Did your PAI get recently dumber, too?

[Raazgar]

Good day folks, I have recently (the past week or so) been experiencing severe issues with output quality from MAIA (my PAI). Forgetting context. Ignoring SOPs. Not reading critical project files. Forgetting her personality. Saving files elsewhere than what my rules are.

Ran inner diagnostics, found some things, fixed them, but not like anything helped.

Today, she completely ignored even the most basic guidelines for content creation (review after every step, drafting me a deep research prompt which I run externally in Gemini, providing several angles to an article concept via BeCreative) and just went ahead and wrote the complete article on her own. OFC it was a junk, made no logiccal sense (mixed AI asistants with Skills), keeps using 2024 and 2025 as "today" for research currentness reference...

Am I doing something wrong in how I operate with MAIA? Is there any process or other requirements I am not aware of?

Thank you kindly for any and all help.

[mal-cmyk]

I have experienced the same issue in the last couple of days. I have to argue and explain way more and on tasks that previously didn't require extensive explaining and/or where rules/sop/memory were already established and working.

Unfortunately I'm not technical enough to go to deep to fix and end up "teaching a toddler to walk again" for Nth time, knowing full well it was already able to "run" at multiple points in time.

[zeddy303]

Yes. So much I deleted it and taking a little break. I was going to post this very same question this past weekend and finally just gave up. Was like talking with a 2 year old. There has to be some per-release obsolescence that Claude does with each release because it seems to happen every few months.

[menewanalyser]

I've noticed this as well this week. My PAI jumps to conclusions or references something completely different. It's not until I tell it to go look through memory and context and then get back to me that it get's it right. It feels more like me talking to a fresh session on the Claude Web during those first few prompts before I see my actual PAI again. It's like when the session starts, instead of reading the core PAI files and modified CLAUDE.md file first, it reads the default CLAUDE.md file.

[menewanalyser]

Lars (My PAI) and I worked on each other tonight. It's observation mode for now, but here's something Lars is suggesting:

Try asking your PAI to assess whether your recurring failure patterns are actually encoded as rules. Ask it to walk you through what happens at session startup — every file read, every hook, every signal loaded — and then ask specifically: are the things it keeps getting wrong written as operational rules in CLAUDE.md, or just as learning observations in MEMORY/LEARNING? Those are two different things. Observations inform the model; rules constrain it. If your PAI keeps ignoring a directive or asserting unverified facts, there's likely no hard rule preventing it — just a context note saying it happened before. The fix is to promote those patterns into explicit CLAUDE.md operational rules with specific behavioral triggers. While you're in there, also check your learning signal corpus for noise — if SatisfactionCapture is timing out, you may have a significant percentage of fake neutral ratings diluting your real performance data.

[jaylarr176]

Yes, I feel like I have been wrestling with mine a lot more. This happened before when I was using vanilla Claude Projects and they made an update - after a week or so it got fixed - but for awhile there was definitely a period where it was hallucination station all the time.

[arpleasa]

Try running your PAI with opus 4.6 instead of 4.7/4.8 and see if it reverts back

[Raazgar]

Im running mine on Sonnet 4.6 by default, offloading minor tasks that dont require MAIA (my PAI) to local Ollama and any major tasks, planning, code review or high-stakes stuff to Opus. But its mostly Sonnet 4.6 since I upgraded to v5.0.0, and that "change" happened somewhere along the way.

[jaylarr176]

That sounds like a really good solution, but I've been using Sonnet and haven't switched models in all this, unfortunately.

[chrisglick]

Hmm, I've had Opus 4.8 tell me it's actively fighting/ignoring the PAI algorithm before because it decided my "preferred voice" was more narrative response. I had the "dumb days" in the lead up to Opus 4.8 also.

You might tell Claude to "follow the PAI algorithm completely" or something like that. It's difficult to tell where the intelligence degradation is coming into the picture.

[Raazgar]

Interesting. Hope @danielmiessler could take a look into that as it seems to be an emerging issue. Thank you!