The problem is that it seems to be an A/B testing thing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50422951

So only if you were "selected" for their experiments, your account was nerfed.

eggdaft 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

For sure, myself and colleague saw this nerfing. He said - new model coming. It was incredibly obvious. I also started getting a lot of "How's Claude doing today" messages at the same time, which is presumably to get feedback on the A/B

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Tadpole9181 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

But the claim here is "the models are nerfed before a release", not "they A/B test quants / efforts". If it were A/B testing, it doesn't really make sense to correlate it to release windows at all.

	▲	Y_Y 18 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The models are nerfed [for some people] before a release
	▲	eggdaft 4 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		They might want to see how people react to a new model depending on whether they've been nerfed. If the nerfing is lower effort (seems to be, presumably why they hide the CoT) then they may be wondering if they can get away permanently with lowering effort on the new release provided it gives a wee improvement.