You weren't imagining it — Claude Code really did get worse, and Anthropic just explained why

Summary - High-to-medium effort cut slowed Claude; Anthropic restored high default on Apr 7. - A bug cleared prior 'thinking' every turn, causing forgetting and repetition; fixed Apr 10. - A 25/100-word system prompt to cut verbosity hurt coding quality; reverted Apr 20. If you've been using…