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Comment by whateveracct

10 hours ago

It's proof that Anthropic is high on their own supply.

I've heard them described as data science script kiddies with inflated egos and it seems spot-on.

That is exactly the impression I get from the claude code team, and by extension some of their recent launches like Cowork and Design. And of course with the growth team or whoever is in charge of the subscription and quota side of things.

They just do the basic experiment -> ship workflow over and over again, doing whatever optimizes their product in the short term, and never seem to step back and think about the full long-term impact of their changes. They evidently seem to not even consider immediate regressions or negative blowback from users if it's not within the area of expertise of the guy who ships the change.

That is despite their other teams (especially alignment) having a track record of being fairly well thought-out and intelligent.

To the guys at Anthropic's product teams, every problem is a data science problem that you slap an A/B test onto, and they seem to think that the A/B test is all that's needed, and actual verification and thinking things through is overrated af. That's what leads to countless regressions in Claude Code as well as removing claude code from the pro plan in their product page for a few hours (lol).

  • Tbf, their harness was surprisingly ahead of the curve for most of the last year..

    Are this point, the difference is mostly made up by issues like the OP has, so you're likely better off using eg pi (-agent) and writing your own custom skills and extensions (or any of the other harnesses the providers create, even copilot-cli has gotten decent nowadays)

    • > Tbf, their harness was surprisingly ahead of the curve for most of the last year..

      Do a `s/harness/software` on that statement, and that is going to describe most companies shipping AI written software.

      > this point, the difference is mostly made up by issues like the OP has, so you're likely better off using eg pi (-agent) and writing your own custom skills and extensions (or any of the other harnesses the providers create, even copilot-cli has gotten decent nowadays)

      They (AI-written software) are all going to be ahead in some way, until they aren't because they hit the practical limits of codebase size that can be reasonably understood by an LLM.

    • > Tbf, their harness was surprisingly ahead of the curve for most of the last year..

      Yeah and now it’s not. We’ll see if they have the product ability to retake the lead, although I suspect not.

What a joke. If "Anthropic is just a bunch of script kiddies" then everyone is, considering dozens of billions pored into beating their models yet they're still the go-to for coding and have been for quite a while now. Just a nonsensical thing to say.

  • They got dethroned by some random Chinese company this month again. I don't think they are script kiddies but I think they have a moat on gpus.

    The US is doing everything to make it so hard for other countries to compete. And yet, with everything stacked against all these other companies, and with way way less money and way less fancy researchers they get beat over and over again. Usually by companies who AI isn't even their main product.

    Actually Alibaba dethroned sonnet with a model that's like 1/100th the size and can run on commodity hardware this month too. So they do look kind of silly...

    Definitely not script kiddies, but the way the researchers get managed makes them look goofy and sloppy and not interested in benefitting the consumer.

What is this reply even, what’s wrong with the vibe coding community? They have such ridiculous takes, it reminds me a lot of the extreme stances from the gaming community. Terminology also seems to come from there, “nerfing” etc.

  • >what’s wrong with the vibe coding community

    For starters, the vibes.

    Vibe coding, like Web3 before it (like Web 2.0 before it, like the dotcom boom before that - what preceded?) - harnesses the kind of focused attention with which gamers hook their brains into portals to virtual worlds - and directs all that bargain-basement wetware compute towards some obscured "real-world" goal instead. (See also: CADT development.)

    Hyperscale these very inefficient but very dependable almost-not-efforts, and you beat the more efficient approaches. See also: evolutionary algorithms, autoresearch, price dumping; "attention is all you need", which though a legit piece of mathemagic always sounded to me like a rehash of that old adage, "all you need is love" (pejorative).

    Really, "real world" is a consensus; we don't generally observe balamatoms or even balamolecules, we reason in terms of material objects' socially constructed balameanings and interrelations. Therefore, by redirecting sufficient attention to some thing labeled "unrealistic", we can remove that label; by this technique, a sufficiently large collective actor can quite literally, and quite directly, change the world. Without asking anyone, least of all me!

  • I think a lot of non-vibe-coding types also hold similar opinions -- in fact they might dislike Anthropic products even more, given that they (however few they might be) choose not to use them.

    • You honestly think “Anthropic employees are script kiddies with inflated egos that are high on their own supply” is a reasonable stance?

      This seems such an immature take to me, and hard to take serious. Anthropic just a bunch of script kiddies? Really?

      11 replies →