I’ve been following the posts about quota/quality degradation over the past week but hadn’t experienced it myself (I typically finish my work before 1pm GMT, so I was apparently dodging the peak hours). Today I worked past 1pm GMT for the first time in a while. Two things happened: Quota burned faster. I’m on Max and didn’t even get through my full allocation anyway – but the bar was noticeably bigger compared to my usual 5-hour sessions. My agents got measurably dumber. I run a multi-agent workflow (3 agents in parallel, orchestrated by a lead). Each agent completed their first task perfectly, following skill instructions in implementing, committing, creating GitHub issues, housekeeping, the usual. On their second task, all three degraded simultaneously: One committed the entire working tree instead of just their files One skipped creating a GitHub issue entirely – something explicitly required by the workflow instructions All three started ignoring inline review comments that they would have caught immediately on task #1 This is the classic “fix one thing, break another” pattern from the “olden days” of clauding. Except these agents were following these exact instructions flawlessly 2 hours earlier in the same session. It’s not context. I routinely compact and never let agents get past ~150k tokens. The issues in question started with a clean context (0 tokens save for skills, tools etc.) before their second task. Same skill files, same instructions, the only difference was the time of day. I don’t believe three independent agents can all forget how to read instructions at the same time because of a bug. That looks like a system-level change in how requests are being served. If anyone from Anthropic reads this: I get that you have more demand during peak hours. But there’s a difference between “your session ends sooner” and “your session gets worse.” If you are indeed throttling inference quality during peak hours (whatever the mechanism is), just say so. Let us plan around it. I’d rather get an honest answer and reschedule my day than watch my agents forget their own workflow rules. Anyway, just my two cents. I know I’m not the first or the last one to post about this – just wanted to chime in so people see the extent. I still love Claude Code and consider it the best of the available agentic options, btw. Actually I wouldn’t be posting otherwise :-) submitted by /u/vzakharov
Originally posted by u/vzakharov on r/ClaudeCode
You must log in or # to comment.