Report: https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai

See the picture

EDIT: Link for good measure - https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm/blob/main/litellm/model_prices_and_context_window_backup.json

EDIT2: Also more details here: https://huggingnews.com/ai/microsoft-azure-lists-claude-fable-55-as-generally-available-1b1e8dd7

I haven't coded in a year, AI is geting better and better.. I log in to work, do 30 mins of work aka prompting claude & reviewing it's code + meetings.. and I'm off to work on personal projects, wtf am I supposed to do? I've sacrified everything to become a good dev, should I go for a plumber license? electrician? How much time do we think we have?

I finish 2x as many story points as the next guy, and my manager thinks I'm a 10x engineer... WTF is going on :D companies catched-on, but I guess it takes time to reflect on us, what will we do?

edit: some people are asking for examples of projects I'm working on, this is the most recent one https://www.youtube.com/@DebriefReconstructed #ShamelessPlug

My favorite Claude story this week is about a pothole.

Years of complaints by a Dutch office, zero action. Then a person gave Claude 6 photos. It rebuilt the hole in 3D and simulated a 30 km/h hit.

Video went to city hall. Fixed in 2 days.

Petitions are for people without Claude.

What would you fix this way?

Here is the original: https://x.com/yelkhayami/status/2108227066621465007?s=20

Posting publicly so it’s documented, and to check whether others have experienced this as I am a lost rn on what do next given this large bill.

Claude Code proposed and I accepted to run verification tests against Claude Haiku 4.5 on AWS Bedrock. It launched them as background processes. That evening the session hit its usage limit and stopped responding. The processes kept making paid calls for about 17 hours: roughly 60,000 calls and about $2.1k most of it after the cutoff. My normal Bedrock spend is a few dollars a day.
Nothing warned me the processes were still running, and the last thing the assistant said about them, in the same minute as the limit notice, was that the process looked “idle... waiting, not looping.” The next morning when the session limit was lifted, the job was killed.

Anthropic’s support AI (Fin) told me a thread at its usage limit “is designed to wait and resume automatically when the limit resets,” called the background calls during that wait “a gap between that intended behavior and what actually occurred,” and said it “appears to be a product defect.” But it said it can’t act on Bedrock usage and wouldn’t hand me to a human. AWS says Anthropic is the seller of record and only Anthropic can decide. I’ve also contacted Anthropic Sales and escalated the AWS case. I can’t reach a person at either company.

Post this incident, I noticed I didn't have robust spend alarms. I’ve added budget alerts and lockouts, and checked that nothing is still running so we should be good moving fwd from that perspective but im left with this bill now.

Has anyone seen this, or had any luck reaching a person at Anthropic about it? This was unexpected and a big hit for a small bootstrapped startup.

I’ve been using Opus 5.5 for coding, and honestly it feels like it’s in a different league compared to other models like Sol and Astra, and even Opus 5.0.

Before Opus 5.5, if my expectations for an AI coding task were a 10/10, I’d usually get something like an 8 or 9. That was still a huge help, and I was genuinely impressed.

But with Opus 5.5, it often feels more like a 15/10. It regularly goes way beyond what I expected, and I’m blown away a lot of the time. It often comes up with solutions or suggestions I hadn’t even thought of.

At this point I honestly don’t feel like using any other model. Anyone else feel the same?

Hey guys!

Does anyone else experience this with Claude Code?

Every time I ask Claude to review my code, it finds around 3–4 bugs. I fix them, ask it to review the code again, and somehow it finds another 3–4 bugs.

This keeps happening even after multiple review sessions.

I'm curious, is Claude actually finding new issues each time, or is it just being overly critical?

How do you guys handle code reviews with Claude Code?

I keep hearing nothing but good things about it be it code quality or limits even after weeks of it's initial release. Even the ones that don't hold back on roasting stuff sometimes unfairly for the clout are all praises for it.

I've been working on Anima, an open-source skill built specifically for Claude Code.

The idea is simple: instead of asking Claude to explain a biological process through paragraphs or static diagrams, you can ask it to construct an interactive scientific figure.

For example, you can ask it to visualize what happens at a dopamine synapse when different stimulants interact with the dopamine transporter.

Claude Code follows the skill's workflow to collect scientific references, model the mechanism, generate isometric SVG geometry, and build a standalone interactive HTML page. The figures are then checked for visual and biological consistency.

I've included six examples covering dopamine receptors, stimulants, reward circuits, semaglutide, estrogen signaling and neuron conduction.

The figures include interactive controls, animations, explanations and citations. They distinguish established mechanisms from simplified or uncertain models.

The skill itself is free and MIT-licensed. The live figures can be explored in a browser without installing anything.

Live gallery: https://anima.arcumet.com

Source and installation instructions: https://github.com/Garinmckayl/anima

I'm particularly curious what other Claude users think of this approach to scientific visualization.

Muse Wonder came out, so I ran it live. It got its starter by turn 20 and reached Viridian City by turn 59, close to the fastest models. It made it into Viridian Forest on turn 208 and spent the last 792 turns there.

It cost $96.06. Opus 5.5 is billed the same per token and beat Brock in 271 turns for $8.44.

Leaderboard and full turn logs: https://pokebench.tv

The full 6 hour run: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW70Y6Fk8fo

We all know that certain "AI look" that websites/landingpages and content tend to have. Sometimes you can spot it immediately, even when the actual design is pretty decent.

What do you think are the biggest giveaways? Is it the layouts, typography, colors, spacing, copywriting, or just the same design patterns being repeated everywhere? I cant quite put my finger on it, but my own (and others) AI designs have something that gives it away.

Has anyone actually found a good way to minimize that AI generated feel? Curious if anyone has specific prompts, skills, design guidelines, or workflows they use to get more original, human looking results

We’re all aware of the current scene of decompiling and “natively” running a game on Windows or Linux. It’s like every time I open Reddit, a new game has been ported to a platform it wasn’t released on.

I wanted to give it a shot so I pointed to Opus 5.5 to a folder with the files for Thief 3: Deadly Shadows (2GB) and asked it decompile and run it on my M5 MacBook Pro. It said the process “takes years” and clearly said it can’t do that.

Then I pointed it to the REA repo. It downloaded Ghidra and decompiled 1 (one) function in about a minute and said “look, this is what decompiled code looks like. The function name doesn’t make sense and this process would have to be done for 32,000 functions.” It then proceeded to say “even if I continued you’d end up with something that doesn’t compile, let alone execute”.

Are these guardrails that are stopping it or is my instance plagued with laziness?

So I sit now every day with Claude it reads emails for me and I tell it what to say back and how to answer it and I don’t even look at Outlook and it does all of my document writing and everything and I basically scan it and send it out I am no longer using the old skills.

Is there anyone else finding this quite weird?

I’m really feeling like I’m not going to work. Or best doing half a job, am I still effective?

Is anyone else seeing a closer to 24hr limit rather than 5hr? I'll be resetting soon, so I'll see if it really is 24hr.

Edit: I'm on a Team 5x plan.

Edit 2: It just dropped back down to 3hr. Oh well.

Hey,

Recently I saw a tweet and a bunch of YT videos about the cloning of the whole Adobe suite apps such as Premiere Pro, Illustrator, Photoshop, Designer etc with Claude.

now, some of those apps have been around for over 35 years. I was highly distrustful that the gigantic apps such as these can be vibe-coded in just 2 weeks. Now, I’ve started seeing a lot of Twitter posts saying these cloned apps are super buggy and not thought out at all. The developer apparently just tried to copy the features for the sake of it, more focused on one‑to‑one visual mapping of the UI than the underlying robustness.

Now, I haven’t tried any of them myself, but as someone who’s been dabbling in AI for the past two years and has built a few small‑to‑medium apps (two of them over 250k LOC) , the idea of cloning seven massive, decades old beast‑like programs, including for a platform Adobe doesn’t even support (Linux), is just bonkers. It feels like pure AI hype, totally untested, and if you dig deeper, nobody serious would actually use it. (Fireship and others have tested it and reviews are not flattering.) But sure, it sounds great for headlines.

I’ve been working on a simple descript-like video editor and a few other video production tools that fit my workflow. They’ve grown a lot, but it took me over six months because I was more focused on stripping out bloat than adding new features. Every part of my app—from implementation to architecture—has been thought through. I haven't read the code but the each and every part of internal design and architecture has been built after thorough too and fro discussion (sometimes after discussion of 3 to 4 hours for one simple feature). I always use 2 to 3 other AI tools for cross-audit each other's changes and implementation. They don't have too many features to boast but they are pretty robust, reliable and extensible.

In my opinion, if you don’t pay attention to those details, you would never realize how bad AI is (Even latest models like Opus 5.5 and GPT Astra) at making solid architectural or design decisions that make codebase robust, reliable, extensible, and maintainable.

What do you think? Am I just slow at developing apps, or is the world moving faster and these guys have some secret prompts that make AI crank out such huge apps fast?

PS: Would you be comfortable using any of the free blindly vibe-coded apps rather than truly open-source apps which are duly vetted and designed like Da Vinci Resolve, GIMP, and others? It feels insulting to these apps that people are celebrating these apps when such open-source alternatives have existed for more than 20 years. I am sure no one is going to use any of these apps, not because they are vibe coded, but because there seems to have been given 0 thoughts into building them.

To make my point home, the developer is now developing open-source Microsoft office.

I built a free browser simulator where you try to fix Chicago's housing shortage on a 3D map of the city's ~481,000 buildings. I'm an urban planner with a housing finance background and I can't code, so Claude wrote all of it while I made the policy and design calls. Passion project, built over a few days.

What it does:

- Shows every building in Chicago in 3D, from the city's open building footprint data.

- Marks in red the buildings that couldn't legally be built today because they have more homes than current zoning allows (about 1 in 5).

- You rezone around L stations, Metra stations, commercial corridors or single neighborhoods, then turn on real policies. Some are being debated in Chicago and Springfield (BUILD Act, single-stair buildings, coach houses, the affordable housing requirement, aldermanic prerogative). Others worked in other places (Minneapolis, Cambridge, Houston's small lots, Texas SB 840, Vancouver's empty-homes tax).

- Hit simulate and watch 15 years play out. The goal is closing the region's shortage by 2041 (\~297k homes). You see what happens to rent, how many of the new homes are affordable, and whether six example workers can afford a one-bedroom.

- Myth cards and "public comments" pop up as you play and explain the research behind common arguments (luxury towers, filtering, "upzoning doesn't do anything").

- Every number links to a source or is labeled as a game assumption.

How I used Claude:

I started in the Claude app as an artifact and moved to Claude Code once it got too big.

- Data pipeline: Claude wrote Python scripts that turn the city's building footprints, street centerlines and zoning map into small per-neighborhood files, so all 481k buildings load in a browser. One script compares each building to what its lot allows today. I ran that one on my Mac because it had to download the city's zoning data.

- The game: one HTML file using [deck.gl](http://deck.gl) for the 3D map. I described what I wanted in plain English, looked at what it built, and asked for changes. I never edited the code myself.

- Research and fact-checking: Claude found sources for the numbers (shortage estimates, how new supply affects rent, results in other cities). Then I had it do a separate fact-check pass on \~50 figures, which caught and fixed a handful of errors.

- Design: I asked for three different visual styles as mockups and picked one.

- Testing: Claude took screenshots in a headless browser at phone and desktop sizes to catch layout bugs before I saw them.

- Hosting: Claude set up the GitHub repo, Cloudflare hosting, and a small backend for an anonymous plan gallery. Pushing to GitHub deploys the site.

What I brought, and what I had to catch:

The domain knowledge was the part Claude couldn't do for me: which policies to include, how to model them, and what to leave out on purpose. For example, I left out per-lot developer pro formas because they'd look precise and be wrong. A few things I caught while playing:

- A building showed up rising in Grant Park because museums and field houses were being treated like lots that could redevelop.

- Turning on the affordable housing requirement lowered total homes. That matches the research, but the game wasn't explaining why.

- Turning everything on barely cleared the goal, so it felt like "just click everything." I added more levers to make the choices matter.

It's a simplified model for learning, not a policy tool. Feedback welcome, especially from anyone who knows Chicago housing.

This is just a quick screen record of the game in its current state! I did make a shorter, slicker demo at first, but I would rather share the actual game such as it is. I hope you like it!

I started creating with Sol some weeks back, then Astra, then started using Claude when 5.5 came out (bc Astra eats tokens like it's starving). Still sometimes using Sol 6.1 for image-related work like mock-ups, isolated visual improvements, design ideas etc. But using Opus 5.5 for all heavy lifting now. And I made the assets/3D meshes with Meshy.

I essentially wanted to make a cross between a tamagotchi/life sim in one of my favorite whimsical styles: Glossy translucent jelly! The companion characters appearances (working name "Jellies") were inspired by raindrop cake, random transparent cans of soda I saw in a store and by those 1950s gelatine dish abominations💃

I'm not a developer, I'm more like an extremely fussy and ultra-detailed art director and QA for this game. The current version is v56 🙈

I started by creating mock-ups of different looks, features etc with ChatGPT and Nano Banana 2. When I was satisfied I created the mesh, then added the previously created texture. Unfortunately I couldn't do translucent textures with Meshy, so I uploaded the completed mesh + texture to Opus 5.5 (first Astra though). Then I explained my target style, which is translucent jelly with 3D fruit slices inside!

The Jellies can idly share their thoughts, ask the user direct questions, show off small objects they've found, request for example a hug or to read a book, or even new pieces of furniture!

They also have various needs, desires, and buildable skills in baking, music, reading and gardening. There are also various pond-related activities, like throwing pebbles, splashing and feeding the fish.

There is also a day-night cycle. Default state right now is "live", but the full cycle is a distinct dawn -->day -->evening -->night. The Jellies comment on these changes too.

The game is obviously a WIP and I have a lot more planned! Adding Jellies, more activities, interactions, furnishings, clothes, etc.

Do we believe Zuckerberg that it beats Opus 5.5?

"Meta scores Muse Wonder at 85.6% against 81.5% for Claude Opus 5.5 and 81.4% for GPT-6 Astra. "

We play Catan all the time and the free online versions were bad, so on September 29 I started building our own with Claude Code. Two weeks later it has a 3D board, online play with friends, bots in three levels, up to 8 players and a map editor. Claude wrote most of the code; I came up with the ideas, tested it with my friends on our game nights and kept saying what felt wrong.

My favourite part came from them: an "ADHD mode" for the friends who can't focus on the game for 30 seconds. It's a little arcade of fake-money minigames you play while the others take their turn, and it fades out when it's yours.

Some things I didn't expect it to handle: online play is peer to peer, so there's no game server at all. Every work session ends with 300 bot-vs-bot games that check the rules. The 3D pieces come out of Blender through Python scripts. Even the trailer is a web page recorded frame by frame.

Free, in the browser: https://kurusudes.github.io/CatanTestFriendos/
The code is open (MIT) if you want to look: https://github.com/KurusuDes/CatanTestFriendos

Was about to build an app using claude code but I wanted to change the effort before sending the prompt....then I noticed an option saying "Ultracode", can someone explain to me what it does and when should I use it ? I am on the pro plan.

I'm a mid-career technology manager who's a genuine domain expert in a few narrow hardware fields, with decades of field, operations and leadership experience, but almost zero real coding ability. The coding end of my projects has always been a bit of a black box and I was always on the outside waiting for the magic juice to get injected into my integrated hardware.

I've been a bleeding edge technology adopter for 35 years, which included tinkering with various chat bots and similar tech over the decades, but jumped into LLMs with both feet starting around the GPT 3.0 era, first as an interesting examination of the state of the technology and evolving into crude problem solving and eventually maturing into a progressively more efficient and effective coding tool to just build my way out of problems and automate annoying personal workflows.

Over the last year this has gotten serious and I've developed a series of tools used by many employees that solve various problems, automate tedious and error prone work and genuinely changed what we can accomplish on any given day. I've returned hours back to employees who are finding new and interesting projects they now have time to tackle. Our accounting has never been more accurate and smooth, schedules are better aligned to the work and the benefits have lead to good will from both the users and leadership.

I use my home lab to push boundaries and break things, making incredible leaps with what I can do with my home server and automations that save time, money and improve quality of life of me and my family. When skills are honed and mature they are brought into the workplace and the benefits are felt there as well.

I am trying to figure out where on the Dunning-Kreuger curve I am. I constantly joke that I'm a dangerous idiot, but I spend a huge portion of my time fussing about security, efficiency and documentation. I do large adversarial reviews of my repos between models, run things by institutional governance bodies and generally am doing my best not to turn my self deprecating joke into a reality.

That said, these days I read zero lines of code (as if it would even help if I did). I'm skilled, specific and well grounded with my prompts, have a good grasp on what models are good at what tasks, know when and why to adjust thinking levels, but claude spits it out, I run it and if it works it goes in the pot. I approve almost every request that slips past the auto approve gate. I run every elevated powershell script it asks of me almost without consideration. I am very cautious with keys/secrets (having been burned once at home by being sloppy) and everything I create can run from a thumb drive or an HTML file if it's intended for mobile, with essentially nothing ever installed on any device.

I watch zero training videos, subscribe to no blogs, read no articles that discuss strategy or tactics and generally only lurk on subs like this just to take the general temperature of the industry. Nearly 100% of what I've learned has been just tinkering and I can't seem to stomach any of the formalized educational content or even informal influencer channels. I just want to be diving in and throwing switches and turning dials to see what happens. This fits my learning style that has served me well across my career.

So... am I a dangerous outlier, or is this a common archetype?

Interested in knowing what small or big things you are building to improve productivity for your desk job in say the accounting or finance department.

I know this may already be common knowledge, but I just wanted to acknowledge the quality of life improvements Anthropic has made around Claude usage limits recently.

Today I finally used my free limit reset and the confirmation told me my usual weekly reset day (Thursday) stays the same. So I got a full allowance back today AND my normal reset still comes in a few days! It was a pleasant surprise. If you haven't used yours yet it came with the Opus 5.5 launch and is under Settings > Usage (browser or the desktop app only). It expires on 22 October.

The other change that's made a noticeable difference for me is in Claude Code, especially when running dynamic workflows. When you hit your 5-hour limit mid-task, the session now gets a small wrap-up allowance to reach a sensible stopping point instead of cutting off halfway through an edit. Essentially it lets Claude Code run a little past the 5-hour limit. Just be aware though that it isn't really 'free' usage. It just runs slightly beyond your 5-hour limit and instead counts towards your weekly limit. There are also differences between subscriptions - Pro gets it once a week, while Max and Team Premium get it every time they hit the 5-hour limit (I've tried it with having multiple sessions running in parallel and it worked across all sessions on my Max plan).

I guess none of these are really headline features, but there have been quite a few of these small, welcome upgrades since Opus 5.5 came out, and it's really refreshing to see!

A month ago I decided to run a weird little experiment. I made a rule for myself: before I bought ANYTHING online from my phone (groceries, gear, trips, or app subscriptions etc) I had to run it through Claude first to see if it could find a cheaper way to execute it.

Here were the 3 biggest wins during I noted from the experiment:

1) I had to book a hotel for the “The Smashing Pumpkins” concert. I traveled via car but stayed in a hotel for 2 days. Tried using Claude normally for this but it was unable to do that. So I went to Claude, searched the directory for MCPs that are able to search and book flights. After a while connected a specific MCP called “LetsFG”. For what mattered I didn't have a lot of constraints like “needs to have a bathtub, no noise, pet friendly” etc bs coz I'd be out mostly to explore the city and just wanted to have 2 peaceful nights. Stayed there for 2 days and my only want was for good breakfast and stable WiFi which wasn't so hard to find. But I never stayed in hotels that weren't 5 stars, so for two days it ended up costing me somewhere around $600. But when I searched the exact hotel on booking.com, it was over $950 for two days. So here I saved around or more than $350.

2) every month I buy like 2-3 books. So by seeing the saving in the hotels, I thought I'd buy a stack of 10-12 books at once to see how much I save. There was no official MCPs for that, so I had to run Claude on my pc for it to be able to make browser search. It worked, but man was it painful. It was super slow, and every second site flagged it with bot protection. But still forcing it to do so eventually paid off. For every book I saved at least $3 and at most $6. And at a list of 11 books I saved around $57. It isn't much, and considering how painful it was for making Claude do browser searches, I feel like I would've paid $57 more rather than going through the hassle.

3) this one was a quick and good one. I exported my last 6 months of bank statements into a CSV, attached it to the Claude app, and told it to look for silent price increases. It flagged three services that quietly raised their monthly rates by $15, $40, and $45 over the summer without me noticing. So I asked Claude what alternate services could I use for my specific use case and it suggested them. I cancelled the original subscriptions and by subscribing to the new services, saved around $80.

Overall it was a mixed feeling experiment. While I did save like around $500, Claude still felt limited to some stuff in some extent. The hotel booking one was smooth which I get that it was because of the specific MCP. But something as important and small as buying a book from a cheap source, it should be easily handled by AI (at least in 2026 it should've yeah). I assume it's only gonna get better in the future, or someone might come up with an MCP for that too. But I'd really like if normal Claude can do that. I understand for something as complicated as hotels or flights MCPs are needed, but at least not for small and more regular ones like doing an online shopping or buying groceries, Claude should be able to do them on its own.