/status/2004897269674639461

  • I read your comment as a joke, but in case if was a defense, or is taken as a defense by others, let me help you punch up your writing for you:

    "[Person who is financially incentivized to make unverifiable claims about the utility of the tool they helped build] said [tool] [did an unverified and unverifiable thing] last month"

    • "Claude Code creator relied so heavily on Claude Code that he broke Claude Code"

  • >In the last thirty days, I landed 259 PRs -- 497 commits, 40k lines added, 38k lines removed.

    Is anyone with or without AI approaching anywhere near that speed of delivery?

    I don’t think my whole company matches that amount. It sounds super unreasonable, just doing a sanity check.

    • 40K - 38K means 2K lines of actual code.

      Which could mean that code was refactored and then built on top of. Or it could just mean that Claude had to correct itself multiple times over those 459 commits.

      Does correcting your mistakes from yesterday’s ChatGPT binge episode count as progress…maybe?

      3 replies →

    • AI approaches can churn code more than a human would.

      Lines of code has always been a questionable metric of velocity, and AI makes that more true than ever.

      4 replies →

    • Is it possible for humans to review that amount of code?

      My understanding of the current state of AI in software engineering is that humans are allowed (and encouraged) to use LLMs to write code. BUT the person opening a PR must read and understand that code. And the code must be read and reviewed by other humans before being approved.

      I could easily generate that amount of code and make it write and pass tests. But I don't think I could have it reviewed by the rest of my team - while I am also taking part in reviewing code written by other people on my team at that pace.

      Perhaps they just aren't human reviewing the code? Then it is feasible to me. But it would go against all of the rules that I have personally encountered at my companies and that peers have told me they have at their companies.

      3 replies →

    • Read that as "speed of lines of code", which is very VERY very different from "speed of delivery."

      Lines of code never correlated with quality or even progress. Now they do even less.

      I've been working a lot more with coding agents, but my convictions around the core principles of software development have not changed. Just the iteration speed of certain parts of the process.

      1 reply →

    • You're counting wheel revolutions, not miles travelled. Not an accurate proxy measurement unless you can verify the wheels are on the road for the entire duration.

    •   ratatui_ruby % git remote -v
        origin https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby (fetch)
        origin https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby (push)
        
        ratatui_ruby % git checkout v0.8.0
        HEAD is now at dd3407a chore: release v0.8.0
        
        ratatui_ruby % git log --reverse --format="%ci" | head -1 | read first; \
        echo "First Commit: $first\nHEAD Commit:  $(git show -s --format='%ci' HEAD --)" 
        First Commit: 2025-12-22 00:40:22 -0600
        HEAD Commit:  2026-01-05 08:57:58 -0600
        
        ratatui_ruby % git log --numstat --pretty=tformat: | \
        awk '$1 != "-" { \
            if ($3 ~ /\./) { ext=$3; sub(/.*\./, "", ext) } else { ext="(no-ext)" } \
            if (ext ~ /^(txt|ansi|lock)$/) next; \
            add[ext]+=$1; rem[ext]+=$2 \
        } \
        END { for (e in add) print e, add[e], rem[e] }' | \
        sort -k2 -nr | \
        awk 'BEGIN { \
            print "---------------------------------------"; \
            printf "%-12s %12s %12s\n", "EXT", "ADDED", "REMOVED"; \
            print "---------------------------------------" \
        } \
        { \
            sum_a += $2; sum_r += $3; \
            printf "%-12s %12d %12d\n", $1, $2, $3 \
        } \
        END { \
            print "---------------------------------------"; \
            printf "%-12s %12d %12d\n", "SUM:", sum_a, sum_r; \
            print "---------------------------------------" \
        }'
        ---------------------------------------
        EXT                 ADDED      REMOVED
        ---------------------------------------
        rb                  51705        18913
        md                  20037        13167
        rs                   8576         3001
        (no-ext)             4072         2157
        rbs                  2139          569
        rake                 1632          317
        yml                  1431          153
        patch                 894          894
        erb                   300           30
        toml                  118           39
        gemspec                62           10
        gitignore              27            4
        css                    22            0
        yaml                   18            2
        ruby-version            1            1
        png                     0            0
        gitkeep                 0            0
        ---------------------------------------
        SUM:                91034        39257
        ---------------------------------------
      
        
        ratatui_ruby % cloc .
             888 text files.
             584 unique files.                                          
             341 files ignored.
        
        github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 2.06  T=0.26 s (2226.1 files/s, 209779.6 lines/s)
        --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Language                      files          blank        comment           code
        --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Ruby                            305           4792          10413          20458
        Markdown                         60           1989            256           4741
        Rust                             32            645            530           4400
        Text                            168            523              0           4358
        YAML                              8            316             17            961
        ERB                               3             20              4            246
        Bourne Again Shell                2             24             90            150
        TOML                              5             16             10             53
        CSS                               1              3              8             11
        --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        SUM:                            584           8328          11328          35378
        --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Meta comment, but the pace of this is so exciting. Feels like a new AAA MMO release or something, having such a confluence of attention and a unified front.