Claude Code Degradation: An interesting and novel find

As many of you have likely seen, the Claude Code community newswire has been ablaze with Claude Code being quite degraded lately, starting in February, and continuing to this day.

Curious to understand if there was any "signal" on the wire when using Claude Code, I fired up my old friend WireShark and a --tls-keylog environment flag. Call it a man-in-the-middle attack on my own traffic.

The captured TLS network traffic reveals the system prompts, system variables, and various other bits of telemetry

The interesting part? A signature routing block that binds the session to a cloud instance with an effort level parameter, named Numbat. Mine, specifically, was
numbat-v7-efforts-15-20-40-ab-prod8

So, it would appear that the backend running my instance is tied to an efforts-15-20-40 level.

Is this conclusive? Not definitively, since only Antrhopic could tell us what that parameter actually means in production.

Side note, a Numbat is an endangered critter that eats Ants in Austrialia :)
If the "Numbat" eats the "Ants" (Anthropic), and Numbat is the engine that controls "Effort," the name itself could imply a "cost-eater" or an optimizer designed to reduce the model's footprint, likely in favor of project Glasswing efforts with Mythos

Follow for more insights on Claude Code

Numabt-v7-Efforts-15-20-40