Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Visibility into Claude Code’s actions

  • Main complaint: recent changes hide which files Claude reads/writes by default, making the agent feel like a black box.
  • Repurposed “verbose” mode now shows file paths, but hides other details; ^O reveals a “very verbose” view. Many find this naming and layering confusing.
  • Several argue visibility is not curiosity but an early‑warning system to stop bad edits or pointless whole‑repo scans before they happen.
  • Others note logs are still available via --json, local files (~/.claude/projects), and third‑party tools (tailers, TUIs), but say this is worse UX than inline streaming.

Autonomy vs supervision in agent workflows

  • One camp wants interactive supervision: seeing file access, plans, and tool calls to steer or abort runs.
  • Another camp runs multiple agents in parallel and values reduced noise, relying on tests, linters, and external gates instead of “micromanaging” the trace.
  • Some argue Anthropic is optimizing for long‑running, horizontally scaled agent teams where only the final result matters; critics respond that reliability isn’t there yet, so hiding steps is premature.

Impact on developer workflow & “vibe coding”

  • Many devs use Claude to work on serious, older codebases; they insist on reviewing every diff and using the agent for scoped, boring tasks, not unsupervised “vibe coding.”
  • Others report maintainability problems from unguided agent‑written code and clients coming back with “scalability/quality” issues.
  • Debate over multi‑agent setups: some report “unreasonably effective” results with reviewer/orchestrator agents; others see confident but wrong outputs and complex, hard‑to‑audit behavior.

Alternatives and tooling ecosystem

  • Multiple mentions of OpenCode, Codex, custom CLIs/TUIs, and wrapper tools that restore richer traces, scrollback, or multi‑agent orchestration.
  • Some users have already cancelled Claude Code subscriptions in favor of alternatives, citing slower performance and poorer feedback loops.

Product decisions, incentives, and trust

  • Disagreement over intent: some see UI changes as benign but misguided simplification; others suspect lock‑in, token‑burn incentives, or attempts to obscure chain‑of‑thought.
  • Several call for simple configuration: multiple verbosity levels, persistent preferences, and distinct “operator” vs “batch” modes, rather than one-size-fits-all.
  • Broader theme: once tools become agents that edit real code, observability (logs, traces, diffs) becomes mandatory infrastructure, not optional polish.