You can watch for these yourself - they are strong indicators of shallow thinking. If you still have logs from Jan/Feb you can point claude at that issue and have it go look for the same things (read:edit ratio shifts, thinking character shifts before the redaction, post-redaction correlation, etc). Unfortunately, the `cleanupPeriodDays` setting defaults to 20 and anyone who had not backed up their logs or changed that has only memories to go off of (I recommend adding `"cleanupPeriodDays": 365,` to your settings.json). Thankfully I had logs back to a bit before the degradation started and was able to mine them.

The frustrating part is that it's not a workflow _or_ model issue, but a silently-introduced limitation of the subscription plan. They switched thinking to be variable by load, redacted the thinking so no one could notice, and then have been running it at ~1/10th the thinking depth nearly 24/7 for a month. That's with max effort on, adaptive thinking disabled, high max thinking tokens, etc etc. Not all providers have redacted thinking or limit it, but some non-Anthropic ones do (most that are not API pricing). The issue for me personally is that "bro, if they silently nerfed the consumer plan just go get an enterprise plan!" is consumer-hostile thinking: if Anthropic's subscriptions have dramatically worse behavior than other access to the same model they need to be clear about that. Today there is zero indication from Anthropic that the limitation exists, the redaction was a deliberate feature intended to hide it from the impacted customers, and the community is gaslighting itself with "write a better prompt" or "break everything into tiny tasks and watch it like a hawk same you would a local 27B model" or "works for me " - sucks :/

In case anyone can correlate, the recovery happened on March 24th and then re-regressed at approximately 3:09 PM PST (23:09 UTC) on March 25. Flipped right back into "simplest" solutions, and "You're right, I'm sorry" mode:

> "You're right. That was lazy and wrong. I was trying to dodge a code generator issue instead of fixing it."

> "You're right — I rushed this and it shows. Let me be deliberate about the structure before writing."

> "You're right, and I was being sloppy. The CPU slab provider's prefault is real work."

I had to build a stop hook to catch it's garbage, and even then it's not enough. I had 30min-1hr uninterrupted sessions (some slipstreamed comments), and now I can't get a single diff that I can accept without comment. Half of the work it does is more destructive than helpful (removing comments from existing code, ignoring directives and wandering off into nowhere, etc).

From 2 weeks after installing the stop hook (around March 8th): ``` Breakdown of the 173 violations:

    73x ownership dodging (caught saying variants of "not caused by my changes")
    40x unnecessary permission-seeking ("should I continue?", "want me to keep going?")
    18x premature stopping ("good stopping point", "natural checkpoint")
    14x "known limitation" dodging
    14x "future work" / "known issue" labeling
    Various: "next session", "pause here", etc.

Other one is loops in reasoning, which are something I'm familiar with on small local models, not frontier ones: ``` Sessions containing 5+ instances of reasoning-loop phrases ("oh wait", "actually,", "let me reconsider", "I was wrong"): Period Sessions with 5+ loops Before March 8 0 After March 8 7 (up to 23 instances in one session) ``` (I've even had it write code where it has "Wait, actually, we should do X" in comments in the code!)

The worst is the dodging; it said, literally, "not my code, not my problem" to a build failure it created 5 messages ago in the same session. ``` I had to tell Claude "there's no such thing as [an issue that existed before your changes]" on average:

    Once per week in January
    2-3 times per week in February
    Nearly daily from March 8 onward

Honestly, just venting, because I'm extremely depressed. I had the equivalent of a team of engineers I could trust, and overnight someone at Anthropic flicked a switch and killed them. I'm getting better results from random models on OpenRouter now (and OmniCoder 9B! 9B!). They aren't _good_ results, mind you, but they aren't idiotic.

Sad. Very sad.

Should have just been an extension with a paid plan.

I've had good luck with indirection tables used during lookup inside of the kernels consuming/producing the kvcache data - it's essentially user-mode remapping like they do here: you can publish a buffer offset table and threads are uniform, have coalesced reads to the table, and cache the offsets no problem. You have the same memory locality issues as VM (contiguous virtual but potentially random physical) but are not limited to device page sizes and since you can update while work is in-flight you can be much more aggressive about reuse and offload (enqueue DMA to cold storage to evict from VRAM, enqueue DMA to copy from cold memory into reused VRAM, enqueue offset table update, enqueue work using them, repeat - all without host synchronization). You can also defrag in-flight if you do want to try to restore the physical locality. It's nothing crazy and fairly normal in CPU land (or even classic virtual texturing), but in ML GPU land I could write a big paper on it and call it SuperDuperFancyAttention4 and publish press releases...

(hello!)

There's also superluminal (https://superluminal.eu/), but it's closed source/paid - wolfpld (the Tracy author) is responsive and there's a decent set of contributors so switching to a black box on a part of the engineering process that is designed to avoid black boxes isn't very enticing. It also is sketchy/misleading about saying things like "Superluminal is the only sampling profiler that displays the profiling data in a visual UI." which is a big turn-off for someone who's been using/building tools like that for decades :)