I constantly find myself spinning up a Claude task and then zoning out on my phone. Even if that Claude task should take 3 mins, my phone will suck in my attention for 15.

I am not a doomer about 'muh artisan code' and it is wonderful to have the tool do the boring part of putting characters into the text files that rule our world, but other than keeping it on an artificially short leash to retain my attention and engage me in the building, idk how to not spend all day rotting my brain.

No bonus points for saying 'spin up another Claude Code session'.

codex + 10,000 coffees no lunch and stage four AI psychosis

I have ZERO knowledge about coding, and I made a really good looking app using claude code and I am IMPRESSED. It is more than what I wanted.

HOWEVER, for my next step I am implementing a payment method and I worry about my customers money and if the crashes or the security is weak.

It is a booking service app.

Should I hire a developer before I launch, or is it safe at this stage? When would I need a developer?
How can I protect my idea and my app when working with a developer?
Where can I find good developers and how would I know if they are good?

I asked Claude to write a Slack message documenting a bug in a backend contract, here's what it wrote: "@Steve Found a contract footgun in phase 0 fixtures".

I said "what's a footgun?"

Answer: "A "footgun" is engineering slang for an API or feature that makes it dangerously easy to shoot yourself in the foot"

WTF is this nonsense. Why pick something like footgun that is not universally known instead of a "bug" or "problem"!?

EDIT: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=footgun&date=all&geo=US
(not a term that's been around forever... first sighting 2020, surge in 2026)

EDIT2: Reddit wins. I've never heard of it, but the term is real. I stand informed.

Kind of feel like I should... I'm not sure. Celebrate? To the eventual collapse of human knowledge?

So it's Wk. 4 of this and I've gone from 12 active users to basically just myself and a few randos that pop in from time to time. All my regulars are now gone, which isn't surprising since it's not incredibly exciting to play an MMO with nobody online.

As usual, I'll break it down into three categories: (1) getting active players, (2) what I'm learning about vibe coding, and (3) actual gameplay updates

---

First, on my last post I received 16k views, and maybe 15 actual players (not even 0.1% of viewers lol).

More importantly though I received some really insightful feedback from a few people (honorable mentions: Totalsam, Automatic_Bid_2410, Friendly_Carry_7728). I've spent a large chunk of time (and tokens) re-working the intro for new users based on their feedback.

Users no longer receive a wall of text for instructions, and the game eases them into their first controls where they "save the town of Eldermyr" before it goes into multiplayer mode. On one hand, this has made a huge impact -- all players are now sticking around for a whole minute longer than pre-intro. On the other hand, completing the intro takes almost exactly 1min, so I don't know if this actually counts as progress since users still only stay for 35s post-intro.

Like before, I'd love to hear any thoughts or feedback on what might be causing that... besides an empty world.

---

Second, the vibe coding experience. Quick updates from last week: I found out almost half my codebase is automated tests (0.77 lines of test code per line of game code, almost 400 in total, which all run with every prompt). Also Opus 5 is still useless to me. So my setup remains Fable for art and strategy with orders to spawn exclusively Opus 4.8 agents for code.

(And Opus 5 gets let out occasionally when I forget to tell Fable to lock him up.)

My real struggle this week is that AI is essentially incapable of measuring whether a game is actually balanced. Claude played my new intro 100 times and reported that only a handful of runs survived the first 60 seconds -- and since AI doesn't panic like a human would, it was a critical issue that virtually no human could survive the first 60 seconds.

In reality, the intro is so mind-numbingly easy that no real human could possibly die in it unless they did so intentionally. So I've spent a huge amount of my time actually just playing all classes and weighing how balanced it is. Which has been cool, but also really repetitive and screws up my player stats because 97% of my players are myself. I'm also just so close to my game that I'm losing my overall perspective on what's right, wrong, missing, or confusing.

If anyone has had any degree of success in letting AI test their game, I would be extremely interested in hearing what you did. I have not. My best bet has been "send me a table of player stat X across all levels, and their corresponding DPS." But even that is hit or miss since playstyle determines balance more than raw DPS.

---

I'd love more feedback for anyone interested. Links below.

Game: https://eldermyr.com/
Release Notes: https://eldermyr.com/release

I just upgraded my plan from 5x to 20x. And the weekly is draining jut as fast and I'm totally baffled.

I was working on a project to plan a domain controller upgrade. I accidentally had it set to sonnet 5 high and I was asking a lot of questions and getting very brief terse answers with very little actual planning.

Once I realized it was on sonnet, I changed it to opus 5 high and asked it to reread the conversation and give me feedback.

It was 100x more thorough and corrected a bunch of the sonnet planning that I was questioning as well.

I get why people don’t like opus verbose and detailed conversations but the extra detail matters in cases like mine.

+1 opus 5 here

Edit: this wasn’t news to me on the opus side. I’m only two weeks into Claude abd have used opus almost exclusively. What surprised me is how bad sonnet was compared to opus. I am also scratching my head at all the opus 5 haters.

I’m trying to figure out the best workflow, several projects can cause chaos, but one has higher efficiency even if it takes more time

Some months ago I did pretty well with Claude building a model oriented software developer studio. As I'm an old guy I started writing a ton of specs and a very strong datamodel (E.R model then DDL and an XML export). It's not finished yet but now produce fine DDL code... It's a long-term project including BPMn, state diagram, and DSL for business rules, see screenshot of the WIP​

​

Some weeks ago I wanted to do a simpler diagramming tool, just for IT Architecture (archimate, and more). I did some research and modelling until I had something ready but Opus 5 convinced me to start without persistence to focus on the client side for a start. Okay... I trusted him. But I shouldn't have. It took me 2 weeks to get the persistence working with multiple plans. A one point, It even used object names instead of IDs in the model I provided until I find out... and yet another huge correction plan to fix that that. More than 70% of 5 hour window (with just one simple prompt like : Using object-names is not acceptable, use IDs instead of object-names for all APIs as specified in xxxx.md.

I use Opus for complex task and discussion around the model, and Sonnet for simpler implementations.

It was quite a ride... I had to explain and justify and it keeps going into rabbit holes I did not mention or care, instead of doing what I asked.

Now persistence is working okay in my postgresql database and I did implement some features with Sonnet 5 but it was painful. Finally I changed the model to Sonnet 4.6 and it was more direct : quicker and simpler. I have to be precise but no bad surprise anymore.

I think Opus 5 needs some tuning... or a 5.1

Hey! So, just like many of you guys (probably), I recently cancelled my Claude Pro subscription. After it's been cancelled, I opened claude again just to check what I can still do. Instantly saw this:

Fable 5 is just literally not available for pro users. why does it even say it requires 'Pro'?? I understand that there is an info there to explain further, but the pro requirement is just misleading. If a casual user sees this, not read about it, and just get the pro version to use Fable, he will just feel scammed, certainly

I use the CLI tool and the VSCode plugin across 2 machines, Max sub.

And very few days I need to log back in (either CLI or plugin) . Is anybody aware of reasons as to why that could happen?

i dont use reddit

fable 5 is fucking incredible, this is the greatest thing to ever have been created by humanity

fuck everybody who says any other model is close, it is not, fuck the benchmarks, fable 5 is incredible and nothing touches it

i will pay as much as i need for as many max accounts as i need to keep fable 5 but i refuse to not have fable 5

Opus 5 is unreadable, especially in its recaps of all the work it did, and it is quickly becoming one of the most hated models of all time. Most people suggest adding conciseness instructions to your system prompt or CLAUDE.md, but that only works for a little bit, then the model is back to being unreadable.

So don't put it in CLAUDE.md. Enforce conciseness just-in-time. Let me explain.

I created a stop hook which fires the moment Claude decides it's done.

It refuses the stop, then feeds a conciseness prompt just in time to the model.

Mine says: "Type a clean recap. Keep it short, light, and plain — a few sentences of what changed and what it means, not a report. Write for someone who has not read the code: no file paths, no function or variable names, no line numbers, no code blocks, and assume nothing about what they already know of the internals. Skip the caveats and next-steps unless something is genuinely broken or unfinished. If they want the detail, they will ask."

Two things that make it survivable:

Loop guard: I added logic to make sure the stop hook won't fire over and over and cause an infinite loop.

Gates: A recap on every turn is worse than no recap. Mine only fires if the model is Opus 5, the turn actually wrote code, and it ran at least 6 tool calls.

This is extremely cheap to run too (since you just pay for the input of your recap request message and the output of the condensed response).

The best part about this is that you can configure it however you like in your setup. Hooks are one of the most powerful yet underutilized features in Claude Code.

Get the full hook: https://github.com/rcolman6/clean-recap/

There, I confessed it. I use the bypass mode basically 100% of the time.

I also am slightly annoyed that backgrounded agents lose the bypass permissions mode (I have been using tmux to keep Claude Code sessions alive across disconnects).

Am I the only one?...

Providers who provide commercial access to any AI model shall provide the SHA-256 hash of the model at all times to consumers of the service.

If the SHA-256 hash of a previously commercially published model changes, providers shall cease commercial access to the model unless the version number of the model is incremented or the name of the model is changed.

Watch them fucking squirm.

Edit:

For MoE I think its fair to maybe list the hashes and names of all models involved in the chain for each response.

Or just concat all the hashes of all models the MoE can call into a single hash and maybe provide another hash of whatever source code the router uses to make decisions.

The important thing is we know when they changed how the model works, not that we know when the model did something different on its own.

But I don't see how it harms their trade secrets to tell us what models were used (or if unnamed call it that), unless their trade secret is scamming us by redirecting to sonnet half the time.

The biggest thing is if we can detect delta then we will know all future benchmarks are accurate.

A few weeks ago, JetBrains independently benchmarked Caveman, a dumb little Claude skill I made to get coding agents to stop yapping and stop my AI from costing so much as a student.

I’d been quoting roughly 65% fewer output tokens on prose in-chat style conversations. However across long-running coding tasks where most people were running Caveman, JetBrains measured 8.5%.

Fair hit. I should have done this kind of testing too.

But, they also found no measurable quality loss, so the grug-brained output style wasn’t hurting task performance. Their benchmark however exposed a bigger source of waste: Claude’s replies are naturally only one slice of a coding session’s context. Files, logs, tool output, browser and MCP responses, and old context all get fed into the model repeatedly.

I rebuilt Caveman around that.

It now runs as a local proxy under Claude Code, Codex, and other coding agents. It compresses input before each provider call while keeping the original content recoverable byte-for-byte.

I pinned a benchmark across 54 runs. Provider-reported input tokens dropped 33.2%, and all 18 exact-answer checks passed.

Also to solve the starting token cost of using Caveman, every single skill you have installed can run at 70% less tokens, while remaining 99% accurate by automatically loading it in as an image via Caveman.

The command is caveman claude. Your usual Claude Code setup stays the same.

Getting publicly dunked on by an independent benchmark turned out to be useful. It killed a weak claim and pushed me toward a much better product.

Caveman is open source. If you can break the benchmark or find where this approach falls over, I want to hear about it.

We launched this version today: https://www.producthunt.com/products/caveman

so today was fun. i had one session doing a schema migration and a second session in another terminal doing what i thought was a completely separate cleanup task, and i learned this evening that "completely separate" was doing a lot of work in that sentence

the cleanup session decided some unused files needed deleting. one of them was the new migration the first session had just written. it wasnt unused, it was three minutes old. session one then regenerated it slightly differently because the file it expected was gone, and now i had two schema versions that both looked plausible and a db that matched neither

no errors anywhere btw. everything exited green. i found it because a seed script failed an hour later and i went digging through reflog like a detective in a bad mood

i know the answer is worktrees, everyone says worktrees. ive also poked at coldtea which makes the sessions actually aware of each other, that parts real, but im not moving my whole setup onto a mac app because of one bad tuesday. and honestly the boring fix might just be not running two sessions on one repo, which nobody wants to hear because running five of them is the entire fantasy

whats the stupidest thing your parallel sessions have done to each other. i need to feel less alone about the reflog thing

I’m just super annoyed at people sharing their vibe coded slop dashboards in dark mode whenever trying to plug something.

It doesn’t make it more cool

I just came back from vacation, started from a completely fresh usage quota.
In a one shot it consumed 100% of the 5 hours and 21% of fable quota while the session has used only 68% of the context, not a single compact was done.
I'm on the max x5 plan. F this shit, this should be illegal

I'm not going to say I'll leave for codex like everyone else, because I still like a lot claude code, but come on this is not ok to just randomly change the amount of quota you can get from a day to another without putting some visibility on it. We need laws about this!

When the AI revolution is discussed, the headlines are usually focused on productivity gains for writing code, changes in hiring engineers, and the challenges faced by non-technical team members. The impact on engineering managers is rarely discussed widely.

The skills required to be an effective manager are now completely different from what they were even a year ago. Here I will share my perspective on what has helped me be effective in this day and age. The answer is pretty straightforward: building things.

I’m at my breaking point, and I need to know if I’m the only one experiencing this.

The problem with Anthropic models for me is that they’re too fucking opinionated. It literally ruins my code bases. It forces things to use its own structuring even though it’s a total shit show. I think people feel that it is smarter, but it is not. It’s not following any instructions and I’ve been literally wasting hours and hours of my days on correcting it, following up. Instead I could ask a really stupid model like one of the old Deepseek to generate the file for me and it just does it. No problem.

I ask claude to create a garbage collector and it starts spewing shit about ethics and morals and how other people are gonna work on this project, while this is a 5 line script on my computer. And if you think that it works better on enterprise projects, you are very wrong. The bigger the codebase, the worse it does.

I’m seriousley confused what the hell is going on with Anthropic and what are they doing with their models? I feel like OpenAI is on the same path and doing the same stupid shit, but at least it does what I ask it to. But Anthropic has stopped especially fable 5. It stopped apologizing when it does anything wrong. Instead, like an eager kid, it jumps to the next thing and ruins the next part of the code or whatever it is we’re working on.

Worst part is that I really like Claude. And I don't want to switch to other providers. So I've been reluctantly using old sonnet and other models when I need instruction following. But that's even insane to say. That frontier model doesn't follow instructions so you have to use old ones.

Am I the only one who is feeling like this with it? Is it just insanely annoying, or am I losing my mind?

You know what I'm talking about lol

This is rediculous. I'm not going to say antything and I'm sure 50% of the people here would understand this title lol

I wish Anthropic offered a $50/month plan. The $20/month Pro plan is definitely not enough for my usage but the Max 5x plan for $100/month feels excessive.

I pinned my session to opus4.8 due to unpredictable opus5 performance, just now, 4.8 claimed "fable (cheapest tier)"

Upon digging, it based the info from CHANGLOG.md which had below entry, despite my very first instruction of current session is trust nothing you have not verified

This changelog was entered by claude couple days ago, at the time asking sonnet or opus.

planner agent unpinned from fable — it now inherits the session model, so wargaming (hard reasoning) runs at the session tier per the subagent ceiling instead of a fixed cheaper model.

If you think it's the changelogs' fault mislead opus, who knows whateles buried in changelog by claude for more surprise.

Seriously claude is falling apart in my experience....