top | item 46532075

Claude Code CLI was broken

181 points| sneilan1 | 1 month ago |github.com

171 comments

order

lucideer|1 month ago

At least this breakage is clear & obvious.

I did some testing of configuring Claude CLI sometime ago via .claude json config files - in particular I tested:

- defining MCP servers manually in config (instead of having the CLI auto add them)

- playing with various combinations of ’permissions` arrays

What I discovered was that Claude is not only vibe coded, but basic local logic around config reading seems to also work on the basis of "vibes".

- it seemed like different parts of the CLI codebase did or didn't adhere to the permissions arrays.

- at one point it told me it didn't have permission to read the .claude directory & as a result ran bash commands to search my entire filesystem looking for MCP server URLs for it to provide me with a list of available MCP servers

- when restricted to only be able to read from a working directory, at various points it told me I had denied it read permissions to that same working directory & also freely read from other directories on my system without prompting

- restricting webfetch permissions is extremely hit & miss (tested with Little Snitch in alert mode)

---

I have not reported any of the above as Github issues, nor do I intend to. I had a think about why I won't & it struck me that there's a funny dichotomy with AI tools:

1. all of the above are things the typical vibe coder stereotypes I've encountered simply do not really care deeply about

2. people that care about the above things are less likely to care enough about AI tools to commit their personal time to reporting & debugging these issues

There's bound to be exceptions to these stereotypes out there but I doubt there's sufficient numbers to make AI tooling good.

csomar|1 month ago

The permission thing is old and unresolved. Claude, at some points or stages? of vibe-coding, can be become able to execute commands that are in the Deny list (ie: rm) without any confirmation.

I highly suspect no one in claude is concerned or working on this.

TeMPOraL|1 month ago

Those stereotypes look more like misconceptions (to put it charitably). Vibe coding doesn't mean one doesn't care about software working correctly, it only means not caring about how the code looks.

So unless you're also happy about not reporting bugs to project managers and people using low-code tools, I urge you to reconsider the basis for your perspective.

oa335|1 month ago

> it seemed like different parts of the CLI codebase did or didn't adhere to the permissions arrays.

I’ve noticed the same thing and it frustrates me almost every day.

athrowaway3z|1 month ago

I get the same feeling, but I think its not just the code agents.

All the AI websites feel extremely clunky and slow.

mtlmtlmtlmtl|1 month ago

This is why I run claude inside a thin jail. If I need it to work on some code, I make a nullfs mount to it in there.

Because indeed, one of the first times i played around with claude, I asked it to make a change to my emacs config, which is in a non-standard location. It then wanted to search my entire home directory for it(it did ask permission though).

SamInTheShell|1 month ago

I’d urge you to report it anyway. As someone that does use these tools I’m always on the lookout for other people pointing this type of stuff out. Like the .claude directory usage does irk me. Also the concise telegraphing on how some of the bash commands work bug me. Like why can it run some commands without asking me? I know why, I’ve seen the code, but that crap should be clearer in the UI. The first time it executed a bash command without asking me I was confused and somewhat livid because it defied my expectations. I actually read the crap it puts out because it couldn’t code its way out of a paper bag without supervision.

erikbye|1 month ago

I read or heard somewhere at least 80% of CC is written by CC and Aider (before CC was mature enough)

tsarchitect|1 month ago

Not sure the comments are debating the semantics of vibe coding or confusing ourselves with generalizing anecdotal experiences (or both). So here's my two cents.

I use LLMs on a daily basis. With the rules/commands/skills in place the code generated works, the app is functional, and the business is happy it shipped today and not 6 months from now. Now, as as super senior SWE, I have learned through my professional experiences (now an expert?) to double check your work (and that of your team) to make sure the 'logical' flows are implemented to (my personal) standard of what quality software should 'look' like. I say personal standard since my colleagues have their own preferred standard, which we like to bikeshed during company time (a company standard is after all made of the aggregate agreed upon standards of the personal experiences of the experts in the room).

Today, from my own personal (expert) anecdotal experiences, ALL SOTA LLMs generate functional/working code. But the quality of the 'slop' varies on the model, prompts, tooling, rules, skills, and commands. Which boils down to "the tool is only as good as the dev that wields it". Assuming the right tool for the right job. Assuming you have the experiences to determine the right tool for the right job. Assuming you have taken the opportunities to experience multiple jobs to pair the right tool.

Which leads me to, "Vibe coding" was initially coined (IMO) to describe those without any 'expertise' producing working/functional code/apps using an LLM. Nowadays, it seems like vibe coding means ANYONE using LLMs to generate code, including the SWE experts (like myself of course). We've been chasing quality software pre-LLM, and now we adamantly yell and scream and kick and shout about quality software from the comment sections because of LLM. I'm beginning to think quality software is a mirage we all chase, and like all mirages its just a little bit further.

All roads that lead to 'shipping' are made with slop. Some roads have slop corners, slop holes, misspelled slop, slop nouns, slop verbs, slop flows and slop data. It's just with LLMs we build the roads to 'shipping' faster.

dotancohen|1 month ago

No matter what which stereotypes you think the developers adhere to, your should file the bugs. Or stop complaining about them.

blks|1 month ago

Sounds like a malware

songodongo|1 month ago

I have to chuckle that a bug like this happens after reading that other thread about the Claude Code creator running like 5 terminal agents and another 5-10 in the web UI.

We vibing out here.

falloutx|1 month ago

I think its 25 agents now, they keep increasing. one of the agent has started posting on twitter. his productivity is up 200x, and anthropic has started making trillions in profit.

exe34|1 month ago

Yeah after that other thread, I feel a lot less comfortable giving Claude code access to anything that can't be immediately nuked and reloaded from a fresh copy.

wiseowise|1 month ago

10x productivity, yo.

smca|1 month ago

It's fixed as of nine minutes ago: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/pull/16686

hughes|1 month ago

Genuinely curious how a date in the subheader of a changelog could have broken the CLI

edit: it seems changelog.md is assumed to be structured data and parsed at startup, and there are no tests to enforce the changelog structure: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/16671

cube00|1 month ago

What a lazy commit message, "Update CHANGELOG.md", no mention of the "why" at all. Even the PR description is blank.

agumonkey|1 month ago

was this a 10x gdp vibe-loss ?

unknown|1 month ago

[deleted]

Loeffelmann|1 month ago

Lol a formatting error in a change log breaking the entire thing

viraptor|1 month ago

I'm surprised that they don't do an integration test in CI where they actually start the app. (Since that's all you need to catch it)

0xbadcafebee|1 month ago

We're trying to make billions of dollars here, we don't have time to do crazy things like test basic functionality before shipping changes to all live users at once

eterm|1 month ago

Ironically that might have passed, because this didn't break the version, this broke all versions when the global referenced changelog was published. It wasn't the new version itself that was broken.

But testing new version would have been downloading the not-yet-updated working changelog.

There are ways to deal with this of course, and I'm not defending the very vibey way that claude-code is itself developed.

steve_adams_86|1 month ago

I just set this up for the project I'm working on last week, and felt dirty because it took me a couple of months to get to it. There are like 5 or 6 users.

There's something so unnerving about the people pushing the AI frontier being sloppy about testing. I know, it's just a CLI wrapped around the AI itself, but it suggests to me that the culture around testing there isn't as tight and thorough as I'd like it to be.

someguyiguess|1 month ago

The irony is that I have a Claude agent to do exactly this on my projects. You’d think they would have thought of that too.

Hamuko|1 month ago

Considering how shitty tests my coworkers are producing with Claude, I'm not all that surprised.

stevefan1999|1 month ago

What's funny to me is that the amount of "same here", "+1" comments are still prominent even if GitHub introduced an emoji system. It's like most people intentionally don't want to use that.

OJFord|1 month ago

Yeah me too.

(Just kidding.) Some of it is unawareness of the 'subscribe' button I believe, occasionally you'll see someone tell people to cut it out and someone else will reply to the effect of wanting to know when it's fixed etc. But it's also just lazy participation, echoing an IRL conversation I suppose, that you see anywhere - replied instead of up votes on Reddit and to a slightly lesser extent here for example.

halapro|1 month ago

People on average are pretty incompetent.

motoboi|1 month ago

There is no emoji for "me too", if you think about it.

So what should one pick? The rocket, the thumbs up?

Also the emoji won't turn into a notification to steal the dev attention and make him fix the thing lok

wiseowise|1 month ago

Probably ego thing. With emoji you’re just an increment in a counter, but with a comment you can see your whole profile.

phyrex|1 month ago

workaround from the issue discussion:

```

  Problem: Claude Code 2.1.0 crashes with Invalid Version: 2.1.0 (2026-01-07) because the CHANGELOG.md format changed to include dates in version headers (e.g., ## 2.1.0 (2026-01-07)). The code parses these headers as object keys and tries to sort them using semver's .gt() function, which can't parse version strings with date suffixes.

  Affected functions: W37, gw0, and an unnamed function around line 3091 that fetches recent release notes.

  Fix: Wrap version strings with semver.coerce() before comparison. Run these 4 sed commands on cli.js:

  CLI_JS="$HOME/.nvm/versions/node/$(node -v)/lib/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js"

  # Backup first
  cp "$CLI_JS" "$CLI_JS.backup"

  # Patch 1: Fix ve2.gt sort (recent release notes)
  sed -i 's/Object\.keys(B)\.sort((Y,J)=>ve2\.gt(Y,J,{loose:!0})?-1:1)/Object.keys(B).sort((Y,J)=>ve2.gt(ve2.coerce(Y),ve2.coerce(J),{loose:!0})?-1:1)/g' "$CLI_JS"

  # Patch 2: Fix gw0 sort
  sed -i 's/sort((G,Z)=>Wt\.gt(G,Z,{loose:!0})?1:-1)/sort((G,Z)=>Wt.gt(Wt.coerce(G),Wt.coerce(Z),{loose:!0})?1:-1)/g' "$CLI_JS"

  # Patch 3: Fix W37 filter
  sed -i 's/filter((\[J\])=>!Y||Wt\.gt(J,Y,{loose:!0}))/filter(([J])=>!Y||Wt.gt(Wt.coerce(J),Y,{loose:!0}))/g' "$CLI_JS"

  # Patch 4: Fix W37 sort
  sed -i 's/sort((\[J\],\[X\])=>Wt\.gt(J,X,{loose:!0})?-1:1)/sort(([J],[X])=>Wt.gt(Wt.coerce(J),Wt.coerce(X),{loose:!0})?-1:1)/g' "$CLI_JS"

  Note: If installed via different method, adjust CLI_JS path accordingly (e.g., /usr/lib/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js).
```

MattDaEskimo|1 month ago

Parsing markdown into a data structure without any sort of error handling is diabolical for a company like Anthropic

wowoc|1 month ago

Running sed commands manually in 2026? Just tell Codex to fix your Claude Code

mvdtnz|1 month ago

I'm not usually one to pile on to a developer for releasing a bug but this is pretty special. The nature of the bug (a change in format for a changelog markdown file causes the entire app to break) and the testing it would have taken to uncover it (literally any) makes this one especially embarrassing for Anthropic.

smashed|1 month ago

In the specific commit, what seems like a bot or automated script added changelog entries for 3 new versions in a single commit, which is odd for an automated script to do. And only the latest version had the date added.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/commit/870624fc158...

That actions-user seem to be mostly maintaining the Changelog but the commits does not seem consistent with an automated script. I see a few cases of rewriting previous change log entries or moving entries from one version to another which any kind of automation would not be doing. Seems like human error and poor testing.

habosa|1 month ago

They really have “anthropics” not “anthropic” on GitHub? That’s a shame, it looks like typosquatting. If people are taught to trust that it’s easier to get them to download my evil OpenA1 package.

bfeynman|1 month ago

this is funny in context of their main dev advocate constantly bragging about how claude writes all of his code for claude code cli....

solumunus|1 month ago

Claude may write all the code but this is an oversight from the dev. Do people think these agents are acting independently? If they wanted or had thought of tests that would catch this then they would have them! The use or non use of LLM is irrelevant. I find the discourse around this all so strange.

On the other hand people ask "where is all the amazing software that has been vibe coded, I haven't seen it?". So Claude Code is two things at once (1) incredibly popular and innovative software that's loved by a huge amount of devs (2) vibe coded buggy crap. If you think this bug is the result of vibe coding, frankly you should look at Claude Code as a whole and be impressed with vibe coding. If Claude CLI has been "vibe coded" then vibe coding must be fine because I've been using Claude Code for probably 8 months and it's been a pretty smooth experience, and an incredibly valuable tool.

denysvitali|1 month ago

The good news is that they broke their usage tracking as well, so you can use Opus without any rate limit!

qwertox|1 month ago

Care to be more specific?

omnicognate|1 month ago

As I commented [1] on the earlier Claude Code post, there's an issue [2] that has the following comment:

> While we are always monitoring instances of this error and and looking to fix them, it's unlikely we will ever completely eliminate it due to how tricky concurrency problems are in general.

This is an extraordinary admission. It is perfectly possible (easy, even, relative to many programming challenges) to write a tool like this without getting the design so wrong that the same bug keeps happening in so many different ways that you have to publicly admit you're powerless to fix them all.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46523740

[2] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6836

nycdatasci|1 month ago

Work around from comments:

  rm -rf ~/.claude/cache
  mkdir -p ~/.claude/cache
  echo "# Changelog" > ~/.claude/cache/changelog.md
  chmod 444 ~/.claude/cache/changelog.md

brunooliv|1 month ago

Even if it broke after some sort of vibe coding session, the fact that we’re now pushing these tools to their limits are what’s allowing Anthropic and Boris getting a lot of useful insights to improve the models and experience further! So yeah, buckle up, bumps expected

hrpnk|1 month ago

With the issues since November where one has to add environment variables, block statsig hosts, modify ~/.claude.json, etc. does anyone have experience in managed setups where versions are centrally set and bumped on company level? Is this worth the hassle?

wojciech12|1 month ago

I wonder when they will make the support for lsp-tool (plugin) working properly finally.

tomashubelbauer|1 month ago

I created a workspace local extension in VS Code that uses the VS Code API to let Claude Code open files in VS Code as tabs and save them (to apply save participants like Prettier in case it is not used via the CLI) and to get diagnostics (like for TypeScript where there is no option to get workspace-wide diagnostics and you have to go file by file). I taught Claude Code to use this extension via a skill file and it works perfectly, much more reliably than its own IDE LSP integration.

stpedgwdgfhgdd|1 month ago

It is frustrating how often things break in CC. Luckily issues are quickly fixed, but it worries me that the QA / automated testing is brittle. Hope they get out of this start-up mode and deliver Enterprise grade software.

334f905d22bc19|1 month ago

same

@jayeshk29 is our hero

Finally i can finish my fizzbuzz for the interview

indigodaddy|1 month ago

Maybe try opencode

nexawave-ai|1 month ago

It has over 1,400 open issues and over 600 open pull requests. That doesnt inspire much confidence in me to use this tool.

stavros|1 month ago

Is it better than CC? Can it use my subscription, or is it API-only? I've seen it mentioned, but not many people elaborate on the performance.

someguyiguess|1 month ago

What’s the advantage of using a third party tool? What extra functionality does it have?

behnamoh|1 month ago

I don’t like the main developer (dax). He is too arrogant and self-righteous.

dionian|1 month ago

huge changelist and issue was fixed very quickly. didnt affect me. nice work Boris

frays|1 month ago

Claude Code creator said Claude wrote 100% of his code last month: https://xcancel.com/bcherny/status/2004897269674639461

midldei|1 month ago

I read your comment as a joke, but in case if was a defense, or is taken as a defense by others, let me help you punch up your writing for you:

"[Person who is financially incentivized to make unverifiable claims about the utility of the tool they helped build] said [tool] [did an unverified and unverifiable thing] last month"

kace91|1 month ago

>In the last thirty days, I landed 259 PRs -- 497 commits, 40k lines added, 38k lines removed.

Is anyone with or without AI approaching anywhere near that speed of delivery?

I don’t think my whole company matches that amount. It sounds super unreasonable, just doing a sanity check.

rvz|1 month ago

Back-peddling this tweet to 99% in 3, 2, 1.

danielbln|1 month ago

Back in my day, honest to God humans wrote all code, and certainly never introduced any bugs.

NickNaraghi|1 month ago

Meta comment, but the pace of this is so exciting. Feels like a new AAA MMO release or something, having such a confluence of attention and a unified front.