<\/p>\n
Over the last few weeks, social media has been filled with complaints about Anthropic’s Claude Code feeling slower and dumber, which was evident in the coding quality and the increased memory issues. Anthropic has now confirmed that its AI coding tool was indeed experiencing issues as it released a post-mortem on Thursday, revealing what went wrong with the tool.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), ClaudeDevs, an account affiliated with Anthropic, wrote, \u201cOver the past month, some of you reported Claude Code’s quality had slipped. We investigated and published a post-mortem on the three issues we found. All are fixed in v2.1.116+ and we\u2019ve reset usage limits for all subscribers.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cThe issues stemmed from Claude Code and the Agent SDK harness, which also impacted Cowork since it runs on the SDK. The models themselves didn’t regress, and the Claude API was not affected,\u201d it added.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Forums like Reddit and X have been filled with complaints about Claude Code slowing down and feeling worse for weeks. Users speculated that the decline in quality may be an effort by Anthropic to save money.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cSince last week this has been noticeably slow\u2026 like taking minutes to read a simple document\u2026 writing the responses line by line and taking its time to do so\u2026\u201d wrote one user on Reddit.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cClaude Code has become so superficial and stupid I can’t trust anything it does anymore,\u201d complained another user.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cI\u2019m trying to figure out if it is nerfing or that it basically shits itself with the 1m context limit when you sandwich different tasks in the same thread. Not sure \u2014 feels like a downgrade!\u201d another user complained.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Anthropic\u2019s post-mortem traced the reports of Claude Code<\/a> quality issues to three separate updates rolled out between early March and mid-April.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve traced these reports to three separate changes that affected Claude Code, the Claude Agent SDK, and Claude Cowork. The API was not impacted,\u201d the company wrote in its blog post.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n First, Anthropic had lowered the default \u201creasoning effort\u201d from high to medium in early March to reduce long wait times that made the UI appear frozen for some users. While this improved speed, Anthropic says it also made the model feel less intelligent to users. Anthropic eventually rolled back this change in April after feedback from users, and Opus 4.7 defaults to ‘xhigh’ effort now, while all other models default to ‘high’.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Second, Anthropic had updated the caching optimisation in late March to clear Claude’s older thinking from sessions that had been idle for over an hour.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n