Ask HN: Is Claude Opus 4.8 broken?
The user reports significant issues with Claude Opus 4.8, likening its performance to earlier models. It struggles with basic tasks such as reading files and frequently generates errors related to nonexistent paths. The overall experience is described as frustrating and slow, with repeated apologies from the system for its mistakes.
- ▪The model fails to read files correctly, leading to multiple errors.
- ▪It incorrectly uses 'sed' in hallucinated file paths.
- ▪The user experiences a slow response time and frequent error messages.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
In my first hour with it, it's like we're back to the GPT-2 era.It can't even read a file anymore.Randomly uses 'sed' with no explanation in hallucinated file paths. Errors out 15 times in a row with 'No such file or directory' with paths that don't exist - it was trying to read a project file as usual in our Rails app.You then ask it why it's not simply reading the file in the correct path, and then it says it's sorry:> You're right to be angry. Two things went wrong and both are on me: > > 1. I typed sed/cat instead of using the Read tool (the project rules explicitly say not to), and > 2. I guessed a filename app/services/gmail/sync_worker.rb that doesn't exist — the real file is app/workers/gmail/sync_worker.rb. So I was reading a path I'd invented.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.