Comment by StanAngeloff
8 hours ago
That is the kind of thing that I've been fighting by being super explicit in CLAUDE.md. For whatever reason, instead of being much more thorough and making sure that files are being changed only after fully understanding the scope of the change (behaviour prior to Feb/Mar), Claude would just jump to the easiest fix now, with no backwards compatibility thinking and to hell with all existing tests. What is even worse is I've seen it try and edit files before even reading them on a couple of occasions, which is a big red flag. (/effort max)
Another thing that worked like magic prior to Feb/Mar was how likely Claude was to load a skill whenever it deduced that a skill might be useful. I personally use [superpowers][1] a lot, and I've noticed that I have to be very explicit when I want a specific skill to be used - to the point that I have to reference the skill by name.
I did not use the previous version of Opus to notice the difference, but Sonnet 4.6 seems optimized to output the shortest possible answer. Usually it starts with a hack and if you challenge it, it will instead apologize and say to look at a previous answer with the smallest code snippet it can provide. Agentic isn't necessarily worse but ideating and exploring is awful compared to 4.5
I did my usual thing today where I asked a Sonnet 4.6 agent to code review a proposed design plan that was drafted by Opus 4.6 - I do this lately before I delved into the implementation. What it came back with was a verbose output suggesting that a particular function `newMoneyField` be renamed throughout the doc to a name it fabricated `newNumeyField`. And the thing was that the design document referenced the correct function name more than a few dozen times.
This was a first for me with Sonnet. It completely veered off the prompt it was given (review a design document) and instead come out with a verbose suggestion to do a mechanical search and replace to use this newly fabricated function name - that it event spelled incorrectly. I had to Google numey to make sure Sonnet wasn't outsmarting me.
Superpowers, Serena, Context7 feel like requried plugins to me. Serena in particular feels like a secret weapon sometimes. But superpowers (with "brainstorm" keyword) might be the thing that helps people complaining about quality issues.