A really big unknown in all of these anecdotes is what skills people have installed (and what's in their CLAUDE.md, and ...)

This really is a lot of it, at least trying to help people at work internally. I've discovered a lot of people overly rely on Claude writing directives (always do X, never do Y, remember this every time) to its MEMORY.md, which it does mostly unprompted. The problem is, the few times I've noticed my agent getting "squirrely," some or a lot of the stuff in MEMORY.md was flat out wrong (the agent wrote down the wrong memory), confused or in direct contradiction with its CLAUDE.md, etc.

When I fixed this, it was like magic, working how I wanted again. I now have a skill to periodically audit MEMORY.md and CLAUDE.md according to the conventions I've learned work best for me - which I suppose /dream is supposed to handle eventually, but you're kind of trusting it to audit its own memories, which have, at least to me, already proven to be unreliable.

With so many factors like this, not even to mention context exhaustion, window size, effort, etc. - anecdotal evidence is almost worthless without examining someone's entire local state.

A lot of it, to me, feels like user error, I haven't really noticed much behavioral difference between 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7, at least in my own workflow. I will note though that constantly managing these things is a lot of work that I hope one day becomes less necessary. It's more than I can expect people on my team to manage on their own, and unless I sit down with them 1 on 1 and review their issues, or write some clever agent to help them, I don't really know how I can help people reporting things that I hear posted here a lot.