Claude Code didn't get worse. The harness did. And that ends one of the most common AI complaints of 2026.

For two months, the same complaint kept showing up on every developer forum I read: Claude Code feels worse. Sometimes worded politely, sometimes not. The vibe was unanimous enough that I almost started believing it on reputation alone. Then on April 23, Anthropic published a postmortem that I think ends this whole class of complaint as a useful conversation. Read it. Even if you don't ship anything with Claude. Especially then. Here's the position I'll defend: "the model got worse" is no longer a credible developer complaint without evidence.