Also product manager here.

Not at all cynically, this is classic product management - simplify by removing information that is useful to some users but not others.

We shouldn't be over it by now. It's good to think carefully about how you're using space in your UI and what you're presenting to the user.

You're saying it's bad because they removed useful information, but then why isn't Anthropic's suggestion of using verbose mode a good solution? Presumably the answer is because in addition to containing useful information, it also clutters the UI with a bunch of information the user doesn't want.

Same thing's true here - there are people who want to see the level of detail that the author wants and others for whom it's not useful and just takes up space.

> It requires deep understanding of customer usage in order not to make this mistake.

It requires deep understanding of customer usage to know whether it's a mistake at all, though. Anthropic has a lot deeper understanding of the usage of Claude Code than you or I or the author. I can't say for sure that they're using that information well, but since you're a PM I have to imagine that there's been some time when you made a decision that some subset of users didn't like but was right for the product, because you had a better understanding of the full scope of usage by your entire userbase than they did. Why not at least entertain the idea that the same thing is true here?

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mattkrause 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Simplification can be good---but they've removed the wrong half here!

The notifications act as an overall progress bar and give you a general sense of what Claude Code is doing: is it looking in the relevant part of your codebase, or has it gotten distracted by some unused, vendored-in code?

"Read 2 files" is fine as a progress indicator but is too vague for anything else. "Read foo.cpp and bar.h" takes almost the same amount of visual space, but fulfills both purposes. You might want to fold long lists of files (5? 15?) but that seems like the perfect place for a user-settable option.

	▲	idopmstuff 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> "Read 2 files" is fine as a progress indicator but is too vague for anything else. "Read foo.cpp and bar.h" takes almost the same amount of visual space, but fulfills both purposes. Now this is a good, thoughtful response! Totally agree that if you can convey more information using basically the same amount of space, that's likely a better solution regardless of who's using the product.

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NinjaTrance 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It requires deep understanding of customer usage to know whether it's a mistake at all

Software developers like customizable tools.

That's why IDEs still have "vim keybindings" and many other options.

Your user is highly skilled - let him decide what he wants to see.

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idopmstuff 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are a lot of Claude Code users who aren't software developers. Maybe they've decided that group is the one they want to cater to? I recognize that won't be a popular decision with the HN crowd, but that doesn't mean it's the wrong one.

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ivan_gammel 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I fully agree with you on almost everything you wrote in this thread, but I’m not sure this is the right answer. I myself currently spend a lot of time with CC and belong to that group of developers who don’t care about this problem. It’s likely that I’m not alone. So it doesn’t have to be the least professional audience they serve with this update. It’s possible that Anthropic knows what are they doing (e.g. reducing level of detail to simplify task of finding something more important in the output) and it’s also possible that they are simply making stupid product decisions because they have a cowboy PM who attacks some OKR screaming yahoo. We don’t know. In the end having multiple verbosity levels configured with granularity similar to java loggers would be nice.

	▲	idopmstuff 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Oh totally - I'm definitely not saying that they made the decision to cater to non-dev users, just that it's a possibility. Totally agree with you that at the end of the day, we haven't the foggiest idea.

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NewsaHackO 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, I made a similar point about the tone of ChatGPT responses; to me, I can't imagine why someone would want less information when working and tuning an AI model. However, something tells me they actually have hard evidence that users respond better with less information regardless of what the loud minority say online, and are following that.

	▲	collaborative an hour ago \| parent [-]
		100%. Metrics don't lie. I've A/B tested this a lot. Attention is a rare commodity and users will zone out and leave your product. I really dislike this fact

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mingus88 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Then why is the suggestion to use verbose mode treated as another mistake?

The user is highly skilled; let them filter out what is important

This should be better than adding an indeterminate number of toggles and settings, no?

	▲	8note 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		does claude code let me control whats output when? verbose i think puts it on the TUI and i cant particularly grep or sed on the TUI

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sfink 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Developer> This is important information and most developers want to see it.

PM1> Looks like a PM who is out of touch with what the developers want. Easy mistake to make.

PM2> Anthropic knows better than this developer. The developer is probably wrong.

I don't know for sure what the best decision is here, I've barely used CC. Neither does PM1 nor PM2, but PM2 is being awfully dismissive of the opinion of a user in the target audience. PM1 is probably putting a bit too much weight on Developer's opinion, but I fully agree with "All of us... have seen UIs where this has occurred." Yes, we have. I personally greatly appreciate a PM who listens and responds quickly to negative feedback on changes like this, especially "streamlining" and "reducing clutter" type changes since they're so easy to get wrong (as PM1 says).

> It's good to think carefully about how you're using space in your UI and what you're presenting to the user.

I agree. It's also good to have the humility to know that your subjective opinion as someone not in the target audience even if you're designing the product is less informed in many ways than that of your users.

----

Personally, I get creeped out by how many things CC is doing and tokens it's burning in the background. It has a strong "trust me bro" vibe that I dislike. That's probably common to all agent systems; I haven't used enough to know.

	▲	idopmstuff 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> PM2> Anthropic knows better than this developer. The developer is probably wrong. Nope! Not what I said. I specifically said that I don't know if Anthropic is using the information they have well. Please at least have the courtesy not to misrepresent what I'm saying. There's plenty of room to criticize without doing that. > It's also good to have the humility to know that your subjective opinion as someone not in the target audience even if you're designing the product is less informed in many ways than that of your users. Ah, but you don't know I'm not the target audience. Claude Code is increasingly seeing non-developer users, and perhaps Anthropic has made a strategic decision to make the product friendlier to them, because they see that as a larger userbase to target? I agree that it's important to have humility. Here's mine: I don't know why Anthropic made this decision. I know they have much more information than me about the product usage, its roadmap and their overall business strategy. I understand that you may not like what they're doing here and that the lack of information creeps you out. That's totally valid. My point isn't that you're wrong to have that opinion, it's that folks here are wrong to assume that Anthropic made this decision because they don't understand what they're doing.
	▲	NinjaTrance 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Personally, I get creeped out by how many things CC is doing and tokens it's burning in the background. It has a strong "trust me bro" vibe that I dislike. 100% this. It might be convenient to hide information from non-technical users; but software engineers need to know what is happening. If it is not visible by default, it should be configurable via dotfiles.

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dgacmu 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They know what people type into their tools, but they don't know what in the output users read and focus on unless they're convening a user study or focus group.

I personally love that the model tells me what file it has read because I know whether or not it's headed in the generally right direction that I intended. Anthropic has no way of knowing I feel this way.

	▲	idopmstuff 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But you have no idea if they've convened user study or focus groups, right? I'll just reiterate my initial point that the author of the post and the people commenting here have no idea what information Anthropic is working with. I'm not saying they've made the right decision, but I am saying that people ought to give them the slightest bit of credit here instead of treating them like idiots.

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lp0_on_fire 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> You're saying it's bad because they removed useful information, but then why isn't Anthropic's suggestion of using verbose mode a good solution?

Because reading through hundreds of lines verbose output is not a solution to the problem of "I used to be able to see _at a glance_ what files were being touched and what search patterns were being used but now I can't".

	▲	idopmstuff 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Right, I understand why people prefer this. The point was that the post I was responding to was making pretty broad claims about how removing information is bad but then ignoring the fact that they in fact prefer a solution that removes a lot of information.

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sdwr 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm sure the goal is that reading files is something you debug, not monitor, like individual network requests in a browser.