Claude probably wasn't secretly nerfed. Anthropic made the black box too dark (10 minute read)

Users have accused Anthropic of nerfing Claude Code, but there's no evidence that Anthropic has done this. The strongest public reports still lack independent raw data. However, Anthropic didn't need to nerf Claude for Claude Code to become a different product. Effort defaults, adaptive thinking, cache duration, context compaction, quota policy, and status incidents can all change the experience while the model name stays the same.