Lead · Fundamentals
Claude getting dumber over time is almost never actually the model. Anthropic engineers put it directly: prompts too long, context too cluttered, tools too narrow. Making Claude smarter isn't finding a magic prompt — it's not making it guess what you want in a chaotic environment.
Lyra Chen
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July 13, 2026
Have you experienced this: you upgrade to a newer Claude model, and it actually feels harder to use? Workflows that ran fine before start breaking. Longer and longer prompts seem to produce less and less. You ask it to fix a bug and it introduces three more. At Anthropic's "Code with Claude" event in London, their engineers spent a full day answering this question. The core conclusion in one...