Comment by cmrdporcupine
3 days ago
I'm not "mad", I'm "sad" -- because I was very much on "Team Anthropic" a few months ago ... but the tool has failed to keep up in terms of quality.
If they're going to close the sub off to other tools, they need to make very strong improvements to the tool. And I don't really see that. It's "fine" but I actually think these tools are letting developers down.
They take over too much. They fail to give good insights into what's happening. They have poor stop/interrupt/correct dynamics. They don't properly incorporate a basic review cycle which is something we demand of junior developers and interns on our teams, but somehow not our AIs?
They're producing mountains of sometimes-good but often unreviewable code and it isn't the "AI"'s fault, it's the heuristics in the tools.
So I want to see innovation here. And I was hoping to see it from Anthropic. But I just saw the opposite.
There is so much low-hanging fruit in the tooling side right now. There's no way Anthropic alone can stay ahead of it all -- we need lots of different teams trying different things.
I myself have been building a special-purpose vibe-coding environment and it's just astounding how easy it is to get great results by trying totally random ideas that are just trivial to implement.
Lots of companies are hoping to win here by creating the tool that everyone uses, but I think that's folly. The more likely outcome is that there are a million niche tools and everyone is using something different. That means nobody ends up with a giant valuation, and open source tools can compete easily. Bad for business, great for users.
Yep. And in a way this has always been the story. It's why there's just so few companies making $$ in the pure devtooling space.
I have no idea what JetBrain's financials are like, but I doubt they're raking in huge $$ despite having very good tools & unfortunately their attempts to keep abreast of the AI wave have been middling.
Basically, I need Claude Code with a proper review phase built in. I need it to slow-the-fuck-down and work with me more closely instead of shooting mountains of text at me and making me jam on the escape key over and over (and shout WTF I didn't ask for that!) at least twice a day.
IHMO these are not professional SWE tools right now. I use them on hobby projects but struggle to integrate them into professional day jobs where I have to be responsible in a code review for the output they produced.
And, again, it's not the LLM that's at fault. It's the steering wheel driving it missing a basic non-yeet process flow.
> Basically, I need Claude Code with a proper review phase built in. I need it to slow-the-fuck-down and work with me more closely instead of shooting mountains of text at me and making me jam on the escape key over and over (and shout WTF I didn't ask for that!) at least twice a day.
It sounds like you want Codex (for the second part)
Try plan mode if you haven't already. Stay in plan mode until it is to your satisfaction. With Opus 4.5, when you approve the plan it'll implement the exact spec without getting off track 95% of the time.
6 replies →
> I have no idea what JetBrain's financials are like
In 2024, ~725 M$ total revenue, ~119 M$ net profit.
(Also, Kenton, I'd add that I'm an admirer more broadly of your work, and so if by chance you end up creating some public project commercial or open source in the general vein we're talking about here, I'd love to contribute)
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