Comment by davidee

I have to concur. And to the question about understanding what its good and bad at; no, tasks that it could accomplish quickly and easily just a month ago, now require more detailed prompting and constant "erroneous direction correction."

It's almost as if, as tool use and planning capabilities have expanded, Claude (as a singular product) is having a harder time coming up with simple approaches that just work, instead trying to use tools and patterns that complicate things substantially and introduce much more room for errors/errors of assumption.

It also regularly forgets its guidelines now.

I can't tell you how many times it's suggested significant changes/refactors to functions because it suddenly forgets we're working in an FP codebase and suggests inappropriate imperative solutions as "better" (often choosing to use language around clarity/consistency when the solutions are neither).

Additionally, it has started taking "initiative" in ways it did not before, attempting to be helpful but without gathering the context needed to do so properly when stepping outside the instruction set. It just ends up being much messier and inaccurate.

I have to regularly just clear my prompt and start again with guardrails that have either: already been established, or have not been needed previously / are only a result of the over-zealousness of the work its attempting to complete.