It’s not just ant. There are so many small knobs that providers can claim isn’t nerfing but “load management” or “improving user experience”. One example from OpenAI is reducing juice to reduce time to first token.

	▲	winwang an hour ago \| parent [-]
		You can just have your agent find the evidence, review it, copypaste it.

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erinnh 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean there is a direct link two comments down from here from 30 minutes before your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49902477

	▲	p-e-w an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That’s NOT Anthropic admitting to “nerfing” their model as claimed above (which implies intent), that’s a regression which they quickly fixed. Christ this forum has become intellectually dishonest.

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consumer451 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I asked a historian:

Two postmortems, neither quite "admitted to nerfing":

Sept 2025, infra bugs: "A small percentage of Claude Sonnet 4 requests experienced degraded output quality" [0], alongside "We never reduce model quality due to demand, time of day, or server load." [1]

April 2026, Claude Code: default reasoning effort was lowered from high to medium, plus a caching bug and a verbosity prompt. Per Anthropic, "The models themselves didn't regress, and the Claude API was not affected." [2]

So users were right that quality dropped, but the confirmed causes were bugs and a product default, not deliberate model degradation.

[0] https://status.claude.com/incidents/72f99lh1cj2c

[1] https://anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-rece...

[2] https://texxr.com/handle/claudedevs

source: https://claude.ai/share/4435bbcf-d6df-44a0-b1db-f08a11858bc2

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what an hour ago | parent [-]

> bugs

There are no bugs, just happy little accidents.

	▲	consumer451 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		u/bcherny does sound a bit like Bob Ross now that you mention it.