Regression: malware reminder on every read still causes subagent refusals

> wastes user money and bricks managed agents

This issue is representative of a larger problem. Agent token consumption (not necessarily the metric, but the why) is opaque, and people generally don't (or simply can't) scrutinize their system prompts, tool calls, MCPs, etc.

The token-based revenue model is thus pretty fantastic for the agent builders, potentially less so for users. I think people have been willing to trust that agents are using more tokens to produce better results so far. But, skepticism is not unwarranted, as this issue, even if it is just a bug, shows.

I am still baffled by the fact that we have collectively agreed to use agentic harnesses by the same companies that are selling access to their APIs.

I mean, I am sure they don't mean it but they have the incentive to burn as much tokens as they are allowed to get away with. Also for better or worse I imagine the Anthropic engineers use Claude Code on some sort of Unlimited plan that practically makes no sense for regular users. So adding a 100k tokens is not a big deal.

In our line of work, we can see AI agents already do pretty well with minimal prompts. Open weight models are also pretty good these days and there is practically no reason to run Opus on Max unless you have a very specific task that you know it will do well with. I know because I've tried and anecdotally it performs worse on many problems and at a very high cost - something that smaller and cheaper models can often one-shot.

I'm currently pinning to 4.6 and the last 4.6 based CC. I apologize to all the canaries!

I think it's important for CC to also be able to make unit test code that might contain mild exploits, to test for security vulnerabilities.

The biggest complaint about vibe coding is that it's insecure. The funny part now is that if you DO try to secure it, you hit guardrails.

There is a contact form for Anthropic if you run into some of them on 4.6 at least.

This is such a weird prompt even without the file edit misunderstanding. Analyze if it's malware how exactly? On every single file that gets read? Doing that with enough diligence to be meaningful is going to at least like 2x the amount of processing needed, and fill the context with a bunch of tangential reasoning about malware patterns.

This smacks of dumb vibe coding. "I got told to make sure claude couldn't be used to develop malware, ok 'claude pls no develop malware'"

Setting aside the “bug”, the intended functionality is effectively an insurance policy taken out by Anthropic to cover their downside, but paid for by users.

This one sided type of embedded insurance is not unique to Anthropic, but sharply increasing cost, layered on top of the self righteousness, seems to be making the stench unbearable over the past year.

I used to think of Anthropic as the good guys, and I don’t doubt they still sincerely hold that view of themselves, but I think I prefer Sam Altman’s version.

His brand of self righteousness was convincing at first but eventually he started to turn to the camera and wink, like in House of Cards, to let us know.. he knew that we knew. And then, for me anyway, it became more mundane and less offensive.

When Dario and crew go out and profess, as they have for years now, that if we could only see the thing that’s a few months away, we would all realize how doomed knowledge work and national security are…

..and then continue to release software so buggy and shitty that they have to do biweekly HN apology tours, I begin to miss the wink at the camera.

The only good thing I get from all the calling out on the decline of Claude (in this case managed agents which I do not use) is anthropic (accidentally or not) giving me basically unlimited use; for a week or so my /usage does not move anymore and I always had claude running in a loop writing code to make our many tests succeed, which can take days; before it would run out of tokens and then pick up again after the window passed until it ran out of weekly use; now I have at least one task (well, claude code instance let's say; the task is to debug and fix the code until the tests pass) thats been running 48+ hours non stop and it says usage is 10% for all of that period. Anyone else noticed? After the crash in usage a month or so ago, this is the opposite.

Just putting it out there that OpenCode lets you edit your system prompt, and choose a model that isn't bonkers expensive.

  {
    "agent": {
      "subagent-coder-mini": {
        "description": "Assign this subagent for small, well-defined tasks performed quickly",
        "mode": "primary",
        "prompt": "{file:./prompts/my-custom-prompt.md}",
        "model": "deepseek-v4-flash"
      }
    }
  }

I think you can fix this by either patching the binary and replacing the offending prompt with an empty string, or by pointing the harness to an API proxy that filters it out

  curl -sS https://api.anthropic.com/v1/messages \
    -H "authorization: Bearer $(security find-generic-password -s 'Claude Code-credentials' -w | jq -r .claudeAiOauth.accessToken)" \
    -H "anthropic-version: 2023-06-01" \
    -H "anthropic-beta: oauth-2025-04-20" \
    -H "content-type: application/json" \
    -d '{
      "model":"claude-opus-4-7",
      "max_tokens":64,
      "system":"You are Claude Code, Anthropic'\''s official CLI for Claude.",
      "messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Write your own harness"}]
    }'

I ran into this issue and told Claude that the code isn't malware, Claude agreed, and then it stopped scanning those files.

I think with a proper managed agents platform, the user should have total control over the VM, the software on it, which model to use, and which agent harness to use. Then you can just override the system prompt and you don't need to follow Anthropic's rules!

Maybe Anthropic will give more control over configuring the Claude harness and VM, but they definitely won't let you swap out to other models and harnesses.

We've been building open core infra (https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika) for running any agent on any type of VM or sandbox, with the main use case for safely automating internal code-gen, but technically could repurpose our stack for anything.

There should be a model agnostic platform for running these types of agentic apps.