Comment by semicolon_storm
11 hours ago
It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work.
If anything, it’s the exact opposite. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.
I suspect if people saw the handwritten code of many, many, many products that they used every day they would be shocked. I've worked at BigCos and startups, and a lot of the terrible code that makes it to production was shocking when I first started.
This isn't a dig at anyone, I've certainly shipped my share of bad code as well. Deadlines, despite my wishes sometimes, continue to exist. Sometimes you have to ship a hack to make a customer or manager happy, and then replacing those hacks with better code just never happens.
For that matter, the first draft of nearly anything I write is usually not great. I might just be stupid, but I doubt I'm unique; when I've written nice, beautiful, optimized code, it's usually a second or third draft, because ultimately I don't think I fully understand the problem and the assumptions I am allowed to make until I've finished the first draft. Usually for my personal projects, my first dozen or so commits will be pretty messy, and then I'll have cleanup branches that I merge to make the code less terrible.
This isn't inherently bad, but a lot of the time I am simply not given time to do a second or third draft of the code, because, again, deadlines, so my initial "just get it working" draft is what ships into production. I don't love it, and I kind of dread of some of the code with my name attached to it at BigCo ever gets leaked, but that's just how it is in the corporate world sometimes.
It's an unpopular truth for our industry, but the point of commercial software development is not to write good code; it's to write profitable code.
There are some cases where the most profitable code is also good code. We like those.
But in most (99%+) cases, the code is not going to survive contact with the market and so spending any time on making it good is wasted.
Yep this is especially true in the pre-product-market-fit phase. Most if not all of that code should be written to be thrown away. Any time you spend writing perfect code instead of your MVP is burnt runway and a chance for competitors to catch up.
Once you show PMF though the balance changes to long-term sustainability and maintainability.
What's going to be interesting is getting to a place where it generates better code than we would from specs. You can get better and better generated code by filling in the context the model infers. Do that long enough, and well, a perfect spec is just code.
We do live in interesting times.
To my believe there was not a goal to write good code. The goal was maintainability and to keep it simple, so that people understand. People come and go, you constantly get to see foreign code and you have to do something with it.
Anyways, i see the maintainability hell coming onto us. I still wonder how i organize this with AI. I definitly do not want to touch it what is written by AI.
To me, it instead sounds like you care about the code you produce. You judge it more harshly than you probably do other code. It sounds like you are also meeting deadlines, so I'd call that a success and more production than what a lot of people tend to put out into the world.
I often have a lot of time between projects, and am able to really think about things, and write the code that I'm happy with. Even when I do that, I do some more research, or work on another project, and immediately I'm picking apart sections of my code that I really took the time to "get right." Sometimes it can be worse if you are given vast amounts of time to build your solution, where some form of deadline may have pushed you to make decisions you were able to put off. At least that's my perspective on it, I feel like if you love writing software, you are going to keep improving nearly constantly, and look back at what you've done and be able to pick it apart.
To keep myself from getting too distressed over looking at past code now, I tend to look at the overall architecture and success of the project (in regards to the performing what it was supposed to, not necessarily monetarily). If I see a piece of code that I feel could have been written far better, I look at how it fits into the rest. I tend to work on very small teams, so I'm often making architecture decisions that touch large areas of the code, so this may just be from my perspective of not working on a large team. I still do think if you care about your craft, you will be harsh on yourself, more than you deserve.
This is the product that's claiming "coding is a solved problem" though.
I get a junior developer or a team of developers with varying levels of experience and a lot of pressure to deliver producing crummy code, but not the very tool that's supposed to be the state-of-the-art coder.
Sure, but as I stated, even "professional" code is pretty bad a lot of the time. If it's able to generate code that's as good as professional code, then maybe it is solved.
I don't actually think it's a solved problem, I'm saying that the fact that it generates terrible code doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have parity with humans.
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> crummy code, but not the very tool that's supposed to be the state-of-the-art coder
Why not? It is subject to the same pressures, in fact it is subject to more time pressure than most corp code out there. Also, it's the model that's doing the coding, not the frontend tool.
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I mean, hasn't it learned from reading other's code? I don't think it can be any better than the common patterns and practices that it has been trained on. Some outlier of amazing code is probably not going to make much of a difference, unless I am completely misunderstanding LLMs (which I very well may be, and would gladly take any criticism on my take here).
The bet is that it will be trivial for them to invest in cleaning up Claude Code whenever they face real competitive pressure to do so. My best guess is that it's a bad bet - I don't think LLM agents have solved any of the fundamental problems that make it hard to convert janky bad code to polished good code. But Claude Code is capable in my experience of producing clean code when appropriately guided, so it's not that there's no choice but jank. They're intentionally underinvesting in code quality right now for the sake of iteration speed.
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No one cares about code quality. No one has ever cared about code quality. It’s only been tolerated in businesses because no one could objectively say that ignoring code quality can result in high velocity. With coding agents, velocity is now extremely high if you get humans out of the way.
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This is not just true of code; it is true of everything - the whole world is held together with spit, bailing wire, a prayer, and some old dude who remembers.
i worked at companies in US
where uptime monitoring was Page Refresh by QA team.
where there was no centralized logs
postgres had no backup or replication or anything
> I suspect if people saw the handwritten code of many, many, many products that they used every day they would be shocked.
Absolutely. The difference is that the amount of bad code that could be generated had an upper limit on it — how fast a human can type it out. With LLMs bad code can be shat out at warp speed.
Oh I don't disagree with that. I am getting pretty tired of people making multi-thousand-line pull requests with lots of clearly AI-generated code and expecting it to be merged in.
I think the better unit to commit and work with is the prompt itself, and I think that the prompt is the thing that should be PR'd at this point, because ultimately the spec is what's important.
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> and then replacing those hacks with better code just never happens
Yeah, we even have an idiom for this - "Temporary is always permanent"
We'll fix it later.
But as a great man once said: Later == Never.
"There's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution."
> I suspect if people saw the handwritten code
Somehow, everyone has forgotten the terrible code quality that existed prior to 2020.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjZQGRATlwA
Like, come on. Software has been shit for decades. AI hasn't observably reduced the quality of software I use everyday in a way that is meaningfully separable from normal incidents in the past.
>AI hasn't observably reduced the quality of software I use everyday in a way that is meaningfully separable from normal incidents in the past.
I have noticed a spike in web apps exhibiting random failures and glitchy behavior over the past few months.
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Bad code works fine until it doesn't. In my experience, with humans, doing the right thing is worth it over doing the bad thing if your time horizon is a few months. Once you're in years, absolutely do the right thing, you're actually throwing time away if you don't. And I don't mean "big refactor", I mean at-change-time, when you think "this change feels like an icky hack."
For LLMs, I don't really know. I only have a couple years experience at that.
If you make a working and functional bad code, and put it on maintenance mode, it can keep churning for decades with no major issues.
Everything depends on context. Most code written by humans is indeed, garbage.
I define maintenance mode as: given over to different team, so not my problem anymore.
> Most code written by humans is indeed, garbage.
I think that this is the problem, actually.
It's similar to writing. Most people suck at writing so badly that the LLM/AI writing is almost always better when writing is "output".
Code is similar. Most programmers suck at programming so badly that LLM/AI production IS better than 90+% (possibly 99%+). Remember, a huge number of programmers couldn't pass FizzBuzz. So, if you demand "output", Claude is probably better than most of your (especially enterprise) programming team.
The problem is that the Claude usage flood is simply identifying the fact that things that work do so because there is a competent human somewhere in the review pipeline who has been rejecting the vast majority of "output" from your programming team. And he is now overwhelmed.
If you are a company founder, what scenario would you rather find yourself in?
a) a pristine, good codebase that follows the best coding practices, but it is built on top of bad specs, wrong data/domain model
b) a bad codebase but it correctly models and nails the domain model for your business case
Real life example, a fintech with:
a) a great codebase but stuck with a single-entry ledger
b) a bad codebase that perfectly implements a double-entry ledger
Since most won't actually deal with fintech (I don't know the stats on HN, but I'm talking devs as one industry), your first "a" example might actually be better than your first "b" example, depending on the complexity of the software. In lots (probably most) of industries, having a good codebase would mean architecture decisions were solid, but the domain/service layer is bad. Maybe my experiences don't match most of the HN crowd, but usually I get stuck with very detailed domain/service rules, but the architecture is a problem where too much memory or CPU is being used, just to abstract away the actual rules of the application (the purpose). Usually when I've been brought in to rebuild an application, the client is fine with the results, but they are upset over performance and/or cost to run the application. For anything of actual complexity, it's usually the supporting code that is the biggest failure, because complex apps usually have decent requirements. Now, if the requirements were bad, and the architecture was bad, AND the domain/service layer is bad, I don't know if there's anything to fix that.
"Perfectly implements" is doing a lot of work there. Enterprise software is very rarely perfect out of the box, and the issue with bad code is that it can make it extraordinarily hard to solve simple problems. I have personally seen tech-debt induced scenarios where "I want a new API to edit this field in an object" and "Let's do a dependency upgrade" respectively became multi-month projects.
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And it’s perfectly okay to fix and improve the code later.
Many super talented developers I know will say “Make it work, then make it good”. I think it’s okay to do this on a bigger scale than just the commit cycle.
https://wiki.c2.com/?MakeItWorkMakeItRightMakeItFast
Make it work, make it work right, make it work fast. In that order.
> Bad code works fine until it doesn't.
Who is to judge the "good" or "bad" anyway?
The fix time horizon changes too, don't discard that.
But tech debt with vibe coding is fixed by just throwing more magic at it. The cost of tech debt has never been lower.
I'm skeptical of the whole thing, it almost seems like a marketing campaign to encourage developers to use more tokens.
My experience as a software engineer, including with Claude Code itself, is that the more code you have, the more bugs there are. It quickly turns into a game of Whac-a-Mole where you fix 1 bug and 2 new bugs appear.
Looking at the functionality of Claude code. There is no way it requires 500k lines of code as claimed. It would make it very difficult to debug... Though it seems they have a team of 10 people which is a lot for a CLI wrapper.
It's more likely that somebody ran the real code through an agent to intentionally obfuscate it into a more complicated form before they leaked it. This is trivial to do with LLMs. You can take any short function of a couple of lines and turn it into a function hundreds of lines long which does the exact same thing.
It's actually a great way to obfuscate code in the AI era because LLMs are good at creating complexity and not good at reducing it. I've done tests where I ask Claude to turn a simple 1 line function which adds two numbers together into a 100 line function and when I asked it to simplify it down, it couldn't reduce it back to its original simple form after multiple attempts. I had to explicitly tell it what the original form of the function was for it to clean up properly. This approach doesn't scale to a whole codebase. Imagine doing this to an entire codebase, it would take more time for you to read and understand each function to tell the LLM how to clean it up than just re-generating the entire app from scratch.
The problem with large amounts of code is not only that it's harder to maintain and extend, it's often less performant.
While LLMs can allow us to get more out of bad code, they will allow us to get even more value out of the equivalent good code when it comes to maintainability, reliability and efficiency.
>I've done tests where I ask Claude to turn a simple 1 line function which adds two numbers together into a 100 line function and when I asked it to simplify it down, it couldn't reduce it back to its original simple form after multiple attempts.
"Claude write a one-way function. Wait, no, not like that!"
1. "Vibe coding" is a spectrum of how much human supervision (and/or scaffolding in the form of human-written tests and/or specs) is involved.
2. The problem with "bad code" has nothing to do with the short-term success of the product but with the ability to evolve it successfully over time. In other words, it's about long-term success, not short-term success.
3. Perhaps most importantly, Claude Code is a fairly simple product at its core, and almost all its value comes from the model, not from its own code (and the same is true on the cost side). Claude Code is relatively a low stakes product. This means that the problems caused by bad code matter less in this instance, and they're managed further by Claude Code not being at the extreme "vibey" end of the spectrum.
So AI aside, Claude Code is proof that if you pour years and many billions into a product, it can be a success even if the code in the narrow and small UI layer isn't great.
The very definition of "vibe coding" is using AI to write software and not even look at the code it produces.
People use two definitions.
There's this definition of LLM generation + "no thorough review or testing"
And there's the more normative one: just LLM generation.[1][2][3]
"Not even looking at it" is very difficult as part of a definition. What if you look at it once? Or just glance at it? Is it now no longer vibe coding? What if I read a diff every ten commits? Or look at the code when something breaks?
At which point is it no longer vibe coding according to this narrower definition?
[1] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/vibe-co...
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vibe%20coding
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding
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1 is definitely false right now. I gave specs, tests, full datasets, reference code to translate to an llm and still produce garbage code/fall flat on it's face. I just spent one week translating a codebase from go to cpp and i had to throw the whole thing out because it put in some horrible bugs that it could not fix even burning 500$ worth of tokens and me babysitting it. As i said it had everything at it's disposal: tests, reference impl, lots of data to work with. I finally got my lazy ass to inplement it and lo and behold i did it in 2 days with no bugs (that i know of) and the code quality is miles better than that undigested vomit. The codebase was a protocol library for decoding network traffic that used a lot of bit twiddling, flow control, huffman table compression, mildly complicated stuff. So no - if you want working non-trivial code that you can rely on then definitely don't use a llm to do it. Use it for autocomplete, small bits of code but never let the damn thing do the thinking for you.
Oh, I agree. Anthropic themselves proved that even with a full spec and thousands of human-crafted tests, unsupervised agents couldn't produce even something as relatively simple as a workable C compiler, even when the model was trained on the spec, tests, the theory, a reference implementation, and even when given a reference implementation as an oracle.
But my point was that I don't think the development of Claude Code itself isn't supervised, hence it's not really "vibe coded".
> you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code
which has always been true
Yes, and to add, in case it's not obvious: in my experience the maintenance, mental (and emotional costs, call me sensitive) cost of bad code compounds exponentially the more hacks you throw at it
Sure, for humans. Not sure they'll be the primary readers of code going forward
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Now with AI, you're not only dealing with maintenance and mental overhead, but also the overhead of the Anthropic subscription (or whatever AI company) to deal with this spaghetti. Some may decide that's an okay tradeoff, but personally it seems insane to delegate a majority of development work to a blackbox, cloud-hosted LLM that can be rug pulled from underneath of you at any moment (and you're unable to hold it accountable if it screws up)
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It’s also possible to sell chairs that are uncomfortable and food that tastes terrible. Yet somehow we still have carpenters and chefs; Herman Miller and The French Laundry.
Some business models will require “good” code, and some won’t. That’s how it is right now as well. But pretending that all business models will no longer require “good” code is like pretending that Michelin should’ve retired its list after the microwave was invented.
Are you saying Herman Miller chairs are uncomfortable?
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Those high end restaurants are more like art and exploration of food then something practical like code. The only similarity is maybe research in academia. There's not real industry uses of code that's like art.
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Still, talk about "good" code exist for a reason. When the code is really bad, you end up paying the price by having to spend too more and more time and develop new features, with greater risk to introduce bugs. I've seen that in companies in the past, where bad code meant less stability and more time to ship features that we needed to retain customers or get new ones.
Now whether this is still true with AI, or if vibe coding means bad code no longer have this long term stability and velocity cost because AI are better than humans at working with this bad code... We don't know yet.
Not only true but I would guess it's the normal case. Most software is a huge pile of tech debt held together by zip-ties. Even greenfield projects quickly trend this way, as "just make it work" pressure overrides any posturing about a clean codebase.
long ago, wordpress plugins were often a proper mess
Not according to some on HN. They consider it impossible to create a successful business with imperfect code. Lol
A cornerstone of this community is "if you're not embarrassed by the first release you've waited too long", which is a recognition that imperfect code is not needed to create a successful business. That's why ShowHN exists.
It depends on the urgency. Not every product is urgent. CC arguable was very urgent; even a day of delay meant the competitors could come out with something slightly more appealing.
See also Salesforce, Oracle, SAP
Most of their products are so large that you can easily find parts with very bad and parts with excellent code. I am not sure a whole ERP product could work with all very bad code, though.
Wordpress hides behind a cabinet
Still, it's probably true that Claude Code (etc) will be more successful working on clean, well-structured code, just like human coders are. So short-term, maybe not such a big deal, but long-term I think it's still an unresolved issue.
I imagine it is way more affordable in terms of tokens to implement a feature in a well organized code base, rather than a hacky mess of a codebase that is the result of 30 band-aid fixes stacked on top of each other.
It's funny how so many of us took this unironically at first.
I stopped using Claude Code a few weeks ago, and realized why I am still glad to use https://pi.dev. I don't miss any of the mess. Bring back Opus 4.5 I would say
One truism about coding agents is that they struggle to work with bad code. Code quality matters as much as always, the experts say, and AI agents (left unfettered) produce bad code at an unprecedented rate. That's why good practices matter so much! If you use specs and test it like so and blah blah blah, that makes it all sustainable. And if anyone knows how to do it right, presumably it's Anthropic.
This codebase has existed for maybe 18 months, written by THE experts on agentic coding. If it is already unintelligible, that bodes poorly for how much it is possible to "accelerate" coding without taking on substantial technical debt.
i think you are conflating anthropic (the startup) with claude code (the leaked source of one of said startup's products)
i.e., the claude code codebase doesn't need to be good right now [^1] — so i don't think the assumption that this is an exemplary product / artifact of expert agentic coding actually holds up here specifically
[^1]: the startup graveyard is full of dead startups with good code
You can, but:
- Good code is what enables you to be able to build very complex software without an unreasonable number of bugs.
- Good code is what enables you to be responsive to changing customer needs and times. Whether you view that as valuable is another matter though. I guess it is a business decision. There have been plenty of business that have gone bust though by neglecting that.
Good code is for your own sanity, the machine does not care.
This product rides a hype wave. This is why it is crazy popular and successful.
The situation there is akin to Viaweb - Viaweb also rode hype wave and code situation was awful as well (see PG's stories about fixing bugs during customer's issue reproduction theater).
What did Viaweb's buyer do? They rewrote thing in C++.
If history rhymes, then buyer of Anthropic would do something close to "rewrite it in C++" to the current Claude Code implementation.
I haven't heard of anyone that's using vibe coding to rewrite what they have. Most of what I hear is to create new things, and to accelerate development of existing projects.
This is also why they had to release it quickly. They got the first mover advantage but if they delayed to make its code better, a competitor could have taken the wave instead of them.
I don't disagree with your general premise that eventually it'll just be rewritten, but I have to push back on the idea that Anthropic will be acquired. Their most recent valuation was $380B, and even if they wanted to be acquired (which I doubt) essentially no company has the necessary capital.
It is hard to find market shares of Viaweb and Yahoo at the time of Viaweb's purchase, the best I've found is that Viaweb was bought for 1/4 of Yahoo's net revenue at the time ($49M price/$203 net revenue in 1998). Viaweb was not profitable at the time of purchase, but it had about four people and quite modest hardware costs.
While there are no companies with $1.5 trillions (4*$380B) of net revenue, the difference is that Anthropic is cash net-negative, has more than 4 people in staff (none of them are hungry artists like PG) and hardware use spendings, I think, are astronomical. They are cash net-negative because of hardware needed to train models.
There should be more than one company able to offer good purchase terms to Anthropic's owners.
I also think that Anthropic, just like OpenAI and most of other LLM companies and companies' departments, ride "test set leakage," hoping general public and investors do not understand. Their models do not generalize well, being unable to generate working code in Haskell [1] at the very least.
[1] https://haskellforall.com/2026/03/a-sufficiently-detailed-sp...
PG's Viaweb had an awful code as a liability. Anthropic's Claude Code has an awful implementation (code) and produces awful code, with more liability than code written by human.
Any company worth more could (in principle) acquire it with a share swap [1]. Even a smaller company could buy it with an LBO [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_swap
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveraged_buyout
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> ... but I have to push back on the idea that Anthropic will be acquired. Their most recent valuation was $380B, and even if they wanted to be acquired (which I doubt) essentially no company has the necessary capital.
isn't that pretty much why anthropic and openai are racing to IPO?
It is always amazing at how crap some code can be and yet still function, usually to the total bemusement of the coder. "It shouldn't work but it does?!"
When I used to contract code for some game engine stuff back in the 2000's early 2010's, that was essentially my working standard. Essentially gave a boiler plate terms of my work. I will make it work, I will get it done quickly, it will run fast BUT you will incur a lot of technical debt in doing so. In a games engine it isn't a big deal, you are essentially just pushing pixels around a screen in a sand-boxed system. "Yeah, the decompression system does some odd things with memory addresses but it is quick and plays nice with your streaming system. Just don't change the overall mapping too much and it should ship ok.". "In this level of your game, I have this explicit exception code that prevents that streaming system from booting out too much necessary data. Don't change this unless you want a headache"
I shudder to think of what that style of code would do in a work environment with serious consequences.
I suspect we will find out a lot more of this in the decades to come.
The impression I got from that thread is its quality is dropping, with weird bugs popping up. And I'm pretty sure I remember they announced at one point they switched to that, so the vibe coding had a human-written codebase to start with.
So that sounds to me like it is evidence vibe coding doesn't work well long term.
This, 100x.
I do M&As at my company - as a cto. I have seen lots of successful companies' codebases, and literally none of them elegant. Including very profitable companies with good, loved products.
The only good code I know is in the open source domain and in the demoscene. The commercial code is mostly crap - and still makes money.
This kinda puts it in words, most of us naturally expected 2025- LLMs to be able to generate OSS / demo / high craft code. Not messy commercial one.
You can send a submarine down to crushing depths while violating all the traditional rules about "good" engineering, too.
Right, and often the tested depth isnt maximum. So you slowly acclimate to worse and worse code practices if the effort needed to undo it is the same as doing.
> if the effort needed to undo it is the same as doing.
That’s the rub, yes - as long as your failures are nice and gradual and proportional to the changes you’re making, everything’s fine.
sure, but undo isn't the only path to a newer better version of the code
it's easy to see how the product (claude code) could be abstracted to spec form and then a future version built from that without inheriting previous iterations tech debt
What I'm missing so far is how they produced such awful code with the same product I'm using, which definitely would have called out some of those issues.
Perhaps the problem is getting multiple vibe-coders synced up when working on a large repo.
I suspect a lot of it is just older, before Opus 4.5+ got good at calling out issues.
It kind of reminds me of grammar police type personalities. They are so hung up on the fact it reads “ugly” they can’t see the message; this code powers a rapidly growing $400B company. They admit refactoring is easy, but fail to realize they probably know that too and it’s just not a priority yet.
They won’t stay 400B for long, and Claude Code will have no effect on that.
> And as for the critics, tell me I don't get it
> Everybody can tell you how to do it, they never did it
> —jay-z
The underlying model powers the valuation.
Not the front end
I think that's another point of why this is not a priority to keep clean
It basically shifting work to future people. This mess will stop working and will introduce unsolvable obscure bugs one day, and someone actually will have to look at it.
It already costed many developers months and hundreds of dollars worth of tokens because of a bug. There will be more.
Vibe coding in my opinion is analogous to say borrowing on a credit card to gamble on a startup.
Occasionally, in IRL you hear the feel good story how Fred smith gambled the last $5,000 to save FedEx and so on, but most people with that mindset end up crashing out.
Vibe coding a product runs the risk of acquiring too much tech debt before project is successful.
Product Market Fit is very hard, you need to keep enough room for pivots. Changes in direction will always accumulate debt, even when tech is well written. It is far more difficult when you accumulate debt quickly.
The counterpoint being that procrastinating and over-engineering prematurely or building lot of unrelated tooling and loosing focus can also bring the product down quickly or never let it start .
Being able to vibe code POCs etc is a great tool if done in a controlled limited well defined way.
Just as borrowing cash on your credit card is not always bad, it just usually is.
Maybe vibe coding gets so good that we completely trash what was written and build from zero. I've seen that with badly written code as well, easier to rewrite than fix the un-goldly mess.
Yes, if you know what you want exactly it is not difficult to rewrite. Writing is the easiest part of coding.
The challenge is knowing exactly what is needed. No matter how bad the code, it is never easy to justify a rewrite .
In a large and old enough code base, documentation is always incomplete or incorrect, the code becomes is the spec. Tens or hundreds of thousands of hours would have been expended in making it "work". A refactor inevitably breaks things, because no single person can fully understand everything.
There is a reason why it is a well know principle don't fix what is not broken. Same reasons why we still have banking or aviation systems still running mainframe and COBOL from 70s.
A rewrite requires the same or likely more number of hours of testing and adoption in a typically much shorter span of time in ironing out the issues [1]. Few organizations either private or public have the appetite to go through the pain and if its money facing or public facing component it is even harder to get buy-in from leadership or the users of app even.
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[1] During the original deployment the issues(bugs or feature gaps) would have been incrementally solved over many years or decades even. During the rewrite you don't have 10-20 years, so you not only have to expend the same or more number of hours you will have to do it much quicker as well.
Code quality is a tactical concern and products live or die on strategy.
I wouldn't recommend neglecting tactics if your strategy doesn't put you on the good side of a generational bubble though.
I'd imagine the AI engineers on million dollar TC are not vibe coding the models though, which is the actual sauce.
Not AI but perfect example is Cloudflare. They have implemented public suffix list (to check if a domain is valid) 10 different times in 10 different ways. In one place, they have even embedded the list in frontend (pages custom domain). You report issues, they fix that one service, their own stuff isn't even aware that it exists in other places.
Meta has four different implementations of the same page to create a “page” for your business… which is required to be able to advertise on any of their services.
Each one is broken, doesn’t have working error handling, and prevents you from giving them money. They all exist to insert the same record somewhere. Lost revenue, and they seem to have no idea.
Amazons flagship ios app has had at least three highly visible bugs, for years. They’re like thorns in my eye sockets, every time I use it. They don’t care.
These companies are working with BILLIONS of dollars in engineering resources, unlimited AI resources, and with massive revenue effects for small changes.
Sometimes the world just doesn’t make sense.
It's just lazy engineering. They get assigned a task, they must implement it or fix it to keep their job. Proper implantation takes more knowledge, more research and more brain pressure.
AI could play a big rule here. Husky (git hook) but AI. It will score lazy engineering. You lazy implement enough times, you loose your job.
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they prioritize bugs based on what impacts the largest amount ($) of customers — fixing every bug of a huge complex project rarely makes sense if the impact of the bug on revenue is tiny
It's always been the case that you could make something that sort of worked for a while with terrible code. The problem was that your product would have random regressions all the time (which theirs does!) and as a result no serious buyers would pay for it.
Yes, that is how Facebook, Yahoo and many other companies started out. But they rewrote their code when it became to big to be maintainable. The problem with shoddy code is not necessarily that it doesn't work but that it becomes impossible to change.
Makes me stare at mid nineties After Effects’ core rendering engine
ehh, as long as the overall starting architecture is decent, it's not hard to do tiny refactors across components
claude code, the app, is also not some radically complex concept (even if the codebase today is complicated)
but hey, that's why people do version breaking rewrites
It helps if the product is so revolutionary that people are willing to overlook bugs. Could you imagine a more mundane product with a TUI that flickered all the time where this wouldn't be a showstopper? I believe the bug is fixed now, but it seems crazy that it persisted so long given how obvious the cause was (clear before update). How many more bugs are in CC? As of a few weeks ago there were 5000 or so open issues against it on github.
The success is undeniable, but whether this vibe-coded level of quality is acceptable for more general use cases isn't something you can infer from that.
99.999999% of products can't get away with what Anthropic is able to - this is a one in a billion disruptive product with minimal competition, and its success so far is mostly due to Claude the model, not the agent harness
> It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.
We already knew that. This is a matter of people who didn't know that or didn't want to acknowledge that thinking they now have proof that it doesn't matter for creating a crazy popular & successful product, as if it's a gotcha on those who advocate for good practices. When your goal is to create something successful that you can cash out, good practices and quality are/were never a concern. This is the basis for YAGNI, move-fast-and-break-things, and worse-is-better. We've know this since at least betamax-vs-VHS (although maybe the WiB VHS cultural knowledge is forgotten these days).
WiB is different from Move Fast and Break Things and again different from YAGNI though.
WiB doesn't mean the thing is worse, it means it does less. Claude Code interestingly does WAY more than something like Pi which is genuinely WiB.
Move Fast and Break Things comes from the assumption that if you capture a market quick enough you will then have time to fix things.
YAGNI is simply a reminder that not preparing for contingencies can result in a simpler code base since you're unlikely to use the contingencies.
The spaghetti that people are making fun of in Claude Code is none of these things except maybe Move Fast and Break Things.
> WiB is different from Move Fast and Break Things and again different from YAGNI though.
Yes, which is why I listed all three.
It's not about if the vibe coding results in any of these strictly, it's that the vibe coder can claim that the low quality doesn't matter and cite any of these as support for why the low quality doesn't matter.
VHS was not worse is better. It’s better is better.
Specifically, VHS had both longer recording times and cheaper VCRs (due to Matsushita’s liberal licensing) than Betamax did. Beta only had slightly better picture quality if you were willing to sacrifice recording length per tape. Most Betamax users adopted the βII format which lowered picture quality to VHS levels in order to squeeze more recording time onto the tape. At that point Betamax’s only advantage was a slightly more compact cassette.
Also to correct another common myth, porn was widely available on both formats and was not the cause of VHS’s success over Betamax.
Betamax was arguably better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war
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The idea that marketing and hype are more important for success than the quality of the product is not new, and has existed for longer than either of us have been alive.
That does not mean your well-marketed and highly-hyped product is good.
Yes that plus having tens of billions of gulf money certainly helps you subsidize your moronic failures with money that isn't yours while you continue, and fail to, achieve profitability in any time horizon within a single lifespan.
Also Claude owes its popularity mostly to the excellent model running behind the scenes.
The tooling can be hacky and of questionable quality yet, with such a model, things can still work out pretty well.
The moat is their training and fine-tuning for common programming languages.
>> Also Claude owes its popularity mostly to the excellent model running behind the scenes.
It's a bit of both. Claude Code was the tool that made Anthropic's developer mindshare explode. Yes, the models are good, but before CC they were mostly just available via multiplexers like Cursor and Copilot, via the relatively expensive API.
Huh what moronic failure did Anthropic do? Every Claude Code user I know loves it.
I don't know if the comment was referring to this, but recently, people have been posting stuff about them requiring their new hire Jared Sumner, author of the Bun runtime, to first and foremost fix memory leaks that caused very high memory consumption for claude's CLI. The original source was them posting about the matter on X I think.
And at first glance, none of it was about complex runtime optimizations not present in Node, it was all "standard" closure-related JS/TS memory leak debugging (which can be a nightmare).
I don't have a link at hand because threads about it were mostly on Xitter. But I'm sure there are also more accessible retros about the posts on regular websites (HN threads, too).
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I don’t know about moronic, but:
https://github.com/ctoth/claude-failures
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796
Recently there was a bug where CC would consume day/week/month quota in just a few hours, or hundreds of dollars in API costs in a few prompts.
The people who don’t love it probably stopped using it.
You don’t have to go far on this site to find someone that doesn’t like Claude code.
If you want an example of something moronic, look at the ram usage of Claude code. It can use gigabytes of memory to work with a few megabytes of text.
I've used and hate it, it's garbage.
There’s a sample group issue here beyond the obvious limitations of your personal experience. If they didn’t love it, they likely left it for another LLM. If they have issues with LLM’s writ large, they’re going to dislike and avoid all of them regardless.
In the current market, most people using one LLM are likely going to have a positive view of it. Very little is forcing you to stick with one you dislike aside from corporate mandates.
There is right now another HN thread where a lot of users hate Claude Code.
To be fair, their complaints are about very recent changes that break their workflow, while previously they were quite content with it.
There have certainly been periods of irrational exuberance in the tech industry, but there are also many companies that were criticized for being unprofitable which are now, as far as I can tell, quite profitable. Amazon, Uber, I'm sure many more. I'm curious what the basis is to say that Anthropic could never achieve profitability? Are the numbers that bad?
your prediction is going to be wrong, even with all those caveats
Maybe. Maybe not.
But if this party is sustainable, what’s the deal with the rate limits that everyone is going on about?
If my prediction is wrong these should be trillion dollar companies yesterday with what their liars proclaim, until then we know that Anthropic has only made $5billion total revenue to data due to the Pentagon lawsuits and that required $20billion.
Can't wait to see how much public money they need going forward! Hopefully our progeny don't die in the subsequent climate crisis before they can unleash true shareholder value.
Investors are getting antsy and are going to start demanding AI companies start producing real returns.
Anthropic et al. better figure it out sooner rather than later because this game they’re all playing where they want all of us to use basically beta-release tools (very generous in some cases) to discover the “real value” of these tools while they attempt to reduce their burn with unsustainable subscription prices can’t go on forever.
There's also a business incentive for code produced by LLM companies to be hard to maintain. So you keep needing them in the future.
It works, it is popular, sure. Claude's code may be barely old enough to have suffered through its true long-term maintainability problems. They probably also haven't had a lot of rotation/attrition in their staff.
TBH Claude Code is surprisingly shit to use given the technical resources and the amount of money behind it. Looking past the bugs and missing features, it's so obvious it's not built by people who care about the product from a developer/craftsman perspective. It's missing all the signs of polish/care, it feels like someone shipped an internal PoC to prod and kept hacking on it. And now they are just tacking on features to sell more buzzwords and internal prototypes. Classic user facing/commercial software story.
But we (the dev community) are kind of spoiled, because we have a lot of great developer tools that come from people passionate about their work, skilled at what they do and take pride in what they put out. I don't count myself among one of those people but I have benefited from their work throughout my career and have gotten used to it in my tooling.
All that being said Opus is hands down the best coding model for me (and I'm actively trying all of them) and I'll tolerate it as long as I can get it to do what I need, even with the warts and annoyances.
> TBH Claude Code is surprisingly shit to use given the technical resources and the amount of money behind it. Looking past the bugs and missing features, it's so obvious it's not built by people who care about the product from a developer/craftsman perspective. It's missing all the signs of polish/care, it feels like someone shipped an internal PoC to prod and kept hacking on it.
I don't wholly disagree, but personally it's still the tool I use and it's sort of fine. Perhaps not entirely for the money that's behind it, as you said, but it could be worse.
The CLI experience is pretty okay, although the auth is kinda weird (e.g. when trying to connect to AWS Bedrock). There's a permission system and sandboxing, plan mode and TODOs, decent sub-agent support, instruction files and custom skills, tool calls and LSP support and all the other stuff you'd expect. At least no weird bugs like I had with OpenCode where trying to paste multi-line content inside of a Windows Terminal session lead to the tool closing and every next line getting pasted in an executed in the terminal one by one, that was weird, though I will admit that using Windows feels messed up quite often nowadays even without stuff like that.
The desktop app gives you chat and cowork and code, although it almost feels like Cowork is really close to what Code does (and for some reason Cowork didn't seem to support non-OS drives?). Either way, the desktop app helps me not juggle terminal sessions and keeps a nice history in the sidebar, has a pretty plan display, easy ways of choosing permissions and worktrees, although I will admit that it can be sluggish and for some actions there just aren't progress indicators which feels oddly broken.
I wonder what they spend most of their time working on and why the basics aren't better, though to Anthropic's credit about a month ago the desktop Code section was borderline unusable on Windows when switching between two long conversations, which now seems to take a few seconds (which is still a few seconds too long, but at least usable).
> TBH Claude Code is surprisingly shit to use given the technical resources and the amount of money behind it.
What harness would you recommend instead?
pi, oh-my-pi, opencode - none of them have subsidized Claude though
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Isn't Anthropic basically a bunch of AI PhDs writing code? I'd imagine they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into actual software engineering.
The most obvious sign to me from the start that somebody wasn't really paying attention to how the Claude app(s) work is that on iOS, you have to leave the app active the entire time a response is streaming or it will error out.
I never saw that bug, I don't think, but there was one where it had to start the response before you switched away. That's thankfully been fixed for a few weeks.
That has never happened to me. Did you try that a long while ago? I only had that issue with Gemini
Don't worry, the Gemini website does the same, at least on Firefox mobile. You switch apps and you lose the response AND the prompt.
Normally some software devs should be fired for that.
The traditional rules of good code are heuristics that are practical for human developers. A different set of heuristics will emerge for agentic development.
In the end what really matters to most people is does it work. How it is built or works means nothing to them nor should it.
devaluing craftsmanship is fundamentally insulting.
While beeing in the center of a hype vortex which basically suspends market physics. But all that bad code eats serverfarms that are going to cost double when the bubble starts deflating.
> It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.
A lot of dollars fix a lot of mistakes.
I think you're all fucking crazy. Or maybe I am?
I can literally see my teams codebase becoming an unmaintainable nightmare in front of my eyes each day.
I use copilot and Claude code and I frequently have to throw away their massively verbose and ridiculously complex code and engage my withering brain to come up with the correct solution that is 80% less code.
I probably get to the solution in the same time when all is said and done.
Honestly what is going on. What are we doing here?
Sounds very similar to my experience with colleagues before AI. It just goes even faster now.
"Wildly successful but unpolished product first-to-market with a new technology gets dethroned by a competitor with superior execution" is a story as old as tech.
It's also crazy more expensive to run than we thought. That doesn't bode well when their loss-leader period is over and they need to start making money.
It is amazing how much malice did author put into proving the world is stupid, and only few still stand guard of reason.
Also, many of the complaints seem more like giddy joy than anything.
The negative emotion regex, for example, is only used for a log/telemetry metric. Sampling "wtf?" along would probably be enough. Why would you use an agent for that?
I don't see how a vibe-coded app is freed from the same trade-offs that apply to a fast-moving human-coded one.
Especially since a human is still driving it, thus they will take the same shortcuts they did before: instead of a formal planning phase, they'll just yolo it with the agent. Instead of cleaning up technical debt, they want to fix specific issues that are easy to review, not touch 10 files to do a refactor that's hard to review. The highest priority issues are bugs and new integrations, not tech debt, just like it always was.
This is really just a reminder of how little upside there is to coding in the open.
I think the thing is that people expect one of the largest companies in the world to have well written code.
Claude’s source code is fine for a 1-3 person team. It’s atrocious for a flagship product from a company valued over $380 BILLION.
Like if that’s the best ai coding can do given infinite money? Yeah, the emperor has no clothes. If it’s not the best that can be done, then what kinda clowns are running the show over there?
The difference here is that everyone else in this product category are also sprinting full steam ahead trying to get as many users as they can
If they DIDN'T heavily vibe-code it they might fall behind. Speed of implementation short term might beat out long-term maintenance and iteration they'd get from quality code
They're just taking on massive tech debt
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I just think this is the nature of all software, and it was wrong to assume AI fundamentally changes it.
Seems like you're also under the impression that privately developed software should be immaculate if the company is worth enough billions, but you'd be wrong about that too.
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Yes, you would expect a company paying millions in TC to the best software developers on the planet could produce a product that is best in class, and you would get code quality for free. Except it's regularly beaten in benchmarks and user validation by open source agents, some built by a single person (pi), with horrible code quality leading to all sorts of bad UX and buggy behaviour.
Either they're massively overpaying some scrubs to underperform with the new paradigm, or they are squeezing every last drop out of vibe coding and this is the result.
Its a buggy pos though, "popular and successful" have never been indicators of quality in any sense.
I think this is a pretty interesting comment because it gets to the heart of differing views on what quality means.
For you, non-buggy software is important. You could also reasonably take a more business centered approach, where having some number of paying customers is an indicator of quality (you've built something people are willing to pay for!) Personally I lean towards the second camp, the bugs are annoying but there is a good sprinkling of magic in the product which overall makes it something I really enjoy using.
All that is to say, I don't think there is a straightforward definition of quality that everyone is going to agree on.
What do I care if Anthropic makes money? Do you think Oracle makes money because they have a quality product?
ok, well if youd like to trade in 14billion dollars of revenue for better quality feel free.
Honestly for such a powerful tool, it’s pretty damn janky. Permissions don’t always work, hitting escape doesn’t always register correctly, the formatting breaks on its own to name a few of the issues i’ve had. It’s popular and successful but it’s got lots of thorns
I read this posts and I wonder how many people are thisdelusional or dishonest. I am programmer for 40 years and in most companies 90% of coders are so called stack overflow coders or google coders. Every coder who is honest will admit it and AI is already better than those 90%.FAR better. At least most influencer coder start to admit the fact that the code is actually awesome, if you know what you are doing. I am more of a code reviewer and I plan the implementation, what is far more exciting than writing the code itself. I have the feeling most feel the way I do but there are still those stack ovwerflow coders who are afraid to lose their jobs. And they will.
Do we know if the original code was vibe coded? It's like chicken and an egg dilemma.
It's not a chicken and egg dilemma, the model can be used independently of Claude to write code, the heavy lifting is still done on their servers.
That’s nothing new.
Countless Excel-Solutions are popular and successful but the Macro behind bad.
Bad code doesn’t not work, unfortunately it works.
The model is the product.
It shows that you can have a garbage front end if people perceive value in your back end.
It also means that any competitor that improves on this part of the experience is going to eat your lunch.
This is a really wrong perspective on software. Short term monkey style coding does not produce products. You might get money but that is not what it is about.
This is similar to retarded builders in Turkey saying “wow, I can make the same building, sell for the same price, but spend way less” and then millions of people becoming victim when there is an earthquake.
This is not how responsible people should think about things in society
> This is a really wrong perspective on software. Short term monkey style coding does not produce products. You might get money but that is not what it is about.
Getting money is 100% what it is about and Claude Code is great product.
It's very buggy. Just look at the ticket tracker. How can you say it is great; are you a light, nontechnical user?
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Nobody rewards responsibility though. It's all about making number go up.
...go up as fast as possible.
> This is a really wrong perspective on software. Short term monkey style coding does not produce products. You might get money but that is not what it is about
You're not alone in thinking that, but unfortunately I think it's a minority opinion. The only thing most people and most businesses care about is money. And frankly not even longterm, sustainable money. Most companies seem happy to extract short term profits, pay out the executives with big bonuses, then rot until they collapse
Because or in spite of? Claude code works because of Claude being good and network effects. Agentic coding tools are maybe the dumbest code ever for the level of popularity they have.
We are all using Claude despite Claude Code. The day ChudCorp releases a superior model Chud, we are all gone in an instant. There is no moat.
I think it is crazy popular for the model and not the crappy vibe code.
Hardly. Claude Code is basically just a wrapper around an LLM with a CLI.
Obviously it does some fairly smart stuff under the hood, but it's not exactly comparable to a large software project.
But to your point, that doesn't mean you can't vibe code some poorly built product and sell it. But people have always been able to sell poorly built software projects. They can just do it a bit quicker now.
>Hardly. Claude Code is basically just a wrapper around an LLM with a CLI.
I don't know why people keep acting like harnesses are all the same but we know they aren't because people have swapped them out with the same models and receive vastly different results in code quality and token use.
My understanding of OP was not a claim that "vibe coding doesn't work", but that the way Anthropic does it doesn't work. He seems to be specifically criticizing the "hands off the actual code, human" approach and advocating for keeping the human in the loop.
There is already lots of popular software that is violates any concept of good software. Facebook messenger, instagram, twitter, minecraft, balena etcher, the original ethereum wallet, almost anything that uses electron...
Except for the part where it's constantly having quality and reliability issues, even independent of the server-side infrastructure (OOMs on long running tasks, etc).
> It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work.
It's not a proof vibe-coding doesn't work. It's a proof it's shitty, rube-goldberg, crappy code. It doesn't mean there aren't other shitty products out there (the heavy turds Microsoft produced throughout the years do comes to mind for example).
But when you've got a project upvoted here recently complaining that people do run into issue while quickly cut/pasting from Claude Code CLI to, say, Bash to test something because of Unicode characters in Claude Code CLI's output... And when you realize that it's because what Claude Code CLI shows you in the TUI is not the output of the model because there's an entire headless browser rendering the model's output to a webpage, which is then converted to text (and changing at that moment ASCII chars for Unicode ones), you realize that some serious level of fucktardery is ongoing.
It's normal that at times people aren't going full agentic and shall want to cut/paste what they see. I'm not the one complaining: I saw a project complaining about it and people are affected by that terribly dumb ASCII-to-Unicode conversion of characters.
When you can produce turds by the kilometer, a near infinity of turd is going to be produced.
We're not saying it's not working: I pay an Anthropic subscription and use it daily... We're saying it's a piece-of-shit of a codebase.
Shit that works is still shit.
If anyone from Anthropic is reading: STOP FUCKING CHANGING THE CHARACTERS THAT YOUR MODEL DOES OUTPUT.
(now of course it's just one issue out of thousands, but it'd be a nice one to fix)
Value to customer. Literally the only thing that matters.
Value isn't a one-shot, though. Value sustained over time is what matters.
Well, if unmaintainable code gets in the way of the "sustained over time" part, then that is still a real problem.
Businesses no longer seem to care about "value sustained over time"
They only seem to operate as "extract as much value as possible in a short amount of time and exit with your bag", these days
I found that to be true years ago when I spooled the source of the Twitch leaks.
To me it said, clearly: nobody cares about your code quality other than your ability to ship interesting features.
It was incredibly eye-opening to me, I went in expecting different lessons honestly.
> It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.
That was always the case. Landlords still want rent, the IRS still has figurative guns. Shipping shit code to please these folks and keep the company alive will always win over code quality, unless the system can be edited to financially incentivize code quality. The current loss function on society is literally "ship shit now and pay your taxes and rent".
>. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.
The product is also a bit wonky and doesn't always provide the benefits it's hyped for. It often doesn't even produce any result for me, just keeps me waiting and waiting... and nothing happens, which is what I expect from a vibe coded app.
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Yes, just get hundreds of billions of dollars in investments to build a leading product, and then use your massive legal team to force the usage of your highly subsidised and marketed subscription plan through your vibe coded software. This is excellent evidence that code doesn't matter.
> Yes, just get hundreds of billions of dollars in investments to build a leading product, and then use your massive legal team to force the usage of your highly subsidised and marketed subscription plan through your vibe coded software.
What? Your comment makes absolutely zero sense. Legal team forces people to use Claude Code?
Claude Code is the only coding harness you're allowed to use with fixed-price subscriptions as opposed to PAYGO API access. There's also rumors that the subscriptions are heavily subsidized compared to API, or at least cross-subsidized to the effect that the heaviest users of Claude Code (controlling for subscription level) end up paying vastly lower unit prices for their token use. These restrictions are enforced legally.
I know this isn't your point, but Anthropic has raised about $70 billion, not "hundreds of billions".
And they don't need a massive legal team to declare that you can't use their software subscription with other people's software.
I don't think anyone who used Claude code on the terminal had anything good to say about it. It was people using it through vs code that had a good time.
I have used Claude Code in the terminal to the tune of ~20m tokens in the last month and I have very little to complain about. There are definitely quirks that are annoying (as all software has, including vs code or jetbrains IDEs) but broadly speaking it does what it says on the tin ime
I prefer using it via the terminal. Might be anchoring bias, but I have had issues with slash commands not registering and hooks not working in the plugin.