Over the past month, Claude users reported that coding responses felt weaker and more error-prone. Anthropic traced the problem to three separate releases affecting Claude Code and the Claude Agent SDK—none touched the API itself—and fixed them all by April 20 with version 2.1.116. First, on March 4 they switched the default reasoning effort from high to medium to curb long pauses, only to hear that medium felt dumbed-down. They rolled that back on April 7, restoring x-high effort for Opus 4.7 and high effort for other models. Next came a March 26 change meant to speed up idle sessions by pruning old reasoning from context after an hour. A bug kept clearing history on every turn, so Claude forgot its own logic, repeated itself and made odd tool calls. That one finally got patched on April 10 in v2.1.101. The repeated cache misses also drained users’ rate limits faster, which added to the confusion. Finally, on April 16 they introduced a new system prompt to tone down verbosity in Opus 4.7. Combined with earlier prompt tweaks, it cut into coding quality. They reverted that change on April 20 as well. Since each tweak hit different subsets of traffic at different times, users saw a patchwork of slowdowns, forgetfulness, and drop-offs in output quality until late April, when all three problems were resolved.