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The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

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Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#51

Post by treexs »

causal wrote: post #28

I'm amazed at how much of what my past employers would call trade secrets are just being shipped in the source. Including comments that just plainly state the whole business backstory of certain decisions. It's like they discarded all release harnesses and project tracking and just YOLO'd everything into the codebase itself. Edit: Everyone is responding "comments are good" and I can't tell if any of you actually read…

well yeah since they tell claude code the business decisions and it creates the comments

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#52

Post by JambalayaJimbo »

causal wrote: post #28

I'm amazed at how much of what my past employers would call trade secrets are just being shipped in the source. Including comments that just plainly state the whole business backstory of certain decisions. It's like they discarded all release harnesses and project tracking and just YOLO'd everything into the codebase itself. Edit: Everyone is responding "comments are good" and I can't tell if any of you actually read…

I guess they weren't expecting a leak of the source code? It's very handy to have as much as possible available in the codebase itself.

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#53

Post by otterley »

petcat wrote: post #46
mzajc wrote: post #37

There are now several comments that (incorrectly?) interpret the undercover mode as only hiding internal information. Excerpts from the actual prompt[0]: NEVER include in commit messages or PR descriptions: - The phrase "Claude Code" or any mention that you are an AI - Co-Authored-By lines or any other attribution BAD (never write these): - 1-shotted by claude-opus-4-6 - Generated with Claude Code - Co-Authored-By: C…

It's less about pretending to be a human and more about not inviting scrutiny and ridicule toward Claude if the code quality is bad. They want the real human to appear to be responsible for accepting Claud's poor output.

That’s ultimately the right answer, isn’t it? Bad code is bad code, whether a human wrote it all, or whether an agent assisted in the endeavor.

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#54

Post by ryandrake »

andoando wrote: post #45
peacebeard wrote: post #14

The name "Undercover mode" and the line `The phrase "Claude Code" or any mention that you are an AI` sound spooky, but after reading the source my first knee-jerk reaction wouldn't be "this is for pretending to be human" given that the file is largely about hiding Anthropic internal information such as code names. I encourage looking at the source itself in order to draw your conclusions, it's very short: https://git…

I think the motivation is to let developers use it for work without making it obvious theyre using AI

Which is funny given how many workplaces are requiring developers use AI, measuring their usage, and stack ranking them by how many tokens they burn. What I want is something that I can run my human-created work product through to fool my employer and its AI bean counters into thinking I used AI to make it.

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#55

Post by amarant »

dkenyser wrote: post #19
peacebeard wrote: post #14

The name "Undercover mode" and the line `The phrase "Claude Code" or any mention that you are an AI` sound spooky, but after reading the source my first knee-jerk reaction wouldn't be "this is for pretending to be human" given that the file is largely about hiding Anthropic internal information such as code names. I encourage looking at the source itself in order to draw your conclusions, it's very short: https://git…

> my first knee-jerk reaction wouldn't be "this is for pretending to be human"... "Write commit messages as a human developer would — describe only what the code change does."

That seems desirable? Like that's what commit messages are for. Describing the change. Much rather that than the m$ way of putting ads in commit messages

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#56

Post by Analemma_ »

simianwords wrote: post #8

Guys I’m somewhat suspicious of all the leaks from Anthropic and think it may be intentional. Remember the leaked blog about Mythos?

It's possible, but Anthropic employees regularly boast (!) that Claude Code is itself almost entirely vibe-coded (which certainly seems true, based on the generally-low quality of the code in this leak), so it wouldn't at all surprise me to have that blow up twice in the same week. Probably it might happen with accelerating frequency as the codebase gets more and more unmanageable.

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#57

Post by otterley »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #18
anonymoushn wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why

Well, as a general rule, I don't do business with people who lie to me. You've got a business, and you sent me junk mail, but you made it look like some official government thing to get me to open it? I'm done, just because you lied on the envelope . I don't care how badly I need your service. There's a dozen other places that can provide it; I'll pick one of them rather than you, because you've shown yourself to be…

Out of curiosity, given two code submissions that are completely identical—one written solely by a human and one assisted by AI—why should its provenance make any difference to you? Is it like fine art, where it’s important that Picasso’s hand drew it? Or is it like an instruction manual, where the author is unimportant?

Similarly, would you consider it to be dishonest if my human colleague reviewed and made changes to my code, but I didn’t explicitly credit them?

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#58

Post by ossa-ma »

simianwords wrote: post #16

> The multi-agent coordinator mode in coordinatorMode.ts is also worth a look. The whole orchestration algorithm is a prompt, not code. So much for langchain and langraph!! I mean if Anthropic themselves arent using it and using a prompt then what’s the big deal about langchain

Langchain is for model-agnostic composition. Claude Code only uses one interface to hoist its own models so zero need for an abstraction layer.

Langgraph is for multi-agent orchestration as state graphs. This isn't useful for Claude Code as there is no multi-agent chaining. It uses a single coordinator agent that spawns subagents on demand. Basically too dynamic to constrain to state graphs.

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#59

Post by AnimalMuppet »

otterley wrote: post #57
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, as a general rule, I don't do business with people who lie to me. You've got a business, and you sent me junk mail, but you made it look like some official government thing to get me to open it? I'm done, just because you lied on the envelope . I don't care how badly I need your service. There's a dozen other places that can provide it; I'll pick one of them rather than you, because you've shown yourself to be…

Out of curiosity, given two code submissions that are completely identical—one written solely by a human and one assisted by AI—why should its provenance make any difference to you? Is it like fine art, where it’s important that Picasso’s hand drew it? Or is it like an instruction manual, where the author is unimportant? Similarly, would you consider it to be dishonest if my human colleague reviewed and made changes…

Why does the provenance make any difference? Let me increase your options. Option 1: You completely hand-wrote it. Option 2: You were assisted by an AI, but you carefully reviewed it. Option 3: You were assisted by an AI (or the AI wrote the whole thing), and you just said, "looks good, YOLO".

Even if the code is line-for-line identical, the difference is in how much trust I am willing to give the code. If I have to work in the neighborhood of that code, I need to know what degree of skepticism I should be viewing it with.

Re: The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode

#60

Post by perching_aix »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #38
causal wrote: post #28

I'm amazed at how much of what my past employers would call trade secrets are just being shipped in the source. Including comments that just plainly state the whole business backstory of certain decisions. It's like they discarded all release harnesses and project tracking and just YOLO'd everything into the codebase itself. Edit: Everyone is responding "comments are good" and I can't tell if any of you actually read…

Comments are the ultimate agent coding hack. If you're not using comments, you're doing agent coding wrong. Why? Agents may or may not read docs. It may or may not use skills or tools. It will always read comments "in the line of sight" of the task. You get free long term agent memory with zero infrastructure.

Agents and I apparently have a whole lot in common.

Only being half ironic with this. I generally find that people somehow magically manage to understand how to be materially helpful when the subject is a helpless LLM. Instead of pointing it to a random KB page, they give it context. They then shorten that context. They then interleave context as comments. They provide relevant details. They go out of their way to collect relevant details. Things they somehow don't do for their actual colleagues.

This only gets worse when the LLM captures all that information better than certain human colleagues somehow, rewarding the additional effort.

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