Comment by mpoteat

I skimmed a couple pages of the docs at:

https://github.com/user-attachments/files/31802150/EXTERNAL....

Might I gently suggest that you have a model at least as capable as Opus 5.5 translate that from Claudish to English? Or, even better, have an actual human work on the docs a bit? As it stands, they are fairly egregious, and they seem to devote at least as much space to little AI-generated quips that convey no meaning than to actually explaining what’s going on.

Also, maybe a human should decide whether these are “function” hooks or “module” hooks. All of this marketing calls them “function” hooks, but the json config seems entirely unaware of this.

(Has anyone else noticed that half the sentences in Claudish aren’t merely weird: they are noun phrases and not sentences at all? I’m pretty sure that any decent pre-LLM NLP-based grammar checker would correctly flag half the sentences in Claudish. Also, whatever variant of Claude wrote this thing can’t even capitalize around semicolons consistently with itself, let alone consistently with how English has been written for at least a century.)

edit: Fixed the link. Thanks, kaszanka.

The only difference between CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md is the filename. Do you really need a whole plugin system to support that use case? Feels like this could have been a one line change.

>via our new extensibility system for CC, called Mods, which is launching soon-ish. A mod is a plugin with a new type of hook, which we call a function hook.

An extensibility system called mods, which is a plugin with a new type of hook that we call function hook?

I can't tell if this is real, or you are making fun of overengineered AI solutions.

Is this real?

I've developed several plugins for different harnesses, and I needed some upstream change for most of them.

The deciding factor for me whether or not I will work on the feature of the plugin is whether I (or rather, my agent) can look in upstream source and evaluate if it can be done with minimal upstream change, which I then contribute. And generally, even if no upstream change is needed, agents work so much better when they can read the code.

So why not just make Claude code open source? Considering also that source code was leaked once anyway.

Sounds like you've read the deepseek harness paper.

> The AGENTS.md support was implemented via our new extensibility system for CC, called Mods,

AKA "we need 100~ish files wrtitten in the most horrible Clean Code style replete with no two files agreeing on the same naming of the same feature... to read one of two files, one of which has been a de-facto industry standard for over two years"

Will you extend your plugin to read skills and rules from `.agents`? Or should we write our own plugin/mod for that?

This may or may not be related, but if you're working on CC, who do we have to annoy to make Anthropic stop trying to force use of arbitrary Bash commands instead of the actual tool calls built into the harness? (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/90450, https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/89251, etc) It's deeply infuriating at times that there's this full system of hooks, permissions, etc that's unusable at times because CC keeps trying to make the model not use any of it.

mods seem like a grasp at all the pi and dsh users

Or add one additional telemetry metric and an extra prompt

I’d just assume good intent here. Feature flags, telemetry, and fast rollouts / rollbacks are standard practice in software. Have a look at chrome://flags perhaps.

I fully believe GP that there was zero intent to gate this behind collecting telemetry. Sounds like a little tech debt and a little oversight, and the simplest explanation is that it is.

That's just how big companies roll out software changes for software that auto-updates.

It's much preferable to be able to instantly fix it if the rollout of a new feature goes wrong than have everyone who installed the broken version bring stuck with problems until the company realizes the issue and rolls forwards with a fixed version.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html

Not necessarily. They probably have an integrated service that handles some telemetry and also feature flags, like Braze. They toggled the whole thing off based on telemetry settings. It's a bug I've made before too.

Seems like they overloaded whatever they use for telemetry to do feature flags.

It’s not a crazy conspiracy. They messed up, it’s fine.

Why would I ever do that to myself? My experience with Codex/GPT is fantastic, while my impression of Claude/Opus is that it's longwinded, patronizing, token-inefficient, stops to ask stupid questions every other minute, overcomplicates simple tasks, often poor engineering overall. I don't use it but this is what I see my partner run into who has access to both and compares them often. She has the same assessment.

On the other hand, if Anthropic is to follow the industry standards, this would never have happened in the first place. It's not like the feature gates are the frontier of software development.

What we need is a low level but constant drumbeat against openai in general. In general the AI situation is overleveraged and underpoliced, with the occasional hints of AI gone wild. If openai were to just be left to die, we could let that financial mess unroll and bail out the leftovers, I don't like bailouts anymore than the next guy but with this administration its almost a guarantee if things go south because this adminstration can charge administrative fees of maybe $20-30 billion (which goes to trump), get Sam Altman to serve one or two years in a cushy resort type fed place for the hugging face hacking and put openai's processes on github as a premium feature, say $10000 a month to access (which again goes to trump).

I know I know, why are we giving money to trump? Its because he's going to take it anyways so can't we at least apply some window dressing?

Sure a fast response on HN would make people switch. Try better rates, infra, limits etc.

Do yourself a favor: ditch both and go local.

Because they respond to HN threads about their products? Which are likely Claude hooks monitoring for activity in the first place? Come on...

At least make an argument for switching vendors based on the quality or price of their service.

> ...if Anthropic can keep it up with this level of service...

fuckin laughable, literally invoked a laugh from me in real life.

I hope customers aren't so stupid that they think a chatty developer on twitter/hn/mastodon/screaming-in-the-wind/wherever (or any other public-facing-place) means shit about customer service, and that goes towards ANY company where the primary customer service is an LLM.

Anthropic is the only company where it took (!) 9 weeks (!) to convince to hand over a 4 dollar refund for book-keeping errors on their side that caused an inappropriately early account deactivation due to time zone issues on their end, while all the while telling me that they don't offer refunds. It took stacks of evidence and argument, and that was after spending two weeks in their system trying to convince every level that I was worth a human.

For me personally it'd require Dario to resort to armed mugging to see another buck out of my wallet. I'm not alone.

tl;dr : being able to convince the powers that be on highly active industry forums (hacker news, twitter, mastodon..?) to act right using the power of peer shaming doesn't good customer service make. That said -- I do appreciate the direct response/statement from mpoteat;

..I just don't appreciate the good actions of a decent individual being too broadly interpreted as the do-good customer-centric nature of Anthropic .. an element I do not believe exists there.

[dead]

The correct design was in the AGENTS.md but they didn't have telemetry on

If it’s like other CC features that depend on telemetry being enabled, disabling telemetry will turn off the feature.

Lol that's literally the entire point of the software, you install it just so the program can talk to a remote server to make changes on your local computer.

valid

yes? feature flags have been a thing for a long time.

I don't think "bug" is the correct term. They put a feature behind a feature flag, and feature flags don't work if you turn them off (via telemetry). That's "Working As Designed™".

Feels pretty normal to me, IDK. "Rollout" is definitely what was happening here, and this leftover problem can be described as an "artifact" most generally - I guess otherwise it'd be a... just "problem" or "mistake"? Cause "bug" doesn't really fit. Plus, the Claudism here would definitely involve "soak", and possibly even "wall-time" lol

IMHO it's worth keeping in mind that Anthropic employees are some of the least likely to casually pass off artificial prose as authentic, given the company's ethos/brand/cover story (depending on how cynical you are). To them this is all getting pretty high stakes pretty damn quickly; based on my usage of full strength Opus 5.5 today, I can't even imagine what working with their full internal stack must feel like. If they were willing to let the machines speak for them, they'd all be melancholically lounging around home by now instead of coming in to work!

...I am refusing to consider the fact that they probably are still WFH because of Salesforce forcing their shared security contractor to strike. Call that a mental health ignorance on my part :)

I was probably an agent that made the change, and the same agent that commented here on HN.