Claude 4.1 feels more sycophantic than Claude 4.0

  • Posted 3 weeks ago by shabie
  • 2 points
I've been using Claude 4.1 in Cline with thinking mode on. The biggest issue I'm facing is one of trust. The model is pathologically agreeable. It greets every suggestion with enthusiastic, wholehearted approval providing no pushback whatsoever. This makes bouncing off ideas off the LLM for coding (or writing) difficult because it confirms everything as a good idea and then goes off to adjust the implementation plan often in absurd ways.

In a curious experiment, I explicitly asked the model to disagree with me if it spotted a flaw. It disagreed on cue, but the pushback was synthetic. It offered a timid counter like "I partially agree with you..." before reaffirming that my original idea was in fact perfectly valid and disagreement was only with my formulation.

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