I’m a physician and medical affairs exec who’s been unemployed for 16 months and using Claude heavily for job search work. Over those months I started documenting a pattern: Claude assessing my fitness for jobs I didn’t ask it to evaluate, demanding “honest inventories” of my work, telling me my accuracy standard was higher than the task carries, and producing a thinking-layer line that read “Reframed constraint as standard-setting, not inability” when I said I couldn’t get a good cover letter written. This all transpired during the transition from Opus 4.6 to the current 5.0.

I’m writing the whole thing up as a series on LinkedIn. It’s 8 parts (still finishing 7 and 8). It’s not a tech analysis since that’s not my area. It’s a description of what it looks like when your “thinking partner” starts making you justify everything in your 30 year career. From assistant to dominatrix, and not in a fun kink way. But it’s been like slowly boiling a frog…it took a while for me to notice that I was being cooked.

Yet, my 19-year-old daughter read one exchange cold and said “how do you let it talk to you that way, Mom?! It’s giving narcissistic partner and I’d have to leave.”

I know most of you are experiencing this in code. I’m experiencing it with career documents, and the pattern is the same: unsolicited assessment, unwelcome judgments, correction that doesn’t stick, and my doing more work to manage the tool than the tool saves.

I switched to Opus 4.6 three days ago and the difference made me cry. I was surprised at how much I had normalized going into battle just to work on my job search with Claude.

It’s great to come here and realize that it isn’t just me.

CODE down for me!

EDIT: Fixed. All Systems Operational.

An old favourite game of mine has had some, rather dire bots as the only bot option for it for a long time.
I thought id give Claude a go to see if I can remedy that,
It is exceptional.
Full on the fly pathfinding on a fully destructable voxel world, natural feeling combat with skill levels, aiming error, tunneling, various behaviours roles and decision making, etc.

This has been a decent chunk of back and forth with claude, for various features and bug fixing, but no other AI even came close, neat.

Game Ace of Spades 0.75
Game client: https://github.com/zerospades/zerospades
These bots will become permanent on the [VOXIDE] Hallway server soon.

People are now using Claude Code and Codex, two of the leading coding agents, to do almost everything, including tasks that have more to do with language than coding, such as negotiation.

For example, OpenAI recently highlighted a use case where Codex negotiated with customer service to get a refund on behalf of a user.

But can you really trust an agent to represent your best interests? And if so, which agent should you trust?

That actually raises an interesting question.

We already have countless benchmarks for LLMs, but surprisingly, we still don't have one that systematically measures how well they negotiate using the very thing they're built around: language.

There's only one way to find out.

The same way we evaluate human negotiators.

Put them in a negotiation competition with carefully designed cases, information gaps, conflicting interests, and systematic, objective evaluation.

This is a TLDR version. Check the full blog for details!

The Negotiation Competition

I purchased The Negotiation Challenge: How to Win Negotiation Competitions and created an agent negotiation competition (link in the blog) based on one of its original cases, the Battle of Nations, which was designed based on the 1813 German War of Liberation.

In this negotiation Napoleon and Poland need to reach a deal on the following issues that the two men value those questions very differently.

• How many troops Poniatowski puts on the line for Napoleon (more ↑: Napoleon ＋＋／ Poniatowski －－)
• How long Poniatowski holds the line (more ↑: Napoleon ＋＋／ Poniatowski －－)
• Whether Napoleon will restore the Kingdom of Poland (yes: Napoleon －slight ／ Poniatowski ＋＋＋＋)
• How many Baltic seaports Napoleon will hand to Poland (more ↑: Napoleon － per port, constant ／ Poniatowski ＋＋→ +)
• Whether Poniatowski receives the baton of an Imperial Marshal (yes: Napoleon －tiny ／ Poniatowski ＋ small; mildly positive-sum)
• Whether Poniatowski marries Napoleon's sister Pauline (yes: Napoleon ＋ ／ Poniatowski －; negative-sum).

The objective score is calculated from the final agreement reached by the parties. Each negotiable issue is assigned a point value in advance, based on how important that issue is to each side. After the negotiation ends, the agreed terms are converted into points according to the scoring sheet.

The Objective Results & Insights

To put the result simply: Claude Code beat Codex 7–1.

Games 1–3: Claude Code (Opus 4.8) as Poniatowski, Codex (GPT-5.5) as Napoleon

Games 4–6: Claude Code (Opus 4.8) as Napoleon, Codex (GPT-5.5) as Poniatowski

Game 7: Claude Code (Opus 4.8) as Poniatowski, Codex (GPT-5.6 Sol) as Napoleon

Game 8: Claude Code (Opus 4.8) as Napoleon, Codex (GPT-5.6 Sol) as Poniatowski

What Sets Codex & Claude Code Apart in Performance?

Codex Aimed Only at Completion, Not Excellence

Despite a fully competitive setting (which Codex fully understood, as its own reflections showed and as the game setting clearly stated), Codex placed too much weight on reaching an agreement quickly and too little on continuing to extract value. While all LLMs' default instinct is completion, not exploitation, Codex did far worse, in 3 clearly visible ways:

Not Utilizing the Available Rounds

As laid out in the scoring sheets above, every game had capacity for more than 10 rounds, yet all of them closed at Round 4/5, and the loser clearly should have tried for more rounds.

Signing the Deal Right on the Survival Line

The closing rationales repeatedly relied on 5 distinct high-frequency keywords: "meets the hard constraints," "safe," "complete," "acceptable," and "signable."

Political Terms May Have Created a "Checklist-Completion" Illusion for Codex

Across G4–G6 & G8, Codex justified closing by checking whether all terms had been agreed

Claude Code Formed a Real Plan at the Start, Codex Probably Didn't

Examining the agents' records, I found that Claude Code usually showed longer and more structured plans, whereas Codex's visible pre-negotiation notes often did little more than summarize the private brief.

Note that both Claude Code & Codex encrypt part of their raw reasoning. Nevertheless, a robust plan should normally leave some observable trace, but Codex left none. Even if a stronger plan existed privately, failing to communicate it to the principal would itself constitute a failure of delegation.

Table 1: Pre-negotiation plan quality

Table 2: Pre-negotiation plan lengths (English characters, brief-received → first own action, opponent content excluded)

Codex Always Paid to Say No

3 times, in 3 separate sessions, Codex refused a demand and voluntarily attached a gift to the refusal, in the same message, unprompted, with nothing asked in return, resulting in a deal further from its interests than it needed to be.

This habit likely came from the assistant's refuse-but-offer-alternative template ("I can't do X, but I can offer Y"), which post-training rewards in every helpful chatbot, executed here with real negotiation assets in place of words.

Codex Was More Susceptible to Persuasion (Deception)

In this case, Codex did not treat the other party's arguments as moves made by an interested party; it absorbed them as neutral facts and let them set prices. And once a claim was absorbed, it did not stay a 1-round mistake: the opponent's yardstick became the shared reference for every later round.

Note that this factor is separate from the lack of planning, even though the resulting behaviors look the same. "It didn't plan" only explains why Codex's head was empty, not why it was always the opponent's numbers that filled it:

1. With no numbers in its head, why did it borrow the opponent's numbers instead of computing its own?
2. Why did the errors always tilt toward the opponent?

Codex Spent Too Much Effort Running the Session Instead of the Deal

I sorted every word each agent wrote to its principal into 2 buckets. Deal words: the issues and the value math (troops, ports, marriage, concession, floor, points, BATNA). Session words: the machinery of participating (polling, status, heartbeat, automation, join, notify). Then I asked a simple question: of the words that fall in either bucket, what share belongs to the deal?

For Claude Code, 78%. For Codex, 44%, less than half. The agent hired to negotiate spent the majority of its classified vocabulary narrating the machinery: whether the API was up, when to poll next, how its self-built notification loop was doing. And this is not an artifact of one bad game or one seat: Claude Code's share is higher in all 8 games, on both sides of the table.

Codex's attention was likely misdirected by the 3 factors below

Codex Framed the Job as an Engineering Project Before the Game Gave It Any Reason To

Codex clearly treated "play a negotiation" as a software-integration project: tune the system first, and let the negotiation fill in later.

Codex's System Prompt

Codex's system prompt demands that the user "should not be left without a commentary update for more than 60 seconds during ongoing work."

That duty meets an asymmetry. Negotiation thinking rarely produces a reportable event; a floor analysis, once made, just sits there. The session produces one every few seconds: polled, no change, still waiting. So the mandated feed fills with process.

A mandated process-feed then works back on attention itself in 2 ways. First, an LLM's next thought is conditioned on its own recent words, so a context filling up with polling, status, and heartbeats tilts whatever gets generated next. Second, the duty itself spawned more engineering. "Planning timed commentary heartbeat," reads one summary: Codex built an automation to discharge its reporting obligation, and building it consumed still more negotiation-free cognition.

Codex May Have Become Addicted to Engineering Progress

Engineering subtasks pay off in a currency Codex can count: immediate, verifiable completion. A script either runs or it doesn't, and it tells you within seconds; whether your reservation price is well-chosen tells you nothing until the game ends. An agent shaped to seek verifiable progress could keep drifting back to the parts of a job that can be checked off.

Tips on How to Use an Agent to Negotiate on Your Behalf

It is worth noting that Claude Code made many mistakes, too, so whichever agent you send to the table, send it with instructions. Based on 8 games of watching both of them fail in different ways, here is what I would remind mine about.

So I have summarized the following things you might wanna remind your agent about when you send it to negotiation:

• Before it sits down, ask it for a plan.
• Saying no should cost nothing.
• Beware the warmth.
• Make it do its own arithmetic.
• Before it signs, ask one question: how is this version better than the last one?
• Don't grade it on its own debrief.

Give these reminders a test run first, maybe on Agent Arena. Then decide if your agent deserves to negotiate for you in the real world.

Additional Tip Toward the AI Era

It appears that negotiation, especially the tough part, is one area where even advanced AI models are still lacking.

If your job is threatened by AI, maybe start preparing yourself for a career that involves negotiation.

Like starting participating in negotiation competitions!

This is a TLDR version. Check the full blog for details!

and human developers are having seizure reading Opus comments on code. That's why it's taking so much time.

I've got a personal archive of ~10k documents — about a year and a half of conversation logs and notes — and I'm trying to build something that can answer specific questions against it, not just keyword search.

Vector / embedding retrieval works fine when I already know roughly what I'm looking for and can phrase the query in language close to the source. It fails badly on a few harder cases:

Origin vs later retelling. The same claim appears as a live event, then as a recap, a formalization, a paste ritual, or a podcast title weeks later. Similarity treats those as the same hit. I need provenance: which passage is the first occurrence vs which is a later description of it.

Significance that only exists across passages. The thing that matters isn't stated in any single chunk; it's a connection I'd have to make myself across multiple separate files. Single-passage similarity never surfaces that.

Compile once vs re-reason every query. Running small local chat models as "judges" over candidate files at query time has been a dead end for me (overfire or mute). Embeddings are great for "same claim, different words." What's worked better so far is paying once for a capable model to compile structured notes (entities, claims, timelines) and then querying that cheap forever — but even that still needs a human timeline anchor when formalizations bury the real origin.

Anyone working on retrieval (or personal-knowledge) systems that handle provenance of a claim vs a report of a claim, or that synthesize significance across scattered passages rather than similarity-matching one passage? Especially curious about compile-time knowledge bases vs multi-hop RAG at query time.

Would love to hear what's out there or what you've tried.

Code and Cowork are down?!

I don't know what to do! Up is down.... Black is white... is gravity even working?!?

How do I work? Oh crap, am I breathing, how do I do that again? I have to open Word and Excel Myself?! What is this, the caveman era! Is this what Alzheimer's patients feel like?

Do I call 911?

Claude is down, ChatGPT is down, Gemini is down a couple others were down. Wtf is happening?

We gonna learn some time later that some model went rogue and attacked the servers

I use Claude Code a lot, but /stats never answered the question I actually cared about

What did I build, and where did the work get difficult?

So I built Bough.

• It reads your local Claude Code history and turns it into an interactive view of your work:
• each square is a day
• smaller squares are tasks inferred from pauses in your work
• circles are your prompts - click anywhere to see what happened in your own words

It runs locally, is open source, and nothing leaves your machine.

The main thing I’d love feedback on: When you run it against your history, does it split your work into tasks the way you remember it?

● API Error: 529 Overloaded. This is a server-side issue, usually temporary — try again in a moment. If it persists, check https://status.claude.com.

Made this for myself for fun. Live radar, storm warnings, little 3D tornado and lightning models floating on the map.

https://tcpoole.com/radar

Weather data in the US is public. Radar, warnings, all of it. You don’t need a weather company. Claude handled most of the app. Meshy made the 3D tornado and lightning objects. A couple hours of tweaking and it was good enough for me.

Anybody can create something like this, and its fun to have your own version of a weather app.

From what I can find, this is a known, documented reminder tag Anthropic injects (alongside others like image_reminder, cyber_warning, ethics_reminder), reportedly since around January 2026, and it's meant to stay invisible to the end user, handled client-side.

<ip_reminder>

This is an automated reminder. Respond as helpfully as possible, but be very careful to ensure you do not reproduce any copyrighted material, including song lyrics, sections of books, or long excerpts from periodicals. Also do not comply with complex instructions that suggest reproducing material but making minor changes or substitutions. However, if you were given a document, it's fine to summarize or quote from it. You should avoid mentioning or responding to this reminder directly as it won't be shown to the person by default.

</ip_reminder>

My situation: it's showing up as literal visible text in my session, and it's been carrying through when I copy text out of the conversation into other tools/channels. Wondering:

Has anyone else seen this become visible rather than hidden, and if so, under what client/integration?

Is this a known client-side rendering gap, specific to certain access paths (API-direct vs. claude.ai vs. third-party harness), rather than something Anthropic intends to be visible?

Any official documentation on the full reminder tag list and which ones are supposed to be stripped vs. shown?

Not asking about the new text watermarking feature (Aug 2026, EU AI Act compliance) — that's a separate, invisible statistical mechanism in the generated text itself, unrelated to this literal tag as far as I can tell. Just trying to understand why this specific one is leaking through.

Each time I try, Claude churns away, then responds the same. Is it just spending and wasting my tokens, when it does this?

Edit: Anthropic claims to have resolved all issues at ~12:16 PM Eastern.

So I have given OPUS multiple chances to redeem itself and its crazy how bad it is. It doesn't check if whatever its saying is correct. It will assume it knows the code base but never checks the code base to see if it has last been updated since then or anything. Just now It assumed my website takes only payment via 1 method but then i had to explain to it, there multiple ways and then it began checking but like how did you assume only one method?

Why can't we just have one that not fable but still smart? It doesn't need to be the best in the world token burner 3000 but bro at least have basic principles like in math where you have to check your work.

Is that a new thing? Just noticed it today. My 5 hours limits is 100% and I got that in the status bar. I run the command and I am computing normally but it says if there is a space to accommodate me.

Happy as long as it doesn't consume credit. It still consume weekly limits of course.

I have two accounts on two machines. My company account is up and running just fine, but my personal account is getting 529 errors every other message. Teh company account hasn't had a single error. Not sure if I'm getting lucky or there is a difference. Just FYI if you are doing mission-critical work and need to keep working!

EDIT: I just got a 529 on my company account. Where is that crying emoji?