It seems they nerf it, then release a new version with previous power. So they can do this forever without actually making another step function model release.
A little off topic, but did Anthropic distill from an older OpenAI model? All the sudden over the last few days I'm getting a ton of em dashes in claude code responses!
It gets really fun when you prompt them to update their BOT.md, also they get access to previous run results so they continually "learn" from mistakes or investigate changes.
I'll take a counterpoint, coding has historically not been cheap. Software engineers have been one of the highest paid professions for a long time. Personally while working a full time job, raising a family and trying to have some semblance of a social life my open source contributions fell off a cliff until recently with the popularization of coding agents. I've created more projects and software in the last 12 months than the past 10 years combined. Not to say a lot of it wasn't total slop or provided little utility, but it's been a fun and exciting time.
Another interesting point is that until recently most average people thought "code" was out of reach or they didn't have time / energy to learn it. My mother made a webapp with the help of claude code the other day to generate books, which she thought of and completed in the course of 3 days all the while learning about terminals, localhost, ports, APIs and more.
That link is redirecting me to https://claude.ai/404, anyone else?