🤖 AMD AI director says Claude Code got worse after March changes

Stella Lorenz, Senior Director of AI at AMD, published an analysis of Claude Code logs that points to a sharp drop in performance from February to March. She looked at 6,852 sessions, 234,760 tool calls, and 17,871 reasoning blocks.

🔸 Median reasoning length fell from about 2,200 characters in January and February to about 600 by March. That is a 73% drop.

🔸 The read-to-edit ratio fell from 6.6:1 to 2:1. In practice, the model spent less time reading code before changing it.

🔸 Attempts to avoid continuing tasks, including prompts like “should I continue?”, rose from 0 to 173 in the 17 days after March 8.

🔸 Self-contradictions in the model’s reasoning tripled.

🔸 Daily usage cost rose 122x as a result.

The timing matters. The reported degradation lines up with the March 8 release of thinking redaction, which hides reasoning. Anthropic said that change was only about the UI.

In the GitHub thread, Claude Code creator Boris Cherny replied that default settings in the agent had changed, including adaptive thinking and Medium effort, so the analysis may be distorted.

📊 @tech