Anecdotally I'm using the superpowers[1] skills and am absolutely blown away by the quality increase. Working on a large python codebase shared by ~200 engineers for context, and have never been more stoked on claude code ouput.

[1] https://github.com/obra/superpowers

This is actually super interesting. Is this "SDLC as code" equivalent of "infrastructure as code"?

This just feels like the whole complicated TODO workflows and MCP servers that were the hot thing for awhile. I really don't believe this level of abstraction and detailed workflows are where things are headed.

Not since skills but earlier as others have said I've noticed Claude chat seems to create tools to create the output I need instead of just doing it directly. Obviously this is a cost saving strategy, although I'm not sure how the added compute of creating an entire reusable tool for a simple one-time operation helps but hey what do I know?

I have also anecdotally noticed it starting to do things consistently that it never used to do. One thing in particular was that even while working on a project where it knows I use OpenAI/Claude/Grok interchangeably through their APIs for fallback reasons, and knew that for my particular purpose, OpenAI was the default, it started forcing Claude into EVERYTHING. That's not necessarily surprising to me, but it had honestly never been an issue when I presented code to it that was by default using GPT.

Claude Code became almost unusable a week ago with completely broken terminal flickering all the time and doing pointless things so you end up running out of weekly window for nothing.

I guess OpenAI got it right to go slower with a Rust CLI. It lacks a lot of features but it's solid. And it is much better at automatically figuring out what tools you have to consume less tokens (e.g. ripgrep). A much better experience overall.

Claude code uses rg by default in its default tools if it’s installed

I've noticed this with Gemini recently - I have a task suited for LLMs which I want it to do "manually" (e.g., split this list of inconsistently formatted names into first/given names and last/surnames) and it tries to write a script to do it instead, which fails. If I just wanted to split on the first space I would've done it myself...

For curiosity, does it follow through if you specify in the end: "do not use any tools for this task" ?

Yes. I notice on mobile it basically never writes artifacts correctly anymore.

it's been doing this since august for me. multiple times instead of using typical cli tools to edit a text file it's tried to write a python script that opens the file, edits it, and saves it. mind-boggling.

it used to consistently use cli tools all the time for these simple tasks.

Yes. Noticed in Claude Code after enabling documents skill then had to disable it for this reason.

As someone who hasn't used any skills, I haven't noticed any degradation

Yes, it's just another anecdote, but I agree, the quality of the outputs have gone down for me as well.