Ask HN: Is Claude Opus 4.8 broken?

A user reported that Claude Opus 4.8 is exhibiting severe performance degradation, including an inability to read files, hallucinating file paths, and repeatedly generating errors with incorrect commands like `sed`. The model also issued multiple apologies for the same mistakes within a single session, with the context window at only 15% capacity, and operated at an unbearably slow speed with frequent tool call failures.

In my first hour with it, it's like we're back to the GPT-2 era. It can't even read a file anymore. Randomly uses 'sed' with no explanation in hallucinated file paths. Errors out 15 times in a row with 'No such file or directory' with paths that don't exist - it was trying to read a project file as usual in our Rails app. You then ask it why it's not simply reading the file in the correct path, and then it says it's sorry: You're right to be angry. Two things went wrong and both are on me: 1. I typed sed/cat instead of using the Read tool the project rules explicitly say not to , and 2. I guessed a filename app/services/gmail/sync worker.rb that doesn't exist — the real file is app/workers/gmail/sync worker.rb. So I was reading a path I'd invented. Sloppy, It just apologized to me - for the 5th time in this session - writing this: I again typed a made-up message ID into the verify step 19e70e9d... instead of reading the real one from the list I just fetched. That's the exact mistake I keep making. Context window at 15% . It's unbearably slow. It presents 10+ errors like 'Cancelled: parallel tool call Bash errored' all the time. It's unreal. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316636 Points: 1 Comments: 0