Comment by jiggawatts

18 hours ago

Please do explain why someone at Anthropic decided, on purpose, to write code that says something along the lines of: "if ( git_history_str contains "HERMES.md" ... )" then { bill more money }

Somebody (or something) wrote this code. This bug wouldn't be happening for any other reason. It's not a glitch, an oversight, a feature gap, or a temporary outage. It is a piece of written code in your system.

Everyone here is upset about the $200, which is probably much less money than the time that engineer spent ranting about the overcharge on GitHub.

The real problem in my mind is that that bit of code existed in the first place.

Why?

Are you vibe coding your billing!?

Without review!?!?

Or worse, a human being decided to add this to your code base? And nobody noticed or flagged it during code review?

Or much, much worse, Anthropic is purposefully ripping off customers?

This deserves a thorough post-mortem.

9 comments

jiggawatts

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csoups14  18 hours ago

Would imagine it's the simplest answer: they're flying by the seat of their pants, there's 1000 things happening every day that demand attention and there's not enough of it to go around. They toss their LLM at it, give it a cursory glance, and ship it. A quick glance at the Claude Code source code bears the result of this process out. The fundamental question is, if their model is so powerful, why do they keep fucking up such simple things? We're led to believe this is a serious company with a model so powerful they can't release it to the general public.

  • stefan_  18 hours ago

    Hermes is one of these OpenClaw clones, so this was certainly intentional, not a model hallucinating something.

    I think the problem is clear. Anthropic saw their usage go up much more than their capacity could handle. There are a few tried and true solutions to this, like "increase the price" or "restrict signups so you can guarantee service to what you have already sold".

    Then there is the "large scale fraud" option, where you materially change and degrade the service you have already sold. Just because you have obfuscated and mislead in how you describe the product you are selling doesn't mean you get to capture the cash flow of 1 year subscriptions then not honor that contract for the full duration.

    • pbowyer  9 hours ago

      > Hermes is one of these OpenClaw clones

      So that's what it is. Reading its README I thought it was another harness like Pi [1], but with built-in memory so it remembers what it learns, and gets more capable the longer it runs.

      Like Letta [2], Dirac [3][4] and the other "more experimental harnesses that look interesting but I haven't had time to try out".

      1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47920787

    • csoups14  2 hours ago

      Late in replying to this, but just wanted to say I found this pretty compelling. I generally think people are too quick to assign to malice what could be assigned to incompetence. In this case I'm not convinced of that anymore especially given their public statements about these third-party harnesses. It does seem unavoidable that they'll have to move away from subscription-based pricing and towards token-based, but they're managing this in a really ham-fisted and user hostile way regardless.

  • jiggawatts  18 hours ago

    I doubt an AI would be stupid enough to write code like that without being explicitly prompted to do so. It's so... specific.

    That specific nature would mean it would get caught by even the most cursory of code reviews.

    Even if I was just "scanning my eyeballs over the code" without properly reading it, this would jump out as very odd and make me pause.

2ndorderthought  16 hours ago

Vibes were strong dude. Don't blame the dev blame the bots brah. They forgot to use mythos obviously otherwise this wouldn't happen simple mistake.