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Apr 24, 2026 · Industry Insights

Anthropic Postmortem: Claude Code Decline Due to Product‑Layer Changes

Anthropic’s detailed postmortem explains that recent user‑perceived declines in Claude Code’s reasoning depth, context retention, and response length stemmed from three product‑layer adjustments—a lowered default reasoning effort, a caching bug that repeatedly cleared thinking, and an overly restrictive system prompt—rather than any degradation of the underlying model itself.