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The Claude Code Leak

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Re: The Claude Code Leak

#181

Post by dpark »

sirpilade wrote: post #81
mergesort wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey there, author of the post here! I actually wrote this piece myself on my phone while I was out for a walk this morning. It was initially meant to be a quick note more than a full blog post —- whereas Coding As A Creative Expression took me a couple of days to write. I made a commitment to write more this year and put my thoughts out quicker than I used to, so that’s likely the primary reason it’s not as deep of a…

As a more general comment, I hope we’ll stop trying to discriminate whether a certain text was or not written/polished/extended by AI and focus more on content and author’s responsibility for what they do or do not say with that text.

I agree. Not because I think that most AI content is worth reading, but because it can be criticized on more grounded merits. People wrote blogspam by hand for two decades before AI started generating it. It wasn’t high value when a human wrote it either.

On many (most?) posts, far more energy is spent arguing about whether a post is AI than discussing if there’s anything of value in the post.

Re: The Claude Code Leak

#182

Post by lelanthran »

r0x0r007 wrote: post #46

I dont understand why so many people have the need to emphasize the code vs product battle. There is no battle. Coding/developing/software engineering is a skill, that just like any other skill has certain requirements and best practices that have to be followed in order to make a quality, maintainable and adaptable application that can stand the test of time from the software perspective. Product, features, marketin…

> The fact that anything got leaked is a serious breach of best practices and security also at this point, something a company that used to work for DoD(W) shouldnt be doing, it can even be considered a national threat at this point.

Wasn't it CC itself the one that leaked, well, itself? It's completely vibe-coded, which I assume means it does its own build step too, which means it leaked itself.

The only breach of best-practice I see here is using an LLM for coding.

Re: The Claude Code Leak

#183

Post by miki123211 »

lukewarm707 wrote: post #171
miki123211 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A third way of looking at it is that you can't just blindly copy arguments when the situations are clearly different. Nobody, not even Anthropic, is arguing that they should be able to host other people's paid content for free. The crux of their fair-use defense is that models are transformative works, just like parodies or book reviews, and hence should be treated as fair use. You can't just take a pile of books (no…

anthropic argue that you should not use claude API to train your model Situation A - Anthropic pays for a book - Anthropic transform the book into a new llm (transformative use) -> OK Situation B - I pay for Anthropic API - I transform API responses into a new model (transformative use) -> Not OK the situations, are clearly the same

Anthropic goes book->llm, you do llm->llm. Very different amounts of transformativeness.

Re: The Claude Code Leak

#184

Post by keeda »

lelanthran wrote: post #76
kstenerud wrote: post #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 th…

> 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. Counterpoint: Code does matter, in the early days too! It matters more after you have PMF, but that do…

I'm probably missing something. Pre-PMF code by definition is not yet proven to solve a specific pain point, so why does it matter?

I think the crux here is the OP means the "quality of code" doesn't matter until PMF, only the utility matters (to the extent it helps you find PMF), in which case you're both in violent agreement.

But even then you don't need code. I briefly worked for a startup that found PMF by calling people, sending text messages, creating social media posts, measuring engagement to create reports, and sending invoices... all manually. The "code" as such was a bunch of templates in a doc for each of those. Once they actually started getting paid they moved to writing code.

Re: The Claude Code Leak

#185

Post by grey-area »

mergesort wrote: post #158
grey-area wrote: post #16

Points from the article. 1. The code is garbage and this means the end of software. Now try maintaining it. 2. Code doesn’t matter (the same point restated). No, we shouldn’t accept garbage code that breaks e.g. login as an acceptable cost of business. 3. It’s about product market fit. OK, but what happens after product market fit when your code is hot garbage that nobody understands? 4. Anthropic can’t defend the co…

Hey there, post author here. I think if you read deeper into my blog post history you’ll see that I have a reasonably balanced take on AI. I generally think this will be a very important technology so I teach the subject to make sure people understand how to use it as leverage in their lives. (Yes as paid workshops, but I also volunteer weekly for 3-4 hour sessions at a non-profit where I get nothing more than the jo…

I disagree on agentic systems and AI based on LLMs and don’t feel this is close to a balanced take. You are assuming you are in the middle of a revolution when that is far from obvious. It is not yet clear this is an important technology because there are very significant limitations.

The code from one of the leading companies in the space is a good example of where the reality of what is achieved falls far short of expectations.

This is what I meant by the hype train.

Re: The Claude Code Leak

#186

Post by lelanthran »

keeda wrote: post #184
lelanthran wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Counterpoint: Code does matter, in the early days too! It matters more after you have PMF, but that do…

I'm probably missing something. Pre-PMF code by definition is not yet proven to solve a specific pain point, so why does it matter? I think the crux here is the OP means the "quality of code" doesn't matter until PMF, only the utility matters (to the extent it helps you find PMF), in which case you're both in violent agreement. But even then you don't need code. I briefly worked for a startup that found PMF by callin…

> I briefly worked for a startup that found PMF by calling people, sending text messages, creating social media posts, measuring engagement to create reports, and sending invoices... all manually.

Right, and in that case there is no step-by-step recipe for the product. When all that is implemented in code, that is a set of step-by-step instructions for solving the pain points.

Re: The Claude Code Leak

#187

Post by mergesort »

grey-area wrote: post #185
mergesort wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey there, post author here. I think if you read deeper into my blog post history you’ll see that I have a reasonably balanced take on AI. I generally think this will be a very important technology so I teach the subject to make sure people understand how to use it as leverage in their lives. (Yes as paid workshops, but I also volunteer weekly for 3-4 hour sessions at a non-profit where I get nothing more than the jo…

I disagree on agentic systems and AI based on LLMs and don’t feel this is close to a balanced take. You are assuming you are in the middle of a revolution when that is far from obvious. It is not yet clear this is an important technology because there are very significant limitations. The code from one of the leading companies in the space is a good example of where the reality of what is achieved falls far short of…

Sorry, when I say I think I have a balanced take on AI what I mean is that I do my best to weigh both the pros and cons of this technology as opposed to a more extreme behavior like spending all day chatting with LLMs or posting all day on X about how AI is already better than me at everything and that jobs are over.

If I had to assign a confidence score for whether agents will change the way we all work and many aspects of how we live, I would put it at a 7/10, maybe 8/10. I felt about the same about the smartphone. While many things we do look the same way they did in 2005 (we still drive on roads, kids still go to school), at the same time it's undeniable that much of our lives are intermediated through a small screen and many societal dynamics have shifted due to that technology's existence.

I will concede that you should read my post with that context and draw your own conclusions about the veracity of my perspective — but I think it is more well-reasoned than what people generally attribute to "LLM hype". (Of course it's a bit tautological that I believe that, but I try to surround myself with people of all kinds technical and non-technical and like to think I stay reasonably grounded.)

All that said, I think the code from a leading company being bad and yet delivering good results is more a sign of the technology's jagged frontier[^1]. Calculators can't write sonnets the same way that LLMs are bad at math, but that doesn't make them useless — it just makes them a tool. This is a tool in our tool belt and I find is surprisingly useful as a general purpose technology despite it's limitations. (Which is related to the main argument I make in the post that bad code leading to good results may imply that we're under and overweighting certain aspects of what is important in software development, and that our expectations of code may may need to be recalibrated often as we gather more evidence.)

[^1]: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/centaurs-and-cyborgs-on-the...

Re: The Claude Code Leak

#188

Post by keeda »

lelanthran wrote: post #186
keeda wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm probably missing something. Pre-PMF code by definition is not yet proven to solve a specific pain point, so why does it matter? I think the crux here is the OP means the "quality of code" doesn't matter until PMF, only the utility matters (to the extent it helps you find PMF), in which case you're both in violent agreement. But even then you don't need code. I briefly worked for a startup that found PMF by callin…

> I briefly worked for a startup that found PMF by calling people, sending text messages, creating social media posts, measuring engagement to create reports, and sending invoices... all manually. Right, and in that case there is no step-by-step recipe for the product. When all that is implemented in code, that is a set of step-by-step instructions for solving the pain points.

But the manual workflow was the step-by-step recipe the founders iterated on until they got traction; the product that came later was just an embodiment of that workflow as code.

Re: The Claude Code Leak

#189

Post by kstenerud »

lelanthran wrote: post #157
kstenerud wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That hasn't been my experience. What I've found worked is: 1. Find a potential customer who's excited about the idea of what you're going to build. 2. Build just enough to make them a mostly happy, paying customer while you secure more customers. 3. Now that you have a few customers, you have a better idea of where your architecture and business flow doesn't fit their needs. 4. Adapt to this reality, and make things…

I follow that too, when I try a new venture, but what does that have to do with "The Code Is/Isn't Important"? What you listed is important, but those findings are distilled into the source code of the product. If you open the source, you are providing step-by-step instructions on solving some problem that other people are prepared to pay to solve. Basically, you come up with a recipe for success for $FOO - why would…

None of what I said even speaks about source code. It could just as well be run by a bunch of people with notebooks, sending emails from time to time.

All that matters is that the product works, and we have a scaling path once we find a market fit. Yes, that's likely to involve source code, but I've no qualms with tossing out the MVP code and starting over from scratch. Or adapting the quickie we put together, if it happens to contain a kernel of value. Whether I open source it or not depends on where our moat lies.

But regardless, the new reality is that anyone can decompile your code with an AI and duplicate it. So merely putting an app out there opens the door for someone to copy it. So really, your moat better be something besides the code!

Re: The Claude Code Leak

#190

Post by sakopov »

boomlinde wrote: post #141
sakopov wrote: post #90

In my opinion, the “code is garbage” argument is a moot point. Anthropic is in the business of removing humans from the SDLC. As long as their models can understand and update the code they generate it can remain garbage. They’re not optimizing for human comprehension of the output. They don’t even want you looking at it. And eventually the models will get good enough that you won’t have to.

It doesn't seem like they're optimizing for stable, working software either, nor, apparently, a stable, working release workflow.

LOL, very true.
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