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Anthropic acquires Stainless

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Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#251

Post by fredophile »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #235
abirch wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI can let you downsize the number of employees that you have and maintain the status quo or it can let you maintain the number of employees, reduce technical debt, improve products, and services.

Do the economics work out ? You can downsize the devs you have, but you need to maintain a smaller stable of very expensive devs, and then factor in the token usage. For example, a recent story about the openclaw creator using $1.3M of tokens/month. And let's assume he's getting paid $5M/yr which is probably a vast under estimate. Is he providing value that a traditional software development org with normal developer…

The $1.3 million doesn't mean much. The article stated he could've switched to a significantly cheaper option and cut the bill to $300k. That's still a lot but since he worked for the company that sells the tokens it isn't as though they were paying the retail cost.

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#252

Post by rft »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #235
abirch wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI can let you downsize the number of employees that you have and maintain the status quo or it can let you maintain the number of employees, reduce technical debt, improve products, and services.

Do the economics work out ? You can downsize the devs you have, but you need to maintain a smaller stable of very expensive devs, and then factor in the token usage. For example, a recent story about the openclaw creator using $1.3M of tokens/month. And let's assume he's getting paid $5M/yr which is probably a vast under estimate. Is he providing value that a traditional software development org with normal developer…

For those who, like me, had to do a double take on that number: https://www.businessinsider.com/openclaw-peter-steinberger-a...

Yes, $1.3M in token cost in less than 30 days and some days were even off-peak, if you can call it that with that insane scale that likely hides quite a lot of tokens in the lower bars.

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48159227

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#253

Post by fnordpiglet »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #235
abirch wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI can let you downsize the number of employees that you have and maintain the status quo or it can let you maintain the number of employees, reduce technical debt, improve products, and services.

Do the economics work out ? You can downsize the devs you have, but you need to maintain a smaller stable of very expensive devs, and then factor in the token usage. For example, a recent story about the openclaw creator using $1.3M of tokens/month. And let's assume he's getting paid $5M/yr which is probably a vast under estimate. Is he providing value that a traditional software development org with normal developer…

The issue is there’s non linearities involved. Although I don’t know I would use the open claw guy, but let’s take Isaac Newton. You can’t sum up people and arrive at an Isaac Newton worth of talent. He’s singular, unique, and irreplaceable at what he did. There were others similarly outsized in their ability to change things, and there are today as well. But you can’t funge talent at some level with more people - in fact as we know there’s a rapidly diminishing return on people investment.

Finally in some ways agentic workflows magnify the power of the individual who is adept at harnessing them, they don’t have to argue (much) with the agents to effect their ideas. I’ve found a lot of very bright engineers spend their days fighting to be heard by managers and peers who can’t / won’t understand them. By unshackling them from trying to debate down idiots, they deliver way way more, and of the right things, than they otherwise could have.

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#254

Post by aleph_minus_one »

827a wrote: post #241
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Successfully building a company, and using that company's products, is actually the best job interview you can ask for if you can pay for that caliber of candidate. This tests for very different skills than being an exceptional programmer.

I did use the word "software engineer" there, but realistically what they're looking for is exactly the name of the role they wear: Member of Technical Staff. Software Engineer, businessman, product manager, designer, agentic harness engineer, cloud, devops, all rolled into one. They want people who can own the entirety of a product from end-to-end. A responsibility domain so vast that most peoples' first thought is…

> I did use the word "software engineer" there

The reason why I avoided this term is that in Germany, there exists a quite strict of whatx an engineer (Ingenieur) is, which is defined in the laws of many federal states (Ingenieurgesetz [engineering law]). "Ingenieur" (engineer) is a protected professional title:

> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ingenieur&oldid=2... (*)

Falsely claiming that you are an Ingenieur when you aren't (by the definition in the Ingenieurgesetz) is a punishable crime in Germany:

> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Missbrauch_von_Ti...

There exist some boundary cases under which as a software developer you can call yourself an "Ingenieur", but you have to be insanely careful about whether you actually satisfy the legal criteria (see (*)) - in most cases you don't and you are thus a criminal if you do.

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#255

Post by rattray »

827a wrote: post #211

Anthropic is at a place where they need the world's best software engineers, and they're willing to comp at insane levels to get them. However: You simply cannot post a Linkedin job for "Really Good Software Engineer, comp $10M+" and make any sense of the inbound applications you'll get. They're not the first to figure this out, and they won't be the last: Successfully building a company, and using that company's pro…

> ... and their team is joining Anthropic to build, who knows, some dumb integration to make Hubspot data available in Claude, or something equally as boring.

Fun fact, I named it "Stainless" after Stainless Steel pipes, likening ourselves to a high-end plumbing supply shop. If you look at the earliest versions of stainlessapi.com on archive.org, you'll see our original motto was "Quality fittings for your REST API".

All that is to say, the incredibly "boring" infrastructural work of making "boring" APIs like Hubspot's more usefully accessible is absolutely the kind of thing I'm excited to do at Anthropic :)

(It also happens to be what got us all excited to work at stainless in the first place, but of course, we understand it's not for everyone!)

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#256

Post by kaashif »

perplex wrote: post #236
EmeraldSky wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they need the best software engineers? I thought their product was supposed to replace such roles. Yet look at the positions they’re hiring for in marketing, finance etc.: https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs Why aren’t they dogfooding their own products to replace such roles?

I've seen this at work. Giving Claude Code to a mediocre programmer gets you mediocre results. The really effective engineers with coding agent can accomplish a lot. Thousand monkeys...

I've also seen this. But I'll extend it to saying that giving Claude to a bad programmer gives bad results.

And seeing how people use it: good programmers review output and iterate to get better output. But bad programmers simply trust the output is good: they have no ability to review it themselves and often don't try.

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#257

Post by torben-friis »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #254
827a wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did use the word "software engineer" there, but realistically what they're looking for is exactly the name of the role they wear: Member of Technical Staff. Software Engineer, businessman, product manager, designer, agentic harness engineer, cloud, devops, all rolled into one. They want people who can own the entirety of a product from end-to-end. A responsibility domain so vast that most peoples' first thought is…

> I did use the word "software engineer" there The reason why I avoided this term is that in Germany, there exists a quite strict of whatx an engineer (Ingenieur) is, which is defined in the laws of many federal states (Ingenieurgesetz [engineering law]). "Ingenieur" (engineer) is a protected professional title: > https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ingenieur&oldid=2... (*) Falsely claiming that you are an Ing…

Wait, does that mean that if I self describe as a software engineer on LinkedIn and get an offer by Germans id be breaking the law by accepting?

If so, is this ever enforced?

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#258

Post by kaashif »

tikhonj wrote: post #247
827a wrote: post #211

Anthropic is at a place where they need the world's best software engineers, and they're willing to comp at insane levels to get them. However: You simply cannot post a Linkedin job for "Really Good Software Engineer, comp $10M+" and make any sense of the inbound applications you'll get. They're not the first to figure this out, and they won't be the last: Successfully building a company, and using that company's pro…

The top trading firms had top-end recruiting figured out for ages, without jumping through all these hoops. There are plenty of other reasons to acqui-hire, but it is not the only or even the most effective way to hire the strongest engineers

Trading firms are surely not hiring for the broad founder-like skill set Anthropic is. Trading firms want narrow extreme technical brilliance.

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#259

Post by aleph_minus_one »

torben-friis wrote: post #257
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I did use the word "software engineer" there The reason why I avoided this term is that in Germany, there exists a quite strict of whatx an engineer (Ingenieur) is, which is defined in the laws of many federal states (Ingenieurgesetz [engineering law]). "Ingenieur" (engineer) is a protected professional title: > https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ingenieur&oldid=2... (*) Falsely claiming that you are an Ing…

Wait, does that mean that if I self describe as a software engineer on LinkedIn and get an offer by Germans id be breaking the law by accepting? If so, is this ever enforced?

> Wait, does that mean that if I self describe as a software engineer on LinkedIn and get an offer by Germans id be breaking the law by accepting?

Using the German translation "Softwareingenieur" of "software engineer" on your LinkedIn page might easily get you into trouble.

Typically, as far as I know, law enforcement agencies only get active in the punishable act "Missbrauch von Titeln, Berufsbezeichnungen und Abzeichen" [abuse of titles, occupational titles and emblems] if the culprit gets denounced by someone or if there is a public interest, but everybody knows how easy it is to make enemies in your job or on the internet.

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#260

Post by eudicnxke »

827a wrote: post #211

Anthropic is at a place where they need the world's best software engineers, and they're willing to comp at insane levels to get them. However: You simply cannot post a Linkedin job for "Really Good Software Engineer, comp $10M+" and make any sense of the inbound applications you'll get. They're not the first to figure this out, and they won't be the last: Successfully building a company, and using that company's pro…

The world’s best software engineers aren’t optimising for comp — they’re optimising to be the world’s best software engineers
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