Andrew and Sean dig into Clawdgate, the growing developer complaints that Anthropic has been quietly throttling Claude's default thinking power after locking in enterprise deals. They also get into Sean's Salvo orchestration system, why waterfall specs do not work even with AI, and why scope creep is the silent killer hiding inside every AI coding workflow.

Links:

• Andrew’s Twitter: @AndrewAskins
• Andrew's website: https://www.andrewaskins.com/
• MetaMonster: https://metamonster.ai/
• Slackletter: https://slackletter.com/
• Sean’s Twitter: @seanqsun
• Miscreants: http://miscreants.com/
• Margins: http://margins.so/
• Sean's website: https://seanqsun.com/

For more information about the podcast, check out https://www.smalleffortspod.com/.

Transcript:

00:00.76
Sean
What is up? My phone is gigantic.

00:02.84
Andrew
I want to throw Claude out of the window.

00:06.04
Sean
Why? What's going on? How dare you speak about my boy, Claude?

00:13.07
Andrew
Have you seen all the chatter online? Like there, I don't know if it's like just my feed or what, but I'm seeing a bunch of people complaining about Claude getting worse.

00:15.63
Sean
Yeah.

00:23.62
Andrew
Like, uh, and like the, the hypothesis I've seen is that, that, um,

00:23.98
Sean
Totally.

00:30.65
Andrew
is that Anthropic has been kind of throttling down Claude's default thinking power, or like like basically how much time and resources it spends thinking to save money.

00:45.99
Andrew
like they The theory is that they like used the masses to get people excited and build hype for Claude so they could sell enterprise deals. And now that they've got the enterprise deals, they're like throttling down how good Claude is for the masses by default.

01:03.27
Andrew
but But I think you can still like adjust the settings to get it back to where it was. i haven't really tried to tinker with it.

01:10.37
Sean
You gotta make an ultra think, man. You gotta turn on ultra think.

01:15.65
Andrew
Wait, is that a thing? Is that a setting, UltraThink? Or is this...

01:21.16
Sean
If you type in ultra think, something will happen. But I think it's just called slash effort max now, not ultra think.

01:26.29
Andrew
yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:27.67
Andrew
yeah

01:28.95
Sean
maybe ultra think is still a thing though I'm not super sure I know that all of Facebook uses ultra think do you see that Facebook's and internally has a competition of like how like they're all token maxing because there's a leaderboard of how many tokens you're burning and one guy's burnt like

01:44.88
Andrew
Is this why people are like making fun of, I've seen a bunch of people talking about how stupid it is to like reward people for like maximizing tokens.

01:52.34
Sean
yeah

01:53.92
Andrew
Is this where this is coming from?

01:55.41
Sean
Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. 100% it is. Yeah. But have you turned on your Claude buddy? Do you have your Claude buddy yet?

02:05.24
Andrew
So no, is this, is this like a default cloud thing or is it something you have to install?

02:08.36
Sean
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, Claude code, just type in slash buddy. You got like a random buddy. I got a common turtle. his name is His name is Flukish, but I like to call him fuckish.

02:23.08
Sean
he' He's kind of an asshole. Like, it tells you, like, a personality rating, and it's, like, everything else is not helpful. Like, ability to debug, like, zero. Ability to whatever, zero. Snarky, 95. Yeah.

02:36.12
Andrew
So sounds like you, they they cloned you.

02:37.69
Sean
yeah I know.

02:39.68
Andrew
they somehow just interpreted you.

02:42.32
Sean
I'm just a common turtle, man.

02:43.62
Sean
Hmm.

02:44.22
Andrew
and So I use i exclusively use Claude inside of Conductor. And so I've never actually like looking directly at the Claude metal. Like I'm not and the Claude code interface.

02:55.56
Andrew
I'm always seeing it inside of just the sort of conductor wrapping.

02:58.95
Sean
Yeah. Yeah.

03:02.35
Andrew
Austin was just showing me a version, like an yet another

03:07.92
Sean
Yeah.

03:08.88
Andrew
uh one of these things it's called superset which is apparently like conductor but you're more you're getting more of the direct cloud code experience which i don't know if i need or want

03:13.18
Sean
Oh, I saw that. Yeah, yeah.

03:23.47
Sean
Yeah.

03:25.69
Andrew
But yeah, what i have also i have not tinkered with my like default fault Clawed settings at all.

03:25.81
Sean
Yeah.

03:35.42
Andrew
like i I haven't done the EffortMax thing yet. I haven't messed around with my ClawedMD file. I've just been like just been rolling with with what I get out of the box. Austin also raves about a set of skills called superpowers that I heard Ian Lanceman talking about some recently too.

03:56.24
Sean
Have you seen people talk about like impeccable? Okay.

03:59.16
Andrew
Oh, is this the is this kind of like the UI?

03:59.36
Sean
U-I-S-H.

04:02.80
Andrew
Well, I still don't, yeah, so no one knows what UiASH is going to actually be, but it seems like similar vibes.

04:03.00
Sean
Yeah. yeah

04:10.84
Sean
Yeah, someone... i saw a post yesterday about someone talking about how, like, a before and after they got to use UISH.

04:19.21
Andrew
Oh, sick. Yeah, I guess maybe they've started rolling out some invites, but it's still pretty small.

04:20.21
Sean
Yeah, yeah.

04:24.92
Sean
Yeah, it just looks like it knows how to use Tailwind.

04:29.41
Andrew
It's, yeah. I'm curious how they're going to charge for it, how they're going to charge for UISH, because if it is just a set of skills, it seems like that's going to be a hard thing to charge an ongoing subscription for, because like once people have the skills and

04:30.51
Sean
Yeah.

04:33.07
Sean
Yeah.

04:46.68
Andrew
Unless the skills the skill files, unless you never actually get access to the skill files, it's like all remote.

04:53.42
Sean
That's terrible. I would not use, I would not use that. That's like, I would just, yeah.

04:57.49
Andrew
Yeah, it seems like it would be really slow.

05:00.10
Sean
oh So I don't know how you would stop it from like just me going or just me going rebuild yourself, you know?

05:02.79
Andrew
Downloading the files.

05:08.24
Andrew
Yeah.

05:08.53
Sean
Yeah. yeah

05:10.96
Andrew
i It seems like there's gonna be a piece beyond, because I've also heard them talking about it kind of like a tool, so I'm wondering if there's more to it than just skill files.

05:21.94
Sean
Maybe it's like, you know how like a lot of those like styled component libraries have like theme creators. I mean, you can download it. Maybe it's like you get access to that. You get to like theme tailwind and you download it as like a specialized skill just for you.

05:36.66
Andrew
Maybe.