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The Claude Code Leak
21–30 of 203 posts
Re: The Claude Code Leak
#22> But then the clean room implementations started showing up. People had taken Anthropic’s source code and rewritten Claude Code from scratch in other languages like Python and Rust. Seems like the phrase "clean room" is the new "nonplussed"... how does this make any sense?
The most fitting method would be to be to train an LLM on the Claude Code source-code (among other data).
Then use Anthropic's own argument that LLM output is original work and thus not subject to copyright.
Re: The Claude Code Leak
#23[dead]
Re: The Claude Code Leak
#24I wonder what happened to the person that wrote "Coding as Creative Expression" ( https://build.ms/2022/5/21/coding-as-creative-expression/ )? I'm not (just) being glib. That earlier article displays some introspection and thoughtful consideration of an old debate. The writing style is clearly personal, human. Today's post is not so much. It has LLM fingerprints on it. It's longer, there are more words. But it doesn'…
Have you noticed that comments like "this post seems written with AI" are now appearing on all posts, even those written without AI?
We're starting to become wary due to the abuse of AI and proliferation of sloppy content, but also because we often have trouble distinguishing authentic from sloppy content.
Another feature of this AI era that I hate.
Re: The Claude Code Leak
#25> Many software developers have argued that working like a pack of hyenas and shipping hundreds of commits a day without reading your code is an unsustainable way to build valuable software, but this leak suggests that maybe this isn’t true — bad code can build well-regarded products. The product hasn't been around long enough to decide whether such an approach is "sustainable". It is currently in a hype state and ne…
Hey there, author of the post here. I actually agree with this! That is in fact why I used the word maybe — my comment really was meant to be more speculative than definitive.
I think one thing that goes unmentioned is that maybe code quality is really not that important for trivial things, because they can be trivially reproduced if need be. I would argue Claude Code is exactly such a project; coding agents are incredibly simple and rewriting CC wouldn't be much of a problem.
Non-trivial things tend to be much more sensitive to code quality in my experience, and will by necessity be kept around for longer and thus be much more sensitive to maintenance issues.
Re: The Claude Code Leak
#26Claude Code proves you don't need quality code — you just need hundreds of billions of dollars to produce a best-in-class LLM and then use your legal team to force the extreamly subsidised usage of it through your own agent harness. Or in other words, shitty software + massive moat = users.
Seriously, if Anthropic were like oAI and let you use their subscription plans with any agent harness, how many users would CC instantly start bleeding? They're #39 in terminal bench and they get beaten by a harness that provides a single tool: tmux. You can literally get better results by giving Opus 4.6 only a tmux session and having it do everything with bash commands.
It seems premature to make sweeping claims about code quality, especially since the main reason to desire a well architected codebase is for development over the long haul.
Re: The Claude Code Leak
#27I wonder what happened to the person that wrote "Coding as Creative Expression" ( https://build.ms/2022/5/21/coding-as-creative-expression/ )? I'm not (just) being glib. That earlier article displays some introspection and thoughtful consideration of an old debate. The writing style is clearly personal, human. Today's post is not so much. It has LLM fingerprints on it. It's longer, there are more words. But it doesn'…
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Re: The Claude Code Leak
#28They just said this was an April Fools joke.
jokesonthemiwasonlypretending.png
Re: The Claude Code Leak
#29> bad code can build well-regarded products.
Yes, exactly. Products.
It seems like me and all the engineers I've known always have this established dichotomy: engineers, who want to write good code and to think a lot about user needs, and project managers/ executives/sales people, who want to make the non-negative numbers on accounting documents larger.
The truth is that to write "good software," you do need to take care, review code, not single-shot vibe code and not let LLMs run rampant. The other truth is that good software is not necessary good product; the converse is also true: bad product doesn't necessarily mean bad software. However there's not really a correlation, as this article points out: terrible software can be great product! In fact if writing terrible software lets you shit out more features, more quickly, you'll probably come ahead in business world than someone carefully writing good software but releasing more slowly. That's because the priorities and incentives in business world are often in contradiction to priorities and incentives in human world.
I think this is hard to grasp for those of us who have been taught our whole lives that money is a good scorekeeper for quality and efficacy. In reality it's absolutely not. Money is Disney bucks recording who's doing Disney World in the most optimal way. Outside of Disney World, your optimal in-park behavior is often suboptimal for out-of-park needs. The problem is we've mistaken Disney World for all of reality, or, let Walt Disney enclose our globe within the boundaries of his park.
> The object which labor produces confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer.
Re: The Claude Code Leak
#30> It should serve as a warning to developers that the code doesn’t seem to matter, even in a product built for developers.
Code doesn't matter IN THE EARLY DAYS.
This is similar to what I've observed over 25 years in the industry. In a startup, the code doesn't really matter; the market fit does.
But as time goes on your codebase has to mature, or else you end up using more and more resources on maintenance rather than innovation.