Hacker News front pageAug 26, 2026, 14:34 UTC+8

I Miss the Old Claude Code: a developer's critique of Anthropic's growing bloat

I miss the old Claude Code

Alex Kras argues Anthropic's products are losing the focus that originally won him over. He was drawn to Sonnet's concise replies and Opus's thorough book summaries, and Claude Code felt like an extension of his brain. Now Opus 5 is chatty and prone to over-engineering—Anthropic even shipped a Concise Output Style as a band-aid. The /doctor command in Claude Code has bloated from a setup check into an audit of all prompts and MCPs. He also calls out Anthropic's new AI-native SDLC Playbook for promoting a process that makes it easier to introduce bloat. His core take: when code generation is cheap, every feature needs more scrutiny before production, and controlling bloat is the biggest challenge of the generative AI era. The post does not include a response from Anthropic.

Why it matters: A user critique with concrete before/after examples, not empty complaining. Three specific gripes: Opus 5 verbosity, /doctor command bloat, and 'concise output style' as a band-aid. Resonates with heavy Claude users but remains a personal take rather than a product-level event...

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Take

This post lands because the complaint comes from a user Anthropic won over slowly, not a drive-by critic. Alex Kras says he picked Sonnet over OpenAI models because it was more concise and focused, and Claude Code felt like an extension of his brain. Now Opus 5 is chatty and prone to over-engineering, and Anthropic shipped a Concise Output Style as a band-aid—Boris Cherny called it exactly that on Twitter. The /doctor command in Claude Code has bloated from a setup check into an audit of all prompts and MCPs.

I'd discount this a bit: it's one blog post, no Anthropic response, no product metrics. But Kras cites multiple tweets with the same complaint—Opus 5 writes longer, uses more stock phrases, and drifts off-task. Peter Gostev mined tens of thousands of real-world outputs to back this up.

The real point isn't "Opus 5 got worse." It's that when code generation is cheap, feature bloat becomes too easy. Kras's line: generating code is cheap now, but that doesn't mean an unstoppable flow of new features is right for users. Controlling bloat is the biggest challenge of the generative AI era. That's a sharper take than "Opus 5 is bad now."

Source: Hacker News front page · alexkras.com
Published: Aug 26, 2026, 14:34 UTC+8 · Aug 26, 2026