Opus is becoming dumb and does not follow instructions
Has anyone else noticed Claude Opus acting worse over the last few days?
I’m not trying to hate on the model, but lately it feels like even simple problems are taking way too much back and forth. I’ll ask it to debug something, it misses the obvious issue, and then when I point directly to the code problem, it says something like, “You’re right, I should have been more careful.”
That is becoming really frustrating. The bigger issue for me is instruction following. I gave it a clear guideline document and specifically said, “Please read this and follow the steps exactly.” The document was written clearly in Markdown with the steps laid out.
But it still didn’t follow them. When I asked, “Did you actually read the doc? The answer is already there,” it basically apologized and said it should have read more carefully instead of assuming.
At that point, how are we supposed to trust the output?
These models are useful, but if they confidently skip instructions, ignore provided docs, or miss basic code issues, it becomes hard to rely on them for real work.
I also feel like Anthropic may be leaning so heavily into safety and security that the product experience is getting worse in some cases. Sometimes even basic security-related fixes get blocked or handled in an overly cautious way, even when the request is normal and legitimate.
For solopreneurs and small builders, this is a real pain. We use these tools to move faster, fix bugs, ship features, and improve security. But when the model doesn’t follow instructions or refuses reasonable requests, it slows everything down instead.
Curious if others are seeing the same thing with Opus recently, or if it’s just my experience.