Comment by shimman
9 hours ago
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).
Ah I believe codex has similar issues. Terrible code quality but goes to show it doesn't really matter in the end.
5 replies →
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.