What went wrong with Claude?
In August, Claude’s performance noticeably dipped.
Responses that were once sharp felt less precise, and the overall flow of conversations slowed. I found myself relying more on GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro to fill the gap. It wasn’t a total breakdown, but the changes were clear enough to raise a question: was this a temporary regression, or a sign of deeper updates happening in the background?
That question points to a bigger irony. We live in a time when tech leaders predict that “AI will write 90% of code in a few years,” yet our AI systems still slow down and struggle, like a tired intern with too much work. Instead of nonstop progress, we saw AI wobble, moving sideways instead of forward. The future may arrive early, but it still stumbles along the way.
This brings us back to Claude. The model had not simply forgotten how to think or reason. What happened was more ordinary: software issues, messy infrastructure, and the plumbing that keeps everything running in the background.
In this newsletter, we'll examine what exactly went wrong and why Claude’s performance dipped: not because the model weakened, but because the support systems around it faltered.
